Would you care to have a flood-tide of love flush the channelways of
your life like that? It would clean out something you have preferred
keeping. It would with quiet, ruthless strength, tear some prized
possessions from their moorings and send them adrift down stream and
out. Its high waters would put out some of the fires on the lower
levels. Better think a bit before opening the sluice-ways for that
flood. But ah! it will sweeten and make fragrant. It will cut new
channels, and broaden and deepen old ones. And what a harvest will
follow in its wake. Floods are apt to do peculiar things. So does this
one. It washes out the friction-grit from between the wheels. It does
not dull the edge of the tongue, but washes the bitter out of the mouth,
and the green out of the eye. It leaves one deaf and blind in some
matters, but much keener-sighted and quicker-eared in others. Strange
flood that! Would that we all knew more of it.
The Fullness of the Stature of a Man.
Now note some of the changes _in the personality_ which attend the
Spirit's unrestrained presence. Without doubt the face will change,
though it might be difficult to describe the change. That Spirit within
changes the look of the eye. His peace within the heart will affect the
flow of blood in the physical heart, and so in turn the clearness of the
complexion. The real secret of winsome beauty is here. That new dominant
purpose will modulate the voice, and the whole expression of the face,
and the touch of the hand, and the carriage of the body. And yet the one
changed will be least conscious of it, if conscious at all. Neither
Moses nor Stephen knew of their transfigured faces.
It is of peculiar interest to note the changes in the mental make-up. It
may be said positively that _the original group of mental faculties
remain the same_. There seems to be nothing to indicate that any change
takes place in one's natural endowment. No faculty is added that nature
had not put there, and certainly none removed.
But it is very clear that there is a _marked development_ of these
natural gifts, and that this change is brought about by the putting in
of _a new and tremendous motive power_, which radically affects
everything it touches.
Regarding this development four facts may be noted.
First fact:--_Those faculties or talents which may hitherto have lain
latent, unmatured, are aroused into use._ Most men have large
undeveloped resources, and endowments. Many of us are one-sided in our
development. We are strangers to the real possible self within,
unconscious of some of the powers with which we are endowed and
intrusted. The Holy Spirit, when given a free hand, works out the
fullness of the life that has been put in. The change will not be in the
sort but in the size, and that not by an addition but by a growth of
what is there.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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