And we all learn in a measure what that means, when we have faithfully served Christ for a little time.  You talk about the sacrifices and losses of the Christian life.  Yes, but no man is fit to be called a Christian who has not found in Christ ten or twenty times as much joy as he has lost.  If there were no hereafter, no future crowns at all, it would be a terrible disappointment, but even, apart from that, the present life of every one who believes in Christ and does Christ’s work, and loves as Christ loved, is richer, fuller, wider, and happier in almost every way than the life which knows Him not.  What about the hundred talents? you say, and I answer with the prophet, “The Lord is able to give thee much more than this.”

JABEZ

BY REV.  J. G. GREENHOUGH, M.A.

“And Jabez was more honourable than his brethren.”—­1 CHRON. iv, 9.

This is a curious fragment of biography, half-hidden in a dreary mass of wholly uninteresting names.  We cannot conjecture how it got there.  It seems to have no connection either with what comes before or what follows.  It is like a sweet little poem in the midst of a dry, genealogical chart; or like a real, living face with the flush of warm colour in it, speaking amid endless rows of mummies or waxwork effigies.

It is indeed the short, incomplete story of a life with neither beginning nor end.  We are not told who his father was, or who his mother was, or what tribe or family he belonged to.  Not a word about origin, descent, pedigree.  And there seems to be a purpose in this.  For the sacred writer at this point is doing nothing else but tracing pedigrees.  These four chapters are to us the most useless in the Bible:  names, nothing but long-forgotten names.  Names of everybody’s father, grandfather, great-grandfather, back to a remote antiquity.  I question whether there are many Bible readers who have ever laboured through the list.  Yet these family trees, as we may call them, were very precious to the Jews.  They thought as much of long descent as my lord Noodle does now.  It swelled them immeasurably in self-importance if they could trace their lineage back in unbroken line to one of the twelve patriarchs, or to one of those who came out of Egypt.  And the historian ministers to this prejudice or vanity by diligently recording the whole dry catalogue, and then, as if weary of the business, or, perhaps, with just a touch of scorn, he introduces this one name as something worth talking about.

Here was a god-made nobleman, whose heraldry need not be written on earth, because it is more surely written in heaven.  All the rest were their fathers’ sons, and that was about all.  This man did not need a pedigree:  he won a name and reputation for himself without the help of a distinguished ancestry.  By prayerfulness, and energy, and courage, he fought his way from obscurity to honour.  And when that happens, when a man has fought the fight with adverse circumstances and overcome them, when he has made his mark in the world by sheer force of work and character, no one cares to grope through musty fusty parchments in search of his progenitors.  What does it matter!  God has given him a certificate of noble birth; that was surely what the historian meant:  “Jabez was more honourable than his brethren.”