7.  Adjusting life

This picturing of a human world more to the mind of God than this present world and the discovery and realisation of one’s own place and work in and for that kingdom of God, is the natural next phase in the development of the believer.  He will set about revising and adjusting his scheme of life, his ways of living, his habits and his relationships in the light of his new convictions.

Most men and women who come to God will have already a certain righteousness in their lives; these things happen like a thunderclap only in strange exceptional cases, and the same movements of the mind that have brought them to God will already have brought their lives into a certain rightness of direction and conduct.  Yet occasionally there will be someone to whom the self-examination that follows conversion will reveal an entirely wrong and evil way of living.  It may be that the light has come to some rich idler doing nothing but follow a pleasurable routine.  Or to someone following some highly profitable and amusing, but socially useless or socially mischievous occupation.  One may be an advocate at the disposal of any man’s purpose, or an actor or actress ready to fall in with any theatrical enterprise.  Or a woman may find herself a prostitute or a pet wife, a mere kept instrument of indulgence.  These are lives of prey, these are lives of futility; the light of God will not tolerate such lives.  Here religion can bring nothing but a severance from the old way of life altogether, a break and a struggle towards use and service and dignity.

But even here it does not follow that because a life has been wrong the new life that begins must be far as the poles asunder from the old.  Every sort of experience that has ever come to a human being is in the self that he brings to God, and there is no reason why a knowledge of evil ways should not determine the path of duty.  No one can better devise protections against vices than those who have practised them; none know temptations better than those who have fallen.  If a man has followed an evil trade, it becomes him to use his knowledge of the tricks of that trade to help end it.  He knows the charities it may claim and the remedies it needs. . . .

A very interesting case to discuss in relation to this question of adjustment is that of the barrister.  A practising barrister under contemporary conditions does indeed give most typically the opportunity for examining the relation of an ordinary self-respecting worldly life, to life under the dispensation of God discovered.  A barrister is usually a man of some energy and ambition, his honour is moulded by the traditions of an ancient and antiquated profession, instinctively self-preserving and yet with a real desire for consistency and respect.  As a profession it has been greedy and defensively conservative, but it has never been shameless nor has it ever broken faith with its own large and selfish, but quite definite,