Character and Conduct – 11 March – The Hallowing of Work

WE shall not do much of that which is best worth doing in the world if we only consecrate to it our gifts.   We have something else to consecrate for our work’s sake, for our friend’s sake, for the sake of all for whom in any way we are responsible.   Beyond and above all that we may do, is that which we may be.   ‘For their sakes I sanctify, I consecrate Myself.’   So our Blessed Lord spoke in regards those whom He had drawn nearest to Himself – His friends those whose characters He would fashion for the greatest task that ever yet was laid upon frail men.   And even when we have set apart all that was unique in the nature and results of His Self-consecration, all that He alone could, once for all, achieve;  still, I think, the words disclose a principle that concerns every one of us – the principle of all that is highest and purest in the influence of one life upon the lives it touches:  ‘For their sakes I consecrate Myself?

There is the ultimate secret of power;  the one sure way of doing good in our generation.   We cannot anticipate or analyse the power of a pure and holy life;  but there can be no doubt about its reality, and there seems no limit to its range.   We can only know in part the laws and forces of the spiritual world;  and it may be that every soul that is purified and given up to God and to His work releases or awakens energies of which we have no suspicion-energies viewless as the wind;  but we can be sure of the result, and we may have glimpses sometimes of the process-surely, there is no power in the world so unerring or so irrepressible as the power of personal holiness.   All else at times goes wrong, blunders, loses proportion, falls disastrously short of its aim, grows stiff or one-sided, or out of date- ‘whether there be prophecies, they shall fail;  whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away;’ but nothing mars or misleads the influence that issues from a pure and humble and unselfish character.”

The Hallowing of Work, BISHOP PAGET.

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