But in us that surrender scarcely deserves the name; even to use the word self-sacrifice covers us with a kind of shame.  Then it is that there is an almost boundless joy in acquiescing in the life and death of Christ, recognizing it as ours, and representing it to ourselves and God as what we aim at.  If we cannot understand how in this sense it can be a sacrifice for us, we may partly realize it by remembering the joy of feeling how art and nature realize for us what we cannot realize for ourselves.  It is recorded of one of the world’s gifted painters that he stood before the master-piece of the great genius of his age—­one which he could never hope to equal, nor even rival—­and yet the infinite superiority, so far from crushing him, only elevated his feeling, for he saw realized those conceptions which had floated before him, dim and unsubstantial; in every line and touch he felt a spirit immeasurably superior yet kindred, and he is reported to have exclaimed, with dignified humility, “And I too am a painter!”

We must all have felt, when certain effects in nature, combinations of form and colour, have been presented to us, our own idea speaking in intelligible and yet celestial language; when for instance, the long bars of purple, “edged with intolerable radiance,” seemed to float in a sea of pale pure green, when the whole sky seemed to reel with thunder, when the night wind moaned.  It is wonderful how the most commonplace men and women, beings who, as you would have thought, had no conception that rose beyond a commercial speculation, or a fashionable entertainment, are elevated by such scenes; how the slumbering grandeur of their nature wakes and acknowledges kindred with the sky and storm.  “I cannot speak,” they would say, “the feelings which are in me; I have had emotions, aspirations, thoughts; I cannot put them into words.  Look there! listen now to the storm!  That is what I meant, only I never could say it out till now.”  Thus do art and nature speak for us, and thus do we adopt them as our own.  This is the way in which His righteousness becomes righteousness for us.  This is the way in which the heart presents to God the sacrifice of Christ; gazing on that perfect Life we, as it were, say, “There, that is my religion—­that is my righteousness—­what I want to be, which I am not—­that is my offering, my life as I would wish to give it, freely and not checked, entire and perfect.”  So the old prophets, their hearts big with unutterable thoughts, searched “what or what manner of time the spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand of the sufferings of Christ, and of the glory which should follow;” and so with us, until it passes into prayer:  “My Saviour, fill up the blurred and blotted sketch which my clumsy hand has drawn of a divine life, with the fullness of Thy perfect picture.  I feel the beauty which I cannot realize:—­robe me in Thine unutterable purity:—­

   “Rock of ages cleft for me,
    Let me hide myself in Thee.”