December 25
That ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.--EPH. iii. 17-19.
O love that passeth knowledge, thee I need;
Pour in the heavenly sunshine; fill my heart;
Scatter the cloud, the doubting, and the dread,--
The joy unspeakable to me impart.
H. BONAR.
To examine its evidence is not to try Christianity; to admire its martyrs
is not to try Christianity; to compare and estimate its teachers is not to
try Christianity; to attend its rites and services with more than Mahometan
punctuality is not to try or know Christianity. But for one week, for one
day, to have lived in the pure atmosphere of faith and love to God, of
tenderness to man; to have beheld earth annihilated, and heaven opened
to the prophetic gaze of hope; to have seen evermore revealed behind the
complicated troubles of this strange, mysterious life, the unchanged smile
of an eternal Friend, and everything that is difficult to reason solved by
that reposing trust which is higher and better than reason,--to have known
and felt this, I will not say for a _life_, but for a single blessed hour,
that, indeed, is to have made experiment of Christianity.
WM. ARCHER BUTLER.