t is one of ourselves who has strength enough to bear the burden
of the glory, one of ourselves who can stand within the blaze of
encircling and indwelling Divinity and be unconsumed. The possibilities
of human nature are manifest there. If we want to know what the Divine
Power can make of us, let us turn to look with the eye of faith upon
what it has made of Jesus Christ.

But such a thought, glorious as it is, still leaves room for doubt as to
my personal attainment of such an ideal. Possibility is much, but we
need solid certainty. And we find it in the truth that the bond between
Christ and those who truly love and trust Him is such as that the
possibility must become a reality and be consolidated into a certainty.
The Vine and its branches, their Head and the members, the Christ and
His Church, are knit together by such closeness of union as that
wheresoever and whatsoever the one is, there and that must the others
also be. Therefore, when doubts and fears, and consciousness of our own
weakness, creep across us, and all our hopes are dimmed, as some star in
the heavens is, when a light mist floats between us and it, let us turn
away to Him our brother, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, and
think that He, in His calm exaltation and regal authority and infinite
blessedness, is not only the pattern of what humanity may be, but the
pledge of what His Church must be. 'Where I am, there shall also My
servant be.' 'The glory that Thou gavest Me I have given them.'

Nor is that all. Not only a possibility and a certainty for the future
are for us the measure of the power that worketh in us, but as this same
letter teaches us, we have, as Christians, a present scale by which we
may estimate the greatness of the power. For in the next chapter, after
that glorious burst as to the dignity of his Lord, which we have not the
heart to call a digression, the Apostle, recurring to the theme of my
text, goes on to say, 'And you hath He quickened,' and then, catching it
up again a verse or two afterwards, he reiterates, clause by clause,
what had been done on Jesus as having been done on us Christians. If
that Divine Spirit raised Him from the dead, and set Him at His own
right hand in the heavenly places, it is as true that the same power
hath 'raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places
in Christ Jesus.' And so not only the far-off, though real and
brilliant, and eye and heart-filling glories of the as