small when we let that searching light in upon them, and others which seemed very insignificant spring suddenly up into dominating magnitude—­that new and truer perspective will be all clear gain.  The more we feel that our salvation is sweeping towards us, as it were, from the throne of God through the blue abysses, the more diligently we shall ‘work while it is called day,’ and the more earnestly we shall seek, when the Saviour and His salvation come, to be found with loins girt for all strenuous work, and lamps burning in all the brightness of the light of a Christian character.

Further, says Paul, this hopeful, cheerful contemplation of approaching salvation should lead us to cast off the evil, and to put on the good.  You will remember the heart-stirring imagery which the Apostle employs in the context, where he says, ’The day is at hand; let us therefore fling off the works of darkness’—­as men in the morning, when the daylight comes through the window, and makes them lift their eyelids, fling off their night-gear—­’and let us put on the armour of light.’  We are soldiers, and must be clad in what will be bullet-proof, and will turn a sword’s edge.  And where shall steel of celestial temper be found that can resist the fiery darts shot at the Christian soldier?  His armour must be ‘of light.’  Clad in the radiance of Christian character he will be invulnerable.  And how can we, who have robed ourselves in the works of darkness, either cast them off or array ourselves in sparkling armour of light?  Paul tells us, ’Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh.’  The picture is of a camp of sleeping soldiers; the night wears thin, the streaks of saffron are coming in the dawning east.  One after another the sleepers awake; they cast aside their night-gear, and they brace on the armour that sparkles in the beams of the morning sun.  So they are ready when the trumpet sounds the reveille, and with the morning comes the Captain of the Lord’s host, and with the Captain comes the perfecting of the salvation which is drawing nearer and nearer to us, as our moments glide through our fingers like the beads of a rosary.  Many men think of death and fear; the Christian should think of death—­and hope.

THE SOLDIER’S MORNING-CALL

   ’Let us put on the armour of light.’—­ROMANS xiii. 12.

It is interesting to notice that the metaphor of the Christian armour occurs in Paul’s letters throughout his whole course.  It first appears, in a very rudimentary form, in the earliest of the Epistles, that to the Thessalonians.  It appears here in a letter which belongs to the middle of his career, and it appears finally in the Epistle to the Ephesians, in its fully developed and drawn-out shape, at almost the end of his work.  So we may fairly suppose that it was one of his familiar thoughts.  Here it has a very picturesque addition, for the picture that is floating before his vivid imagination is that