See that thou make all things.' Let us go back to Leviticus. There you will find page after page that reads like an architect's specification. The words that I have taken as my text are given in immediate connection with the directions for making the seven-branched candlestick, which are so minute and specific and detailed, that any brass-founder in Europe could make one to-day after the pattern.' So many bowls, so many knops, so many branches; such and such a distance between each of them; and all the rest of it--there it is, in most prosaic minuteness. Similarly, we read how many threads and fringes, and how many bells on the high priest's robe. Verse after verse is full of these details; and then, on the back of them all, comes, See that thou make all things according to the pattern.' Which things are a parable--and just come to this, that the minutest pieces of daily life, the most commonplace and trivial incidents, may all be moulded after that great example, the life of Jesus Christ.
It is one of the miracles of revelation that it should be so. The life of Jesus Christ, in the fragmentary records of it in these four Gospels, although it only covered a few years, and is very imperfectly recorded, and in outward form was passed under conditions most remote from the strange complex conditions of our civilisation, yet fits as closely as a glove does to the hand, to all the necessities of our daily lives. Men and women, young men and maidens, old men and children, professional men and students, women in their houses, men of business, merchants, and they that sail the sea and they that dig in the mine, they may all find directions for everything that they have to do, in that one life.
And here is the centre and secret of it. Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone.' Therefore that which is the law for Jesus is the law for us, and the next verse goes on; he that loveth his life shall lose it,' and the next verse hammers the nail farther in: If any man serve Me, let him follow Me.'--Take that injunction and apply it, in all the details of dally life, and you will be on the road to reproduce the pattern.
But remember the all things.' It is for us, if we are Christian people, to bring the greatest principles to bear on the smallest duties, Small duties?' Great' and small' are adjectives that ought never to be tacked on to duty.' For all duties are of one size, and while we may speak, and often do speak, very mistakenly about things which we vulgarly consider great,' or superciliously treat as small,' the fact is that no man can tell what is a great thing, and what is a small one. For the most important crises in a man's life have a strange knack of leaping up out of the smallest incidents; just as a whisper may start an avalanche, and so nobody can tell what are the great things and what the small ones. The tiniest pin in a machine drops out, and all the great wheels stop. The small things are the things that for the most part make up life. You can apply Christ's example to the least of them, and there is very small chance of your applying it to the great things if you have not been in the way of applying it to the small ones. For the small things make the habits which the great ones test and require.
So thorough' is the word. See that thou make all things according to the pattern.'
I remember once going up to the roof of Milan Cathedral, and finding there stowed away behind a buttress--where I suppose one man in fifty years might notice it, a little statuette, as completely chiselled, as perfectly polished, as if it had been of giant size, and set in the facade for all the people in the piazza to see. That is the sort of way in which Christian men should carve out their lives. Finish off the unseen bits perfectly, and then you may be quite sure that the seen bits will take care of themselves. See that thou make all things '--and begin with the small ones--according to the pattern.' Lastly,
