EDITORIAL DEPARTMENTS NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS THE METHODIST REVIEW is part of the permanent literature of the church. Its bound volumes are preserved in many libraries, public and private. The complete set of eighty-eight volumes is a veritable cyclopedia for a minister. No church corner-stone should be laid without containing a copy of the REVIEW. THE GOD OF LAW AND ORDER GOD is nowhere the originator of disorder. The visible creation reverberates through all its depth and echoes from all its heights that the Creator is the God of order. The evidence is written in light upon the sky, where the spheres keep time and tune; and upon the air, whose winds, though they seem wild, wayward, and wanton, without known whence or whither, are yet not unchartered, but go with secret orders, under rigid law, to definite destinations. It is written also over all the varied surface of the earth, and in the stone parchment of its voluminous strata, as well as in the restless depths of the sea, marked by the Almighty long ago with "ocean lanes," along which the great currents sweep and curve between the continents. All sciences with their classification of phenomena and facts, their discovery of principles and tracing of laws, are but the progressive demonstration of the Divine order. Looking up into the stupendous firmament, where all things keep appointed orbits and nothing flies the track, it is plain that the order seen there is transcendent. No step of the best-trained soldiers the earth ever saw could compare with the drill of those starry regiments which wheel and maneuver on the blue parade-ground of infinite space. No wise and skillful housekeeper of the best-ordered home that woman's statesmanship ever directed could approach the perfect management of the great unseen Keeper of this "house of many mansions" which we call the universe. Yet, clear as this now seems, there was a time when men looked on the ordered firmament and discerned no plan, no harmony; stared at the powdery splendor and thought it a piece of wild spatter-work without a pattern. Only by the painful study of thousands of years has the outline of its plan become vivid to the eye of man. Thus science, slowly uncovering plan and order where none had been perceived, teaches us that in God's other ways of providence and life, though "the drift of the Maker is dark" and we see no wise purpose, there is doubtless order and the reign of law, awaiting discovery in the fullness of time. God is so orderly that both the scientist and the most illiterate Christian can count on him out of sight. The astronomer tracks the craziest comet in the sky along the small part of its orbit which is in sight, and then knows all its path beyond vision, telling with precision in how many thousand years the punctual God will bring the wanderer back. The most unbelieving scientist constantly exercises more faith in God than would suffice to save his soul if directed aright. Everywhere we may depend on God, in the dark, for all which, in the light. he leads us to expect. To this God of order, man is amenable. On us, as on the world of matter, he imposes restrictions, rules, and system, requiring regulated character and life. Order does not yet visibly and completely prevail in the moral world; but it is exacted, and will in the long run be enforced. The universe is so constituted that moral disorder, which is mutiny and treason, is certain to be effectively discouraged. Human hearts, thoughts and lives are full of disorder, and society is a troubled sea; but God has not made, and will not countenance, this confusion. He insists on control, rhythmic regulations and moral decorum in all that we are and do. Disregarding this, we lie under his eye, a spectacle of miserable and guilty anarchy. Among the faculties and powers of man's nature a relative rank is ordained on the recognition and sacred maintenance of which depend the peace and welfare of his being. The appetites, passions and desires of the flesh belong in the lowest place. The intellect, clear and unbesotted by carnal indulgence, is set to perceive logical consequences and the reasonableness of righteousness. The affections are put in their graded place to furnish pure, beneficent fire of motive warmth, kindled rightly from, and aspiring to, the holy source of love. Above all is conscience, clear as intellect, loyal as love, charged to give law to all that ranks below it, receiving law from Him who ranks above it; its fit upward look being humble, docile, dutiful; its downward attitude imperative and lordly. Yet conscience is but God's vicegerent, needing constant communication with the Home Government, to receive instructions therefrom. Whoever will keep his nature and life under due discipline and subjection must needs be vigilant over all the turbulencies and treacheries of his own being; for no Russian Empire was ever so catacombed with conspiracies, mined by mutinies, and infested with enemies as this many-provinced, half-explored, triple-zoned human nature of ours. Vigilant also must we be against the hostile and pitfalled world neighboring all around us, and swarming in all its thickets of concealment and ambush with secret, subtle, and savage foes. Introspection must see if law and order rule the inward elements into their places, in due relations of authority and subjection. Circumspection, observing our outward relations, must ascertain if we are in our required place in the world; for to be out of place is to be in the way of penalty-on the track, when the lightning express is due and coming, though unseen, around the curve. These things are inexorable. We must make our peace with them or they will grind us to powder. The God of order punishes disorder. "His will fulfilled shall be: For, in daylight or in dark, His thunderbolt hath eyes to see Its way home to the mark." Not by arbitrary nor even by special decree is man's final destiny fixed, but by the normal operation of the natural forces of the moral universe. By the law of moral gravitation