f 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 of a
company of soldiers, roused by the morning bugle, casting off their
night-gear because the day is beginning to dawn, and bracing on the
armour that sparkles in the light of the rising sun. 'That,' says
Paul, 'is what you Christian people ought to be. Can you not hear the
notes of the reveille? The night is far spent; the day is at hand;
therefore let us put off the works of darkness--the night-gear that
was fit for those hours of slumber. Toss it away, and put on the
armour that belongs to the day.'

Now, I am not going to ask or try to answer the question of how far
this Apostolic exhortation is based upon the Apostle's expectation
that the world was drawing near its end. That does not matter at all
for us at present, for the fact which he expresses as the foundation
of this exhortation is true about us all, and about our position in
the midst of these fleeting shadows round us. We are hastening to the
dawning of the true day. And so let me try to emphasise the
exhortation here, old and threadbar