"L" Feathers
LETHARGY OF SOUL
Two of my hearers perished by a fire in their own house. They were not consumed by the flames, but they were suffocated by the smoke. No blaze was ever visible, nor could any remarkable sign of fire be seen from the street, yet they died as readily as if they had been burned to ashes by raging flames. In this way sin also is deadly. Comparatively few of our hearers are destroyed by outrageous and flaming vices, such as blasphemy, theft, drunkenness, or uncleanness; but crowds of them are perishing by that deadly smoke of indifference which casts its stifling clouds of carelessness around them, and sends them asleep into everlasting destruction. O that they could be saved from the smoke as well as from the flame!
LIFE
John Mackintosh thus writes to his biographer, Norman Macleod:—"May it not be said that the movement of our age is towards life? I sometimes fancy that I can discern three epochs in the Reformed Churches, corresponding in the main to those three weighty epithets—via, veritas, vita. The Reformers themselves, no doubt, laid the stress chiefly upon the first (via). It was on this Popery had gone most astray, obscuring the doctrine of justification by faith alone. The epoch following was essentially dogmatic (veritas), when the doctors drew up 'systems' of the truth. It was now, indeed, Christ as veritas! but the dogma taken alone led to coldness, dogmatism, sectarianism, and formality. Happy will it be for the church, if, not forgetting the other two, she shall now be found moving on to the third development of Christ as vita—the life, which will regulate the two former aspects, while it consummates and informs them. This life must develop the individual, and on individuals the church depends; for in God's sight it is no abstraction."
LIFE OF THE BELIEVER—Interesting
I heard a gentleman assert that he could walk almost any number of miles when the scenery was good; but, he added, "When it is flat and uninteresting, how one tires!"
What scenery enchants the Christian pilgrim; the towering mountains of predestination, the great sea of providence, the rocks of sure promise, the green fields of revelation, the river that makes glad the city of God, all these compose the scenery which surrounds the Christian, and at every step fresh sublimities meet his view.
LIFE—Explains Religion
One of our party greatly needed some elder-flower water for her face upon which the sun was working great mischief. It was in the Italian town of Varallo, and not a word of Italian did I know. I entered a chemist's shop and surveyed his drawers and bottles, but the result was nil. Bright thought, I would go down by the river, and walk until I could gather a bunch of elder-flowers, for the tree was then in bloom. Happily the search was successful: the flowers were exhibited to the druggist, the extract was procured. When you cannot tell in so many words what true religion is, exhibit it by your actions. Show by your life what grace can do. There is no language in the world so eloquent as a holy life. Men may doubt what you say, but they will believe what you do.
LIFE—the Need of the Sinner
We visited two palaces in Venice, and realised the contrast of life and death. The first was tenanted by a noble family, who delighted to maintain it in good repair, to adorn it with fresh beauties, and to furnish it in the most sumptuous manner. Everything was fresh, fair, bright, and charming. From the paving of mosaics in the hall one looked up to ceilings glowing with the creations of the artist's pencil, and in every chamber paintings, statues, ormolu, tapestry, and all things else of the richest kind surrounded you. The other was a palace, too, with marble pillars, and carved work, but the stones were loosening, and the columns shifting, grass grew in the halls, and the roofs let in the rain, decay was there and desolation, and yet the palace was as noble in its architecture as the first. Thus when God dwells in a man, all his powers and faculties are bright with a sacred light, and joy and peace and beauty adorn his entire manhood; but if the Holy Spirit depart, the heart being empty and void becomes a ruin, everywhere decaying, and alas! too often haunted by the demons of vice and iniquity.
LIFE—the Power of an Earnest The upper galleries at Versailles are filled with portraits, many of them extremely valuable and ancient. These are the likenesses of the greatest men of all lands and ages, drawn by the ablest artists. Yet most visitors wander through the rooms with little or no interest; in fact, after noticing one or two of the more prominent pictures, they hasten through the suite of chambers and descend to the other floors. Notice the change when the sight-seers come to fine paintings like those of Horace Vernet, where the men and women are not inactive portraits but are actively engaged. There the warrior who was passed by without notice upstairs, is seen hewing his way to glory over heaps of slain, or the statesman is observed delivering himself of weighty words before an assembly of princes and peers. Not the men but their actions engross attention. Portraits have no charm when scenes of stirring interest are set in rivalry with them. After all, then, let us be who or what we may, we must bestir ourselves or be mere nobodies, chips in the porridge, forgotten shells of the shore. If we would impress we must act. The dignity of standing still will never win the prize, we must run for it. Our influence over our times will arise mainly from our doing and suffering the will of God, not from our office or person. Life, life in earnest, life for God, this will tell on the age; but mere orderliness and propriety, inactive and passionless, will be utterly inoperative.