every man goes to his own place, to the good place or the bad place according as the one or the other has the greater attraction for him. God endows man with free agency, allows him to choose, and then simply lets him have what he has chosen. The just and sufficient reward for having chosen the good is to have it ever more and more with all its sweet and blessed fruitage. The just, unexcessive, yet unsurpassable punishment for having chosen the evil is to have it to the full with all its bitter, rankling, fiery and consuming consequences. The natural forces of the spiritual universe, its attractions and repulsions, carry men to their destiny. That for which they have affinity is what they go to. The place or state where a man would feel most at home, that place or state shall be his home forever. This is eminently right and manifestly inevitable. The story of the conversion of John Nelson, one of the most remarkable of Wesley's early preachers, is impressive. It was brought about by means of a dream. "He saw the great white throne set and the myriads gathered of earth and heaven. The Judge sat silent, but before him was an open book. Up to that book came, one by one in long procession, every soul of all mankind, and as each advanced he tore open his breast as a man would tear open the bosom of his shirt, and then compared his heart with the commandments written in the book. Not a word was said nor did the Judge lift his finger, but each man, according as his heart agreed or disagreed with that perfect standard, went with joy to the company of the saved, or in despair to the company of the lost. Every man was conscious where he belonged and each went to his own place." THE IMITATION OF CHRIST THOMAS A KEMPIS wrote an immortal book setting forth man's highest possibility, The Imitation of Christ. It is amazing what store men have set on the power of imitation; and the more refined they have become the higher value they have seemed to put on this capacity. It has almost been regarded as man's finest faculty. To discover the deep philosophy which explains the laudation that has been bestowed on him who has the genius for imitation is not easy. It is the occult reason of all love of art and praise of artists. The artist is simply the imitator. Imitation is the work of the painter on canvas, the sculptor in clay, marble, or bronze, the engraver with his burin, and the etcher with his aqua fortis. The artist labors to copy effects of light, colors of sunsets, tints of flesh, sheen of silk or satin, gleam of metal, bloom of flower or fruit, delicate intricacy of lace, subtle expression of the eye, animals' fur, or sparkle of moonlight on water. In this work, such is the fame men win that we are told the artist outlives in renown the general, the magistrate, and the statesman; indeed, never dies. What is the great artist but the consummate imitator? This faculty of imitation is essential and natural, not grafted on by education, for it develops almost in earliest infancy; indeed, scarce anything is more marked in childhood. And it is universal, for the most savage and brutal tribes display it, making rude images of things. Everywhere this instinct hews in wood, or carves in stone, or molds in clay some copy of things known, heard of, or imagined. Singularly enough, it is before the product of this imitative faculty that groping, dim-eyed, unenlightened man bows down and worships. When his instinct for copying has carved out and completed its result, the next instinct which springs into operation makes of his image a god, before which he prostrates himself and offers sacrifices. Is there a subtle persuasion, an intuitive assumption, in human nature, that the imitative faculty is to be man's instrument for his most valuable achievement-nay, his guide to God? The facts of human sentiment and conduct are hardly explicable otherwise. Did the Divine Intelligence implant this active power in humanity at the beginning, in order that when at last the complete, stainless Pattern should be visibly presented in the person of Jesus Christ this instinct, groping ever to find a perfect model for its copying, might not only be impelled to imitate the perfection, but be carried by the natural current of its unformulated reasoning and unconscious inference to the conclusion that what satisfies the imitative faculty as an adequate object for its exercise must be Divine? that the ultimate outreach, arrival, and seizure of this most noble capacity can be nothing less than God? It would seem so. The lines of this logic appear to have been invisibly bedded as in the very marrow of man's bones and laid deeper than thrilling nerves. Recent years have witnessed in art the revival of the preRaphaelite or realistic school of painting, the ruling principle of which is to copy literally, to paint things as they are, instead of idealizing and painting them as the artist thinks they ought to be. Let us say that it is this principle of fidelity to reality which must rule and insure our moral progress, through the exercise of our power of imitation, to the highest result. Christianity is the realistic imitation of Christ. Whatever objection may be made to the preRaphaelite principle in reproducing a faulty original, it is the only rule to be approved when we are to render the faultless model. Sir Joshua Reynolds once complained of the difficulty of the work of a portrait painter, in that he must in each case paint “a particular man, and consequently a defective model." As any human face is defective, so is every human character, and any one who tries to copy or imitate it has an imperfect model. One perfect Model stands singular, sublime, supreme. All imitation which has not sighted Christ shows by its partialness and immense defect the meanness of its ideal. "An Ethiop's god hath Ethiop's lips, Black cheek, and woolly hair; A portrait painter or engraver may fall into two noticeable faults. One is that the portrait may show more of the personality of the artist who copies than of the subject who is copied. Longhi com |