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James Clerk Maxwell
 
 
DOCUMENTS
 
Lettere alla moglie     22 giugno, 23 giugno, 26 giugno e 28 giugno  1864
 
TO HIS WIFE.(alla moglie)
 

                                                                                    22d June1864.

     May the Lord preserve you from all evil, and cause all the evil that assaults you to work out His own purposes,    that the life of Jesus may be made manifest in you, and may you see the eternal weight of glory behind the  momentary lightness of affliction, and so get your eyes off things seen and temporal, and be refreshed with the  things eternal! Now love is an eternal thing, and love between father and son or husband and wife is not temporal  if it be the right sort, for if the love of Christ and the Church be a reason for loving one another, and if the one be  taken as an image of the other, then, if the mind of Christ be in us, it will produce this love as part of its complete  nature, and it cannot be that the love which is first made holy, as being a reflection of part of the glory of Christ,   can be any way lessened or taken away by a more complete transformation into the image of the Lord.

     I have been back at 1 Cor. xiii. I think the description of charity or divine love is another loadstone for our life—to  show us that this is one thing which is not in parts, but perfect in its own nature, and so it shall never be done   away. It is nothing negative, but a well-defined, living, almost acting picture of goodness; that kind of it which is  human, but also divine. Read along with it 1 John iv., from verse 7 to end; or, if you like, the whole epistle of John  and Mark xii. 28.


                                           TO HIS WIFE.(alla moglie)

23d June 1864.

     Think what God has determined to do to all those who [339] submit themselves to His righteousness and are   willing to receive His gift. They are to be conformed to the image of His Son, and when that is fulfilled, and God  sees that they are conformed to the image of Christ, there can be no more condemnation, for this is the praise  which God Himself gives, whose judgment is just. So we ought always to hope in Christ, for as sure as we receive
Him now, so sure will we be made conformable to His image. Let us begin by taking no thought about worldly    cares, and setting our minds on the righteousness of God and His kingdom, and then we shall have far clearer  views about the worldly cares themselves, and we shall be continually enabled to fight them under Him who has   overcome the world.


                                           TO HIS WIFE.(alla moglie)

26th June 1864.

     Note in (2 Cor.) ver. 10 that the judgment is according to what we have done, so that if we are to be counted   righteous, we must really get righteousness and do it. Note also that we are to receive the things done in the body,   not rewards or punishments merely, but the things themselves are to be brought back to us, and we must meet  them in the spirit of Christ, who bore our sins and abolished them, or else we must be overwhelmed altogether.

     . . . I have come from Mr. Baptist Noel. The church was full to standing, and the whole service was as plain as    large print. The exposition was the Parable of Talents, and the sermon was on John iii. 16. The sermon was the   text writ large, nothing ingenious or amusing, and hardly any attempt at instruction, but plain and very serious   exhortation from a man who evidently believes neither more nor less than what he says.



TO HIS WIFE.(alla moglie)
 

28th June 1864.

     I can always have you with me in my mind—why should we not have our Lord always before us in our minds, for    we have His life and character and mind far more clearly described than we can know any one here? If we had   seen  Him in the flesh we should not have known Him any better, perhaps not so well. Pray to Him for a   constant sight of Him, for He is man that we may be able to look to Him, and God, so that He can create us anew    in His own image.