prophets. A great
many people still think that Jesus comes to destroy. The religious
life appears to them a life of giving up things. Renunciation seems
the Christian motto. The religious person forsakes his passions,
denies his tastes, mortifies his body, and then is holy. But Jesus
always answers that he comes not to destroy, but to fill full; not to
preach the renunciation of capacity, but the consecration of capacity.

Here is your body, with all its vigorous life. It is a part of your
religion to fill out your body. It is the temple of God, to be kept
{42} clean for his indwelling. Not the ascetic man, but the athletic
man is the physical representative of the Christian life. Here is your
mind, with all the intellectual pursuits which engross you here. Many
people suppose that the scholar's life is in antagonism to the
interests of religion, as though a university were somehow a bad place
for a man's soul. But religion comes not to destroy the intellectual
life. It wants not an empty mind but a full one. The perils of this
age come not from scholars, but from smatterers; not from those who
know much, but from those who think they "know it all." When our
forefathers desired to do something for the service of their God, one
of the first things they regarded as their religious duty was, as you
may read yonder on our gate, to found this college. And here, once
more, are your passions, tempting you to sin. Are you to destroy them,
fleeing from them like the hermits from the world? Oh, no! You are
not to destroy them, but to direct them to a passionate interest in
better things. The soul is not saved by having the force taken out of
it. It is, as Chalmers said, the expulsive force of a new affection
which redeems one from his {43} old sin. How small a thing we make of
the religious life; hiding it in a corner of human nature, serving it
in a fragment of the week; and here stands Jesus Christ at the centre
of all our activities of body and mind and will, and calls for the
consecration of the whole of life, for the all-round man, for the
fulfilment of capacity. In him, says the scripture, is not emptiness,
but fullness of life.

{44}

XVI

TAKING ONE'S SHARE OF HARDSHIPS

2 _Timothy_ ii. 3.

Here is one of the passages where the Revised Version brings out more
clearly the meaning.[1] The Old Version says: "Endure hardness;" as
though it were an appeal to an individual. The Revised Ver