Page:The Eternal Priesthood (4th ed).djvu/41

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
THE THREE RELATIONS OF THE PRIESTHOOD.
29

sanctity without being sanctified. What should have been for his salvation became an occasion of falling; and the life of the world was turned by him into death.

The relation in which a priest stands to his Divine Master is, in everything except sensible presence, the same as theirs. It is as personal, real, and continuous. We have a Master in heaven.[1] And our loyalty to Him rests on consciousness, not on sight, as in this world our allegiance is paid to a sovereign whom perhaps we have never seen. S. Peter says of this, "Whom having not seen you love: in whom also now, though you see Him not, you believe; and, believing, shall rejoice with joy unspeakable and glorified;"[2] that is, full of the earnest and the foretaste of eternal bliss. It is no mere imagination in our work, early and late, to believe that He is near us, in the ship or on the shore; nor, when we are in the hospital or in the poor man's home, or by the bed of the dying, or walking through the fields, or in the crowded streets, or in the mountains seeking His scattered sheep, that He is with us at every step and in every moment. It is no illusion to believe that the words He spoke are spoken still to us, or that every word we speak is

  1. Ephes. vi. 9.
  2. 1 S. Pet. i. 8.