LIFE—The Hidden
Standing by the telegraphic wires one may often hear the mystic wailing and sighing of the winds among them, like the strains of an Aeolian harp, but one knows nothing of the message which is flashing along them. Joyous may be the inner language of those wires, swift as the lightning, far-reaching and full of meaning, but a stranger intermeddles not therewith. Fit emblem of the believer's inner life; men hear our notes of outward sorrow wrung from us by external circumstances, but the message of celestial peace, the divine communings with a better land, the swift heart-throbs of heaven-born desire, they cannot perceive: the carnal see but the outer manhood, but the life hidden with Christ in God, flesh and blood cannot discern.
LIFE—Power of the Inner On a winter's day I have noticed a row of cottages, with a deep load of snow on their several roofs; but as the day wore on, large fragments began to tumble from the eaves of this one and that other, till, by-and-by, there was a simultaneous avalanche, and the whole heap slid over in powdery ruin on the pavement, and before the sun went down you saw each roof as clear and dry as on a summer's eve. But here and there you would observe one with its snow-mantle unbroken, and a ruff of stiff icicles around it. What made the difference? The difference was to be found within. Some of these huts were empty, or the lonely inhabitant cowered over a scanty fire; whilst the peopled hearth and the high-blazing fagots of the rest created such an inward warmth that grim winter melted and relaxed his gripe, and the loosened mass folded off and tumbled over on the trampled street. It is possible by some outside process to push the main volume of snow from the frosty roof, or chip off the icicles one by one. But they will form again, and it needs an inward heat to create a total thaw. And so, by sundry processes, you may clear off from a man's conduct the dead weight of conspicuous sins; but it needs a hidden heat, a vital warmth within, to produce such a separation between the soul and its besetting iniquities, that the whole wintry incubus, the entire body of sin, will come spontaneously away. That vital warmth is the love of God abundantly shed abroad—the kindly glow which the Comforter diffuses in the soul which he makes his home. His genial inhabitation thaws that soul and its favourite sins asunder, and makes the indolence and self-indulgence and indevotion fall off from their old resting-place on that dissolving heart. The easiest form of self-mortification is a fervent spirit.—James Hamilton, D.D.
LIFE—Reviewed
Here is a good searching question for a man to ask himself as he reviews his past life:—Have I written in the snow? Will my life-work endure the lapse of years and the fret of change? Has there been anything immortal in it, which will survive the speedy wreck of all sublunary things? The boys inscribe their names in capitals in the snow, and in the morning's thaw the writing disappears; will it be so with my work, or will the characters which I have carved outlast the brazen tablets of history? Have I written in the snow?
LIFE—Spiritual
How like to a Christian a man may be and yet possess no vital godliness! Walk through the British Museum, and you will see all the orders of animals standing in their various places, and exhibiting themselves with the utmost possible propriety. The rhinoceros demurely retains the position in which he was set at first, the eagle soars not through the window, the wolf howls not at night; every creature, whether bird, beast, or fish, remains in the particular glass case allotted to it; but we all know that these are not the creatures, but only the outward semblances of them. Yet in what do they differ? Certainly in nothing which you could readily see, for the well-stuffed animal is precisely like what the living animal would have been; and that eye of glass even appears to have more of brightness in it than the natural eye of the creature itself; there is a secret inward something lacking, which, when it has once departed, you cannot restore. So in the churches of Christ, many professors are not living believers, but stuffed Christians. They possess all the externals of religion, and every outward morality that you could desire; they behave with great propriety, they keep their places, and there is no outward difference between them and the true believer, except upon the vital point, the life which no power on earth can possibly confer. There is this essential distinction, spiritual life is absent.
