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It expresses richness — this "All things are yours"; a broad and confident hold on life: a large liberty of mind. To have "all things ours"; to have, as it were, the freedom of the universe; to feel nowhere hemmed in, excluded, limited, whether in the sphere of truth or of sympathy, is a magnificent prospect, a splendid promise. To a great extent, we are compelled to acknowledge, our primary needs are needs of limitation and restraint, and Christianity presents itself as limiting and restraining. We come out to make our way in the world with good intentions, and around us there are ringing in our ears numberless voices — theories of life — denunciations — schemes — hopes — fears — doctrines — denials — doubts, and we feel anything but the consciousness that "all things are ours." We feel no sense of mastery, only of bewilderment. To be free — to give our sympathies on all sides — to trust all voices alike, is to leave our moorings, to be free to wander on a shoreless sea. Or again, careless indiscriminate sympathy, fellowship with human life in all its forms, may present itself to us as an ideal of conduct, "Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto." But there is that at once must give us pause. For humanity as it is is a strangely mixed thing. To say that my pulses beat in sympathy with all that is human is to state a fact of my being, but it is a fact suggestive as much of horror as of self-congratulation. For it means that there is no disordered passion, however vile, of which I cannot trace at least in some horrible moment the capacity in my own blood; no craft, no guile to which I can claim to be by nature utterly a stranger. Thus out of the surging sea of conflicting theories — out of the seething of this common manhood which I cannot trust — out of this indiscriminate life which might indeed master me, but which certainly I do not master — in which certainly "all things are not mine," I look up for some Hand from above to lift, some Voice to guide, some standard and criterion of life. And lo! there is One who knows life's secret, One who loves my humanity, who believes in its capacities as none else ever did, and yet distrusts its impulses. One who in our flesh, "in the likeness of flesh, of sin," yet restores life; sums it into Himself, and claims to purge it and to reconstruct it. I come to Him — I will be taught by Him. I would have the key to life — I would feel myself under His instruction. He turns upon me, He speaks to me. But it is not first of freedom. A secure life — a strong life, that is the first thing. It must be strong before it can be free — strong at the centre ere it can be free at the circumference, and to make it strong there must be concentration, and that means for the moment mutilation — the cutting off of occasions of sin, of whatever hinders the progress of the true self. If there is a theory which puzzles me, which I cannot refute, which perhaps has some attraction for me, yet seems to militate against my spiritual growth, which is to go — the spiritual growth or the intellectual?" "Thy intellectual interest," the answer of Christ seems to come, "is not thy primary self. Behind thine intellect is thy will — thy spirit. The centre of thy being where conscience speaks, where will acts, where prayer rises and God is known — that is thyself. It conditions all else. Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness — at all costs, limit thyself as you mayest to do so." Thus the first claim of Christ is a claim upon us for concentration of faculties upon the pursuit of holiness. All things are yours; but not till ye are Christ's, then, as Christ is God's. But so, if in blind surrender the sacrifice has been made and remade and made for ever, — is the reward sure. What is this vaunt of the Christian life? In what sense does the "slave of Jesus Christ" find that "all things are his"?

1. He finds it first in the moral sphere. Self has been cut at the roots, and it is selfishness which is the source of narrowness, the impoverishment of life. Party spirit (that is St. Paul's point) narrows your privileges. To make one great teacher of the Church your patron in such sense as that you exult exclusively in what he taught, exalt his special adherents and depreciate the work of others, is to narrow your Christian heritage. Yours is not what one teacher only was given to teach, but what all were given. All are yours, whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas. Argument, it has been said, is often most effective when it is most one-sided. The Christian Church in like manner may gain a certain sort of effectiveness by ignoring half her mission, and dealing with half human nature, but "all things are ours." The heritage is not meant to be impoverished and narrowed into ever closer channels as it comes down the ages. Meant for Catholic humanity, it remains in its Catholicity. We believe in one holy Catholic Church, one in its Divine authority, one in the truth it teaches in common, one in the grace which flows in its channels and makes its inner life the same, one in its common organisation, one in its sacred books, and to no part of that one whole do I limit my faith. By no corporate self-assertion would I have a part of that society strive to be the whole. "All things are ours."

