uth or rise to the new opportunity.

Here is a serious warning to the 'elect' of every age. How often has
the church at large, or a national church, refused the call to
expansion, and lost some rich part of its heritage because it was
self-satisfied, and therefore blind? How often does a 'good catholic'
fail to recognize that he is utterly misusing the gifts of grace, {90}
if his Catholicism does not mean a generous and self-sacrificing desire
to win the lost and save the world? How often has the profession of
being 'saved' put an end to spiritual growth and the struggle with sin?
How many religious orders and societies have lived on the reputation of
the past, and appeared to fancy that the achievements of their
founders--'the merits of the fathers'--would justify the apathy and
carelessness of those who had inherited an honourable name? Indeed, to
whatever we are elect--whether national, or ecclesiastical, or personal
privileges--the temptation dogs us to rest on our inherited merits and
have no open ear to the guiding voice of God, as it calls us to fresh
ventures and renewed sacrifices, like those which laid the basis of the
position of which we now make our empty or insolent boast. But thus to
evade the uncomfortable requirements of the present by an appeal to the
achievements of the past--whether it be the past of catholic tradition
or 'the Reformation settlement'--is to expose ourselves inevitably to
divine condemnation.

Those who keep the open ear are the 'remnant' in every age and church
and nation. They are the men who refuse to 'make the word of God {91}
of none effect,' because of the blinding, deadening force of social
tradition. They are alive and awake to 'buy up the opportunity,' as it
presents itself. And for such St. Paul's teaching, inherited from the
prophets, of the function of the remnant is full of encouragement. The
Bible is a book contemptuous of majorities. The mass of men,
conventional, easily satisfied, self-centred, accomplish nothing,
redeem and regenerate nothing. But those who have ears to hear have
every motive, though they be few in number, to live at the highest
level possible, and believe to the full that the purpose of God can be
realized. God's purpose can work, and has in history worked, through
small minorities, through single individuals. They are the true
representatives of their church, their nation, their class. And when
the inner history of any epoch comes to