A Lamp to the Path / Or, The Word of God in the Heart, the Home, the Workshop and the Market-Place

by W. K. Tweedie

THE CHIEF END OF REVELATION.

THE CHIEF
END OF
REVELATION. Now, it can never be made too plain that revelation, with all that is glorious in it, is only a means to an end. Even the death of Christ, solitary as it stands in its moral grandeur, among the events of the universe, was only a means—the end was God’s glory in man’s holiness. To bring a clean thing out of an unclean; to transmute enmity against God into love to him, or wounds and bruises and noisome sores into the beauty of holiness—behold the grand result aimed at alike in the life and the death of the Son of God. By dying he did accomplish other results, and the influence of that death is felt to the utmost verge of creation, as we know it is felt among the angels on high. But still it is the grand result we should ever aim at, and that is, deliverance from sin in its condemnation, its pollution, and its power: “This is the will of God, even our holiness.”

THE CHRISTIAN WORKMAN.

THE
CHRISTIAN
WORKMAN. Now, this simple truth may serve as a guide or an ally in every sphere of life, but specially so in that sphere which we are now to contemplate, or the Bible in the Workshop. And an incident recorded in the Christian Scriptures will at once shed light upon the subject. On more than one occasion the apostle Paul had to work with his hands to earn his daily bread.[14] Though the care of all the churches was upon him; though the enmity of the prejudiced, and the persecution of those who had the power, tried to bear him down, he was yet amid it all, a man of handicraft and hard labour—he could sit down with Aquila in his workshop, and there engage in manual labour for his livelihood, with all the zeal of his noble and indomitable nature. He at least was not one of those who think that idleness and indolence can dignify man’s position. He was not one of those who would deem themselves degraded by being useful. He knew that man is born under a decree to work. He therefore wrought; and just as this man of God, when it was his duty, put forth all the powers of his intellect and soul in reasoning before Festus, or Felix, or King Agrippa, did he put forth the powers of his body in making tents in the workshop of his friend at Corinth. Enough for Paul, if he was where the Lord wished him to be, or engaged in what the Lord gave him to do; and without one feeling either of degradation or of discontent, he bore the toils of the body as well as exerted the activities of the mind; he both taught and practised the lesson, “If any man will not work, neither shall he eat.” He felt that every man must be a worker, either with mind, or body, or both. The last was his alternative; and we know that in some cases the night was added to the day, ere he could complete his allotted task. Sinew, and muscle, and bone, in Paul’s case, were dedicated to the service of God, as well as a mental power which could not be gainsaid, except by the bigot’s ever ready argument—the dungeon, the chain, or death.

A WORKSHOP—

With this high model in view, then, let us now enter a workshop, and accost some of those who are there. A
WORKSHOP— Our object is to show how the Bible should preside among them, to protect the character from pollution—the soul from peril. Remembering that Christian worth does not depend on lofty birth or brilliant powers, but on a heart right with God, and his long-lost image restored to the soul, consider how that image may become more and more vivid, if it be indeed stamped on us by the Spirit.

ITS OCCUPANTS.

ITS
OCCUPANTS. And, first, not a few of those with whom we associate in the workshop, are snares to the soul of the very direst kind. We find that infidelity which is often the result of utter ignorance, there rampant and rife. We often see vice rioting in the life, and shutting the heart against the truth. A soul in which religion is felt and loved, will hear what it deems sacred blasphemed, and in self-defence, it may be constrained to contend for the faith once delivered to the saints. Some of those who are thus tried can tell of the mental anguish to which they are exposed—of the snares which are laid for them on the right hand and on the left—the heroism which is needed to contend, perhaps single-handed, against a crowd of gainsayers, who know of no pleasure but the pleasures of sin, or care for no truth but such as relates to gross and material things. As the body is oppressed and dies amid mephitic vapours, the soul grows sick and like to die amid scenes like these. It has to maintain a constant struggle for existence, as the natives of some portions of India maintain a constant warfare with the inhabitants of the jungle—the boa, the lion, or the tiger. Men long neglected by those who should have consulted for their better interests; men long viewed as only so much animal machinery, to be used as long as it can drudge, and then heartlessly cast aside; men long treated as if they had neither souls to save, nor an eternity to provide for, have too often sunk so far that they threaten to take revenge upon society, by trampling out every vestige of truth that can be found in the places of their exhaustion and toil.

Now, amid perils like these, surely the man who cares for his soul has just the more need to cleave close to the only power which can give him the victory—and that power is Christ. Every ungodly gainsayer should be to that man an object of pity, like that of the Redeemer to our fallen world. Every blasphemer, every infidel, every man who has given himself up to the slavery of passion, and dethroned at once his reason and his God, should be an object of tender compassion to the soul of the Christian beside him. While sporting with their own ruin, such men should be like another, and another, and another call to all who know the truth, to show by their life at least, what a Christian, or what Christianity is—how true it is that

“We can make our lives sublime,