| J.R. MIller | Page 11 |
There is a story of a mother who had lost a beautiful child. She was inconsolable, and, to occupy her hands with something about her beloved child, in order that she might find comfort, she began to color a photograph of the precious little one. Her fingers wrought with wonderful skill and delicacy, and at length the face in the photograph seemed to have in it all the winsome beauty of life. The child appeared to the mother to live again before her eyes. When the work was done, she laid the picture away for a time in a drawer. When she took it out by and by, to look at it, the face was covered with blotches and the beauty was sadly marred. Again the mother took her brush, and with loving skill painted out the spots and touched the picture afresh, until once more the face had all its witchery of beauty. Then again the photograph was laid away, and when it was brought out the blotches were there as before. There was some fault in the paper on which the likeness was printed.
There are human lives which may be made to shine in the fairest beauty that Christian culture can produce. They may be freed from all that is coarse and unrefined. They may be nurtured into gentleness of manner and sweetness of spirit. Yet in certain experiences of testing, undivine qualities are brought out, unhallowed tempers and dispositions are disclosed. The trouble is in the nature itself. Sin is still in the heart. The only way to be made perfect is to have the very springs of the life cleansed. “I long to be clean all through.” That is the kind of men and women we should pray to become. It was the lifelong prayer of Frances Willard, “O God make me beautiful within!” Think what spiritual beauty there would be in any church, what healing for the world, if all its members were thus made clean, through and through, if all were really beautiful within.
It is to this that we are called each New Year, for example, each birthday. We are summoned to leave our routine Christian life, the commonplace godliness that has so long satisfied us, and turn northward. We are called to be saints — not when we are dead and our bodies have been buried out of sight, but now, while we are busy in the midst of human affairs, while we live and meet temptations every day, while men see us, and are touched and impressed by what we do. Shall we not give up and leave behind our conventional godliness, our fashionable holiness, our worldly conformity, and be holy men, holy women, turning northward to get nearer to God?
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