"He that is faithful in that which
is least is faithful also in much." If you look on morality, virtue,
goodness, holiness, sanctification--call it what you will--as merely the
obligation of an EXTERNAL law, you will be tempted to say, "Let me be
faithful to it in its greater and more important cases, and that is
enough. The pettier ones must take care of themselves, I have not time
enough to attend to them, and God will not, it may be, require them of
me." But if the morality, goodness, holiness be in you what it was in
Christ, without measure--a SPIRIT, even the spirit of God--a spirit
within you, possessing you, and working on you, and in you--then that
which seems most petty and unimportant will often be most important, the
test of the soundness of your heart, of the reality of your feelings.
We all know--every writer of fiction, at least, should know--how true
this is in the case of love between man and woman, between parent and
child: how the little kindnesses, the half-unconscious gestures, the
petty labours of love, of which their object will never be aware, the
scrupulousness which is able "to greatly find quarrel in a straw, when
honour is at stake,"--how these are the very things which show that the
affection is neither the offspring of dry and legal duty, nor of selfish
enjoyment, but lies far down in the unconscious abysses of the heart and
being itself:--as Christ--to compare (for He Himself permits, nay
commands, us to do so in His parables) our littleness with His immensity-
-as Christ, I say, showed, when He chose first to manifest His glory--the
glory of His grace and truth--by increasing for a short hour the
pleasures of a village feast.
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