This page has been validated.
SCOPE OF THE THREE PETITIONS.
241

to be men, strong, mature, many-sided, fully-developed in knowledge and spiritual understanding. Do we realise it that God can and will teach us deep things and to profit, and that He can reveal to us His secret and give us wisdom? What hopefulness have we in our acquisition of spiritual knowledge? With God for our teacher, with Scripture for our text-book, with Christ, as the perfect embodiment of all God's thoughts, for our model; with nature as our picture-book, with Providence as our commentary, with conscience as our monitor, with fellow-Christians as our schoolmates! You lack wisdom—who among us does not?—what a solution of the difficulty:—Let him ask of God! It is written in the prophets, "And they shall all be taught of God." And as regards the effect of God's teaching, do we seek to be full of light? Or are we rather like unto a house, scantily lit up, imperfectly illuminated, in which many chambers are scarcely ever used, in which some are dark and unswept, and others again purposely left untenanted and unvisited? If our eye is single we shall be transparent—the whole body will then be full of light.

And again as to our character and life. We are to be renewed daily after the image of Christ. We mourn over our weakness and sinfulness. Let us start every day with the conviction that we have nothing, that all our resources are spent, all our strength exhausted, yesterday's manna consumed. Be daily renewed; begin the day with a new Christ as it were.