. Has he caught it
from the inoculation of crowds and masses, as the mere religious zealot
catches his character? That cannot be either, for the type is altogether
different from that which masses of men, under enthusiastic impulses,
exhibit. There is nothing gregarious in this character; it is the
individual's own; it is not borrowed, it is not a reflection of any
fashion or tone of the world outside; it rises up from some fount
within, and it is a creation of which the text says, We know not whence
it cometh."[53]

Now we have all met these two characters--the one eminently respectable,
upright, virtuous, a trifle cold perhaps, and generally, when critically
examined, revealing somehow the mark of the tool; the other with God's
breath still upon it, an inspiration; not more virtuous, but differently
virtuous; not more humble, but different, wearing the meek and quiet
spirit artlessly as to the manner born. The other-worldliness of such a
character is the thing that strikes you; you are not prepared for what
it will do or say or become next, for it moves from a far-off center,
and in spite of its transparency and sweetness that presence fills you
always with awe. A man never feels the discord of his own life, never
hears the jar of the machinery by which he tries to manufacture his own
good points, till he has stood in the stillness of such a presence. Then
he discerns the difference between growth and work. He has considered
the lilies, how they grow.

We have now seen that spiritual growth is a process maintained and
secured by a spontaneous and mysterious inward principle. It is a
spontaneous principle even in its origin, for it bloweth where it
listeth; mysterious in its operation, for we can never tell whence it
cometh; obscure in its destination, for we cannot tell whence it goeth.
The whole process therefore transcends us; we do not work, we are taken
in hand--"it is God which worketh in us, both to will and to do of His
good pleasure." We do not plan--we are "created in Christ Jesus unto
good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them."

There may be an obvious objection to all this. It takes away all
conflict from the Christian life? It makes man, does it not, mere clay
in the hands of the potter? It crushes the old character to make a new
one, and destroys man's responsibility for his own soul?

Now we are not concerned here in once more striking the time-honored
"balance between fa