Another remark is, how strangely and unwittingly this good man has got himself an immortality by that passing thought of his.  One loving message has won for him the prize for which men have joyfully given life itself,—­an eternal place in history.  Wheresoever the Gospel is preached there also shall this be told as a memorial of him.  How much surprised he would have been if, as he leaned forward to Tertius hurrying to end his task and said, ‘Send my love too,’ anybody had told him that that one act of his would last as long as the world, and his name be known for ever!  And how much ashamed some of the other people in the New Testament would have been if they had known that their passing faults—­the quarrel of Euodia and Syntyche for instance—­were to be gibbeted for ever in the same fashion!  How careful they would have been, and we would be, of our behaviour if we knew that it was to be pounced down upon and made immortal in that style!  Suppose you were to be told—­Your thoughts and acts to-morrow at twelve o’clock will be recorded for all the world to read—­you would be pretty careful how you behaved.  When a speaker sees the reporters in front of him, he weighs his words.

Well, Quartus’ little message is written down here, and the world knows it.  All our words and works are getting put down too, in another Book up there, and it is going to be read out one day.  It does seem wonderful that you and I should live as we do, knowing that all the while that God is recording it all.  If we are not ashamed to do things, and let Him note them on His tablets that they may be for the time to come, for ever and ever, it is strange that we should be more careful to attitudinise and pose ourselves before one another than before Him.  Let us then keep ever in mind ’those pure eyes and perfect witness of the all-judging’ God.  The eternal record of this little message is only a symbol of the eternal life and eternal record of all our transient and trivial thoughts and deeds before Him.  Let us live so that each act, if recorded, would shine with some modest ray of true light like brother Quartus’ greeting, and let us seek that, like him,—­all else about us being forgotten, position, talents, wealth, buried in the dust,—­we may be remembered, if we are remembered at all, by such a biography as is condensed into these three words.  Who would not wish to be embalmed, so to speak, in such a record?  Who would not wish to have such an epitaph as this?  A sweet fate to live for ever in the world’s memory by three words which tell his name, his Christianity, and his brotherly love!  So far as we are remembered at all, may the like be our life’s history and our epitaph!

EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE

ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D.D., Litt.D.

CORINTHIANS
(To II Corinthians, Chap.  V)

CONTENTS

CALLING ON THE NAME (1 COR. i. 2)