A Sketch of Individual Development

[Footnote: 1880.]

“I wish I had thought to watch when God was making me!” said a child once to his mother. “Only,” he added, “I was not made till I was finished, so I couldn’t.” We cannot recall whence we came or how we began to be. We do not know how far back we may have forgotten; certainly we once knew much that is gone. My own earliest definable memory is of a great funeral of one of the Dukes of Gordon, when I was between two and three; surely my first knowledge was not of death, and I must have known much before. In what we foolishly call maturity, as in the dawn of consciousness, each new consciousness dims or obliterates the one before, and as with our future, so with our past, imagination and faith must fill the place knowledge leaves. We are aware, and know we are aware, but when or how we began to be so is wrapt in a mist that deepens on one side into night and brightens on the other into full assurance of existence. Looking back we can but dream, looking forward speculate; but we may do both, for not all speculation is false nor all dreaming unreal. What may we fairly imagine of the child’s inward condition before the first moment his memory vouches for?

It is one, I venture to say, of absolute though largely negative faith. No memory of past pain or fear of pain to come troubles him. In some vague way he knows he is enfolded in love: the sky over him is his mother’s face, the earth that feeds him her bosom. The source, sustenance, and defence of his being, and the mediation between his needs and their supply, are all one. No type is so near the highest idea of relation to God as the child’s to his mother: her face is God, her bosom Nature, her arms Providence, all one love, an undivided bliss.

From this security he regards the world beyond. Things come and go and he neither desires nor bemoans them. Change may grow to storm; to him storm is calm, his rest unbreakable. He is accountable for nothing, and with conscience not yet awake there is no conflict. His waking is full of sleep, yet his very being is enough.

But all the while his mother lives in hope of his growth; in the babe her heart broods over the coming boy, the marvel closed in the germ. Whatever mothers lament in the change from childhood to maturity, none would want to nurse for ever a child in whom no live law of growth unfolded an infinite change. The child knows nothing of growth and desires none, but grows, as irresistibly as a peach swells and reddens in the sun. By slow, inappreciable accretion he is carried on toward the face of the awful mirror in which he must meet his first foe, himself.

By degrees he learns that the world is around him, not within, that he is apart and it is apart; from consciousness he passes to self-consciousness. This is a second birth, the beginning of a higher life. Only when a man knows that he lives does real life, life with a share in its own existence, become possible.

Now, toward the world around him, which is not his mother and does not actively love or serve him, relations begin that arise from his own fancies, desires, and preferences; reasonable or not, being founded in reason they are never devoid of it. Everything in them appears lovely, desirable, good, or ugly, hateful, bad; and through these obscure, imperfect relations, to a being heavily prone to mistake, begins to be revealed a Being other and higher than his own, known as Will and first of all in its opposition to his desires. Then begins the strife without which there never was, or can be, growth or progress; its first result I call the third birth of the human being.

The mother’s first opposing glance wakes in the child not only answering opposition, the rudimentary sac of his own coming will, but a new something so natural and so much a part of him, even when he refuses to heed it, that he long needs no name for it. This Conscience sides with his mother and makes itself felt before and after the event, so that he soon knows it is well or ill with him as he obeys or disobeys. Now he not only knows and knows that he knows, but knows he knows that he knows: he is self-conscious, he has a conscience. With the first resistance to it, the power above him has drawn nearer, and the deepest within him has sided with the highest without. The heaven of his childhood has both receded and come closer: he has run from under it, yet it claims him, farther yet immeasurably nearer, and he feels his mother’s grasp on his being. Through the higher individuality he becomes aware of his own; through his mother’s will his own begins to wake. He is conscious of himself as able to do or not do; responsibility has begun.

