most slenderly endowed Christian soul has the double charge of giving to, and receiving from, its brethren.  We have all something which we can contribute to the general stock.  We have all need to supplement our own peculiar gifts by brotherly ministration.  The prime condition of Christian vitality has been set forth for ever by the gracious invitation, which is also an imperative command, ‘Abide in Me and I in you’; but they who by such abiding are recipients of a communicated life are not thereby isolated, but united to all who like them have received ’the manifestation of the Spirit to do good with.’

GRACE AND GRACES

’Having then gifts, differing according to the grace that is given to us, whether prophecy, let us prophesy according to the proportion of faith; 7.  Or ministry, let us wait on our ministering; or he that teacheth, on teaching; 8.  Or he that exhorteth, on exhortation; he that giveth, let him do it with simplicity; he that ruleth, with diligence; he that showeth mercy, with cheerfulness.’—­ROMANS xii. 6-8.

The Apostle here proceeds to build upon the great thought of the unity of believers in the one body a series of practical exhortations.  In the first words of our text, he, with characteristic delicacy, identifies himself with the Roman Christians as a recipient, like them, of ‘the grace that is given to us,’ and as, therefore, subject to the same precepts which he commends to them.  He does not stand isolated by the grace that is given to him; nor does he look down as from the height of his apostleship on the multitude below, saying to them,—­Go.  As one of themselves he stands amongst them, and with brotherly exhortation says,—­Come.  If that had been the spirit in which all Christian teachers had besought men, their exhortations would less frequently have been breath spent in vain.  We may note

I. The grace that gives the gifts.

The connection between these two is more emphatically suggested by the original Greek, in which the word for ‘gifts’ is a derivative of that for ‘grace.’  The relation between these two can scarcely be verbally reproduced in English; but it may be, though imperfectly, suggested by reading ‘graces’ instead of ‘gifts.’  The gifts are represented as being the direct product of, and cognate with, the grace bestowed.  As we have had already occasion to remark, they are in Paul’s language a designation of natural capacities strengthened by the access of the life of the Spirit of Christ.  As a candle plunged in a vase of oxygen leaps up into more brilliant flame, so all the faculties of the human soul are made a hundred times themselves when the quickening power of the life of Christ enters into them.