To be near unto God - pagina 595

anxiety. Robust health or wasting disease imparts an altogether different stamp to your inner existence. After victory over self in the hour of temptation your fellowship with God is of an entirely different nature from what it is after fainting in sin and fall. Under all this the heart is always the selfsame organ, but entirely different combinations of registers are opened every time, and constantly changing is the chord. And this

continuous changing and becoming different must every time be pointed out, because death reigns supreme in imitation, in sameness, in uniformity, and rich, full, blossoming life of godliness only revels in endless variety and uniqueness. One difference can not be emphasized sufficiently: to-wit, the difference in age. The apostle describes

it

so accurately:

"When

I

was a

child,

spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child" (I Cor. 13:11). But it did not continue so. Later it was altogether different: "When I became a man, I put away childish things." Consider carefully that the apostle mentions this difference between the existence of a child and that of a man, when he treats of the personal knowledge, which we have of our God. The working of this difference, of course, is far more delicate. For the sake of brevity the apostle merely places the child by the side of the fullgrown man. It needs but a reminder, however,

I

that the lad and the young girl exist differently from the youth and the young maiden. That the man in the strength of his life is different from the man in his declining years, and that at the end of the pilgrim journey the grey old man again presents an own image with own needs of 591

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