2. But it is not only within the area of the Christian Church that the Spirit of Christ, by cutting the roots of self-assertion, realises in us the richness of our heritage. "Not only Paul, and Apollos, and Cephas," but the world, the κοσμος, is ours. The Christian realises his freedom in all truth, his kinship with all nature. It is not only that the good man is at peace with nature, that he is in league with the slaves of the field and the beasts of the land are at peace with him; there is a deep ground for such kinship. He has learned to recognise in Christ (in the latter days Incarnate) the eternal Word of God, the expression and counterpart of his being. His mediation in grace is based upon an unceasing mediation in nature. "Through Him all things were made." "Without Him was not anything made." "Whatever has been made, in Him was life." And as the Christian must lay his claim to be utterly at home in the modern scientific conception of nature, so must he also be in the world of universal humanity. The great Greek theologians of the epoch of the great general councils never let their students forget the largeness of the Christian claim. God's special dealings with the Jews (St. reminds us) are given only to prevent us forgetting His universal providence in all history and nature. For He who came into our territory (he tells us) in the Incarnation, came not as a stranger nor as having been far off before. For no part of creation had ever been left void of Him. He had filled all things through all. He was through all the ages "coming into the world." He was the light which lighteneth every man — the same Jesus Christ. "Dream not," says St. Justin (meeting a difficulty by anticipation), in his apology to the heathen, "that persons who lived more than a century and a half ago, before Christ was born in the flesh, escape His judgment. For we have been taught" (it is not a private opinion of his own) "and have explained before that He is the Logos, in which the whole race of man shared. And those who lived with reason up to their lights, are Christians even though they are reckoned Atheists among men, as among the Greeks were Socrates and Heracleitus, and among the Barbarians Abraham and Elijah, and many others, and those who lived of old without reason, were ever the enemies of Christ and the murderers of those who lived with reason. But they who lived or live with reason (i.e., up to their lights) are Christians and can live without fear." It ought to have been the instinct of Christianity always to recognise this. Christianity supersedes all other religions not by excluding but by including. In part indeed they represent merely man's bewilderment and ugly perversions of the truth. But in part they also represent that natural revelation of God which is involved in the light shining in darkness, so that the darkness could not suppress it. Everywhere there was something of a witness to God. And Christian faith stands to all other teachings, as that which supersedes them, by containing and elevating the truth they taught, and illuminating and satisfying the human need that they expressed. They become foes only when they become rivals, as even the good may ever be the enemy of the best, as the twilight is darkness by comparison with the sunlight. "There are many noble things," says , "in the Oracles by those not of Christ's part, but with us only are their Oracles complete and pure."

3. All things are yours — "Life and death," the world of human nature. It is the privilege of Christian faith to give us the freest access to human hearts. For the wants that Christ came to evoke and to satisfy belong to man, as man, to men equally in every age and in every class. The capacity for prayer, the sense of sin, the need of pardon, the reality and force of temptation, the vicissitudes of spiritual feeling, the moral discouragements and encouragements of life, the moral perplexities from conflicting duties — these things belong to people of utterly different positions in life and with scarcely any reference to degrees of education.

4. "All things are ours, whether things present or things to come." The great poet of human nature in our time constantly gives expression to the conviction that the problems of human character demand an immortality for their solution. Human characters he feels, in proportion to their worth, need an environment to develop them larger than this world; need a vaster field to work out their issues. "On the earth the broken arcs: in the heaven the perfect round." "God's task to make the heavenly period — perfect the earthen." Now this conviction of immortality in which the Christian lives gives him a leverage for action, and makes him the minister of hope. He can believe in the small beginnings who believes in immortal growth. He can believe in the perfect victory for all who do not finally and obstinately cling by choice to evil. He again has a rational doctrine to hold out to man of human perfection — a doctrine rational because it takes account of experience. Make this world the only sphere of progress, obliterate from men's eyes what we heard of last week as "the world as little like Whitechapel as possible," in which, "after death men shall wake up," and you certainly have no rational doctrine of hope to present to mankind. Where is the experience that justifies us in expecting that the progress of knowledge and civilisation really means for "the sacrificed classes" the progress of happiness. Does not experience rather give us a doctrine that nations have their periods of climax, and then their periods of decay? and is there any real ground for believing the later period for a particular race, happier than the earlier? Or have great social convulsions (though they have taught great lessons to humanity at large) been (except under certain conditions not now existing in England) productive of happiness to the nations who were the subjects of them? Does civilisation or knowledge any way tend to minimise the selfishness which is the root of all social evils? Behind the veil, under the feet of the great Head of a redeeming humanity, the Christian knows that the race of man who will consent to have God when He is offered them in His love, is being gathered into an ever developing perfection.

(C. Gore, M. A.)

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KJV: Therefore let no man glory in men. For all things are yours;

WEB: Therefore let no one boast in men. For all things are yours,