The Beauty of Holiness

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Ugly Christianity is not Christ’s Christianity. Some of us older people remember that it used to be a favorite phrase to describe unattractive saints, that they had “grace grafted on a crab stick.” There are a great many Christian people whom one would compare to any other plant rather than a lily. Thorns and thistles and briars are a good deal more like what some of them appear to the world. But we are bound, if we are Christian people, by our obligations to God, and by our obligations to men, to try and make Christianity look as beautiful in people’s eyes as we can…. Do you remember the words, “Whatsoever things are lovely; whatsoever things are of good report, … if there be any praise [from men] think on these things” (Phil. 4:8). It may be a modest kind of beauty, very humble, and not at all like the flaring reds and yellows of the gorgeous flowers that the world admires…. But unless you, as a Christian, are in your character arrayed in the “beauty of holiness,” and in the holiness of beauty, you are not quite the Christian that Jesus Christ wants you to be; setting forth all the gracious and sweet and refining influences of the Gospel in your daily life and conduct.

—Alexander Maclaren

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