XV

<< Life's Functions >>

''And He cometh and findeth them sleeping.” Mark XIV. 37.

Intense spiritual activity numbs the senses and the natural mind.

"And there was a famine in the land. " Genesis xxvi. 1.

Hunger for good comes upon the soul.

"In the most holy place shall thou eat it.” Numb, xviii. 10.

Whatever you learn, learn in the most perfect form.

''And they gave him to drink wine mingled with myrrh.” Mark xv. 23.

So false are the lives of men to God, and so untrue and unnatural is much in human life, that there result from it many bitter experiences. And no matter how bitter they be to man himself, much greater and deeper are they in bitterness to Him, who yearns for love and finds apathy ; who longs for intelligent co-operation and finds ignorant selfishness.

"He shall not lie down until He eat of the prey and drink the blood of the slain. " Numb. xxiii. 24.

In his wonderful work in the human soul the Great Conqueror rests not content until he has reached, uprooted, and slain every falsity and every evil that grows in the heart-soil of that soul. When this work has been done, and the evil has become a prey, and the blood of the false has been drunk, then doth He rest, and the soul's Sabbath day has come.

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There are parts of the mind and soul of man that tower far into the azure depths of peace, and about them the breezes of the Lord's tenderness blow as gently and as softly as a mother's dreams about her unborn babe. But there are, deep-rooted in the mire of evil, many roots of the soul about which the miasms of evil and falsity gather and cluster, like fungi about a fallen oak. And when He, the Great Surgeon, reaches down to cut these off; when He, the Great Warrior, fights against these with the " sword of His mouth," He will not rest until they be utterly destroyed. Not one of the weak, the false, the evil traits of a regenerating character will He suffer to enter through the baptism of death the realm of eternal life. He will not lie down until He has destroyed their substance ("eating the prey"), and made innocuous their deleterious power ("drink the blood").

Author: A. Roeder (1900)