rson. For
the attraction is the outward sign of a spiritual connection--a sign that
we ought to pray for that person, to thank God for the manifestation of
His character, which we see in a riddle, through a glass in that life,
that human life.

And then we shall be prepared to realise deeper relationships, more
wonderful mysteries of love--to see with clearer eyes the heart of the
Supreme. We cannot make relationships too spiritual. We cannot be too
careful to see them in God and God in them. Think what it is to see a
relationship _in God_, to see it existing there in His life, as His
thought, long, long before we were born, long before we had an idea that
we were intended to realise it. What a new light on old
relationships--brother and brother, brother and sister, father and child,
husband and wife, all thoughts of God, all being gradually entered into,
appropriated, realised, understood, worked out by us. They seem so
common and natural, and yet they are intensely awful and sacred and
mysterious. And then think what it is to see _God in them_--to see One
from whom all family life flows, penetrating those whom we have never
properly learnt to love and those whom we love as much as we can. God in
them--all that is good and attractive--not their own, but God's. The
eyes which seem to be {85} contemplating something which we cannot see,
the face which lights up at times with another than human light; the
eyes, the face, a realisation and expression of that Being who is at once
human and divine, God and man. Why, this is bringing heaven down to
earth, this is a realisation in part of the holy city coming down from
heaven. For as we think of them, above all as we pray for them, we are
led beyond them, we forget our own selfish interests in them, we are
brought out from the 'garden' life of individual souls into the 'city'
corporate life of a great human society, a family, the Church of God. We
should live, we should die for Christ and His Body--the Church--the
fulness of His life, who is filling all in all. We must cease thinking
and praying for ourselves and for others, as though we were alone. We
are all part of one great society. Around us--nay, in us--are others,
some whom we can see, some who in the course of development have burst
the bonds of space and time and matter, all one, one, for ever one. We
all have one common Lord, one common hope, one common life, one common
enemy, one common Saviour, who