And we know that this life of Christ is real and abundant life because it fulfills the tests of life. It is a life of fullness in all its correspondences and relationships. It completes life to the uttermost of its possibilities, setting it in all those ties with that which is outside of it, which constitute life. For, after all, there is no separable life. All the life that we know is relationship. Our Lord defined it in such terms in His great prayer: “This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” Life can only be construed in terms of correspondence.
We know that the life Christ came to give, and does give, is the satisfying and real life, because it meets these testings. It gives us this wealth of correspondence of relationship.
“Oh, the pure delight of a single hour,
That before Thy Cross I spend,
When I kneel in prayer, and with Thee, my God,
I commune as friend with friend.”
We know that the life Christ brings is complete and full, because it reëstablishes the tie and union between ourselves and God, and He becomes to us again our Father and our Friend. We know it, because it is the root of all deep and true and satisfying human relationships. How can there be a real and full union of one man and one woman that is not a union in Christ? And for the highest friendship and its ideals we find sanction and nourishment best in Him and the groundwork of His life.
And Christ’s is the real and satisfying life, because it is creative and energizing. It is not like the influence of that thief—selfishness, low desire, sin and small ambition—who kills and steals and destroys. But the life that Christ is teems with vitalizing power; it is strength and energy and new service in men. I have never seen it more beautifully put than in a letter of Stanley to David Livingstone. It was found by Lady Stanley in a little pocketbook which her husband had carried on the expedition for the relief of Livingstone. It was written in lead pencil. It was a copy of the letter that Stanley had written to the great explorer the very day after he left him. It has sometimes been questioned whether Livingstone really made on Stanley the impression which Stanley describes in his autobiography. There have been those who said that that picture was but the reading back over the intervening years of a growing hero worship. But here is the letter which Stanley wrote as he came fresh from the old missionary’s companionship and the inspiration of his personality:
“My dear Doctor:
“I have parted from you all too soon; I feel it deeply; I am entirely conscious of it from being so depressed.... In writing to you, I am not writing to an idea now, but to an embodiment of warm, good fellowship, of everything that is noble and right, of sound common sense, of everything practical and right-minded.