Daily let me grow in grace.
[December 10.]
THE GOODNESS OF A GOOD MAN.
By ALEXANDER McLAREN, D. D.
“He was a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost and of faith.”—Acts xi: 24.
You remember how once a young man came to Jesus, with much beautiful youthful purity in his life and youthful enthusiasm in his heart, and in his eager way, prefaced his question with a lightly-uttered “Good Master.” Christ answered by trying to make him feel how much more the word meant than he had ever seen. “Why callest thou me good?” said he, not thereby rejecting the term for himself, but setting the youth to ponder its deep meaning. And whenever we have learned to feel “how awful goodness is,” we shall be ready to listen to Jesus saying further: “None is good but one, that is God.” By that saying he neither means to deny his own goodness nor that of men who will take up their cross and follow him, but only to remind the light-hearted inquirer, who was so ready with his conventional bestowment of the epithet, and so eager to know what he was to do for eternal life, that there was one source—and only one—-of goodness, and, therefore, that the only way to be good was to have our emptiness replenished by his fullness.
A good man, then, is a man who draws his goodness from God, the source of all goodness. He himself is the type of all perfection, the home of all things fair. Whatsoever things are lovely and whatsoever things are venerable—all that we call virtue, all to which hearts and consciences ascribe praise—dwell in God as in their native home. In the abyss of his being the streams of goodness, which part into many heads to fertilize the wilderness and sweeten the salt marshes of human nature, rest undivided. He is the reality of which all our conceptions of goodness are but the fragmentary representations, the substance of which they are but shadows. Not only so, but as all life is an effluence from him with whom alone is the fountain of life, and as it is his light in which we see light, so all the goodness which is in men is from above, and cometh down from the Father of Light. All light and heat are from the sun, and all goodness is of God. All virtues are radiations from him. “They are but broken lights of thee.” He alone is good of himself and by himself. Drawing his being from none, he owes his character to none, to no outward helps or occasions his actions, to no importation his beauty. Receiving from none, he gives to all, and every deed of fair goodness that man has ever done, at the last analysis, has been to the doer no less than to the beholders or the hearers the gift of God.
He would not be good unless he delighted in bestowing himself. Goodness is communicative, and all love has its chiefest delight in giving away itself. As the sun “rejoices to run his race,” and as it is the very nature and property of light to radiate, and of gases to diffuse themselves, so he can not be stayed nor sealed up, but rejoices to impart. And, certainly, there can be nothing in God which he so much delights to bestow as his goodness, since it is that in which most chiefly do we bear his image, and by which we are most closely knit to him. His highest purpose concerning us all is “that we should be partakers of his holiness.” Happiness, wisdom, life itself, all in some measure and fashion, offshoots from his own, he delights to give; but these are but means to an end, and thus moral likeness to himself is his aim in all his other gifts. God had rather have us good than great, and makes us sometimes glad and sometimes heavy that by both we may be made to desire, and so be able to receive, more resemblance to himself in holiness. This is the meaning of life. This is the dearest desire of our Father for us. This is the gift which he—the infinite love—is ever longing to bestow on us.