LIFE—Uncertainty of
"It fareth with most men's lives, as with the sand in a deceptive hour-glass; look but upon it in outward appearance, and it seemeth far more than it is, because it riseth up upon the sides, whilst the sand is empty and hollow in the midst thereof, so that when it sinks down in an instant, a quarter of an hour is gone in a moment. Thus many men are mistaken in their own account, reckoning upon threescore and ten years, the age of a man, because their bodies appear strong and lusty. Alas! their health may be hollow, there may be some inward infirmity and imperfection unknown to them, so that death may surprise them on a sudden, and they be cut down like the grass."
LIFE—Uncertain Tenure of
There is a talk of giving fixity of tenure in Ireland; can they find it in England, or for the matter of that, in all the world? No, we are all tenants, liable to be ejected without an hour's notice. How death must laugh at our leases and our bonds! Cobwebs are not more frail. A bubble has as sure a tenure as a man.
"What boots your houses and your lands? In spite of close-drawn deed and fence, Like water, 'twixt your cheated hands, They slip into the graveyard's sands, And mock your ownership's pretence."
LIFE—to be Viewed is Referonce to its End The way is good, says Chrysostom, if it be to a feast, though through a dark and miry lane; if to an execution not good, though through the fairest street of the city. Non qua sed quo. Not the way but the end is to be mainly considered.
LIGHT—Detested by the Wicked. A sluttish housemaid when scolded for the untidiness of the chambers exclaimed, "I'm sure the rooms would be clean enough if it were not for the nasty sun which is always showing the dirty corners." Thus do men revile the gospel because it reveals their own sin. Thus all agitations for reforms in Church and State are opposed, and all manner of mischief attributed to them as if they created the evils which they bring to light. The lover of the right courts anything which may manifest the wrong, but those who love evil have never a good word for those disturbing beams of truth which show up the filthy corners of their hearts and lives.
LITTLE THINGS—Whereunto they may Grow When the air balloon was first discovered, a matter-of-fact gentleman contemptuously asked Dr. Franklin what was the use of it. The doctor answered this question by asking another:—"What is the use of a new-born infant? It may become a man." This anticipation of great things springing from small beginnings should induce us to put into practice those holy promptings which at certain seasons move our souls. What if we ourselves and our work should be little in Zion; cannot the Lord cause the grandest issues to proceed from insignificant beginnings? Who hath despised the day of small things?
LIVES—Wrecked
Sailing down the Thames one occasionally sees a green flag in tatters, inscribed with the word WRECK, floating in the breeze over apiece of a mast, or the funnel of a steamer which is just visible above the water. Alas! how many lives might thus be marked, and how needful that they should be so labelled, lest they prove ruinous to others! The debauched, the self-righteous, the spendthrift, the miserly, the apostate, the drunken, how wisely might the flag be placed over them, for they each are a WRECK!
LONGINGS—of the Soul often Painful Have you never seen a caged eagle with its breast or wing bleeding from blows received by dashing against the wire of its cage? The poor creature dreamed of the forest and the craggy rock, and, filled with aspirations for sublimest flight, it stretched its wings and flew upward, only to bring itself into sharp contact with its prison. Even thus the new-born nature, stirred in its inmost depths with longings suitable to its celestial origin, aspires after the joys of heaven, stretching all its wings to soar towards perfection; but alas! we who are in this body do groan, we find the flesh to be a prison, and so the more we long the more we pine, and pining we sigh and cry, and wound our hearts with insatiable desires and bleeding discontents. The pangs of strong desire for the presence of the Lord in glory, who among believers has not felt them? Who among us has not found our flight upward brought to a painful pause by the stern facts of flesh and blood, and earth and sin?
LOVE OF GOD—Shed Abroad by the Holy Ghost
Frequently at the great Roman games, the emperors, in order to gratify the citizens of Rome, would cause sweet perfumes to be rained down upon them through the awning which covered the amphitheatre. Behold the vases, the huge vessels of perfume! Yes, but there is nought here to delight you so long as the jars are scaled; but let the vases be opened, and the vessels be poured out, and let the drops of perfumed rain begin to descend, and every one is refreshed and gratified thereby. Such is the love of God. There is a richness and a fulness in it, but it is not perceived till the Spirit of God pours it out like the rain of fragrance over the heads and hearts of all the living children of God. See, then, the need of having the love of God shed abroad in the heart by the Holy Ghost!
LUST Our lusts are cords. Fiery trials are sent to burn and consume them. Who fears the flame which will bring him liberty from bonds intolerable?