ot with enticing words of man's wisdom,
but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: that your faith
should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God." "The
weak things of the world hath God chosen." "We are weak with Him"
(margin)--oh! words of wonderful grace and sweetness. There is
nothing but rest in being brought low "with Him."

And not only must our service feel this weakening touch: it must go
deeper yet. Our experiences, the blessed hours of opened heavens,
must be held with a loose hand. We saw the life withdrawn before from
the leaves of the old creation into the seed-vessel of the new. Now
it is withdrawn further still, as ripeness comes, from the
seed-vessel into the seed. In the early stages of Christian path we
are apt to be much taken up, and rightly, with the spiritual
processes by which God is working in us. But in the "ripeness of
maturity" (the real sense of "perfect" in Col. i. 28, and elsewhere)
He has something better for us. "I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth
in me." He wants to bring us from clinging to the emotional on one
hand, and on the other from morbid introspection: for perhaps one of
the chief dangers besetting those who are following hard after Him,
lies in getting taken up with these inner experiences (it is awfully
possible for the devil to rivet the chains of self back on a soul
even in the very act of watching the death process going on within
it, getting it absorbed even with its own dying!). Let us come as
fast as we can to letting the seed-vessel go as well as the leaves,
God wants to bring us to a life of childlike simplicity, taken up
with His Christ; always lower and lower at His feet in the
consciousness of shortcoming and unworthiness as His Glory shines,
but with our spiritual selves and all their intricacies fading out of
sight before Him. As we go on, we learn to draw the supply of every
need for spirit and soul and body from the simplest, barest, most
direct contact with Him. All the intervening tissues in the
seed-vessel melt away. "You have learnt the death of self when there
is nothing between your bare heart and Jesus."

Yes; when the seed is ripe it fills up the whole of the husk--there
is no room left for anything else: the walls shrivel to a mere shell.
This is the calling of the Bride--to have no room for anything but
Jesus. Blessed are they who hear it and respond.

Look at the parable. The life of leaf and tendril has shrunk away,
but t