He slips from her lap, travels from chair to chair, crosses the threshold, braves the stair, and takes the greatest step possible to man, as George Herbert says, out of doors, changing the house for the universe. He runs from flower to flower, crosses the road, wanders, is lost, is found. His powers and activity grow; at school he meets other boys, and new objects of strife, new desires and impulses arise. His mother’s face and will, the old heaven, recede; a world of men, which he foolishly thinks nobler because larger, claims him. More or less he yields, as the example of those who seem more like himself than his mother grows strong on him, and his conscience speaks louder. Even here his fourth birth may begin: the birth of the real Will, not the pseudo-will that is mere Desire swayed by impulse, selfishness, or some miserable motive. When the man, listening to conscience, wills and does the right regardless of inclination or consequence, he is free, the universe open before him, born from above. Conscience need never speak to him twice or aloud, for he never neglects what she commands. When he knows he can will his will, that God has given him a share in essential life and in the causation of his own being, he is a man indeed. With most this birth takes many years. As the mother’s power wanes the neighbour’s waxes, and if the boy is of common clay, willing to accept dishonour, it will grow until individuality vanishes and what friends, society, or his trade or profession say becomes his rule of life. With such I have no more to do than with the deaf dead, who sleep too deep for words.

My typical child of man is not of such. He can influence as well as be influenced, first of all himself: he takes a share in his own making, determining actively what he shall become, for he never ceases to heed, however poorly and intermittently, the voice of his conscience, and today he heeds it more than yesterday.

Long ere now the joy of space has laid hold on him, the more if he lives in a wild and broken region. The human animal delights in motion and change, even violent motion and the swiftest changes of place, as if he would grasp the infinite by ceaselessly leaving one standpoint for another. He is full of unrest, must know what lies on the farther shore of every river and how the world looks from every hill: What is behind? What is beyond? is his constant cry. Within months or years the world begins to come alive around him; the stars are strange, the moon sad, the sunrise mighty, and he begins to see what men call beauty. He lies on a sunny bank gazing into the blue till his soul seems to mingle with the infinite made visible. Dissatisfied with his emotions, he longs for a deeper waking and greater beauty, troubled by an unknown ideal of Nature stirring in him. Nor is it only an ideal of Nature: a more precious thing, a human ideal, is taking shape in his soul. The wind that at night fills him with unexplained sadness haunts him by day as a wild consciousness of strength with no difficulty or danger enough to spend itself on. He would be a champion of the weak, a friend to the great, a merciless foe to every oppressor; rich that he might help, strong that he might rescue, brave (as he counts himself already, never having proved his weakness). At the first encounter he fails, and the bitter, wholesome, saving cup of shame and confusion of face is handed him from the well of life. He cannot yet see that one filled with the glory and not the duty of victory must and ought to fail, but days and nights soothe his dismay with forgetfulness, gently wiping out past sins so that young life may begin again unburdened by too much present failure.

Probably at school or in his first months at college, a new phase begins. He has crossed the border of science, and the marvel of multitudinous facts strung on golden threads of law grips him. For a time knowledge is pride: the mere consciousness of knowing rewards its labour, and each contact with a new fact is an exciting joy. But what is known soon sinks into insignificance except as a step of the endless stair he climbs he knows not whither; the unknown draws him, and each new fact flames up in his mind and drops dark on the heap below. Even the grandeur of law as law costs his life’s consciousness no small suffering and loss. For when Science enters, noble and graceful as she is, young Poetry shrinks back dismayed. Poetry is as true as Science, Science as holy as Poetry, but Poetry is timid and Science fearless, bringing a colder atmosphere than Poetry has learned to brave. Science is no enemy to Poetry, but they meet as friends only in the sage’s mind and heart, not the boy’s. The youth gazes on Science’s cold, clear, beautiful face, turns to find his friend, and Poetry has fled. He rushes out and sees only the rainbow glimmer of her skirt on the far horizon; she returns in dreams, never for long. How can he turn from evaporation and refraction to “sad Hesper o’er the buried sun,” or from quantitative analysis to “the rime of the ancient mariner” and the “moving moon” that “went up the sky, and nowhere did abide”? Looking from his window across the sands at the troubled ocean he cries, “What is the storm to me any more! it is but the clashing of countless water-drops!” He finds relief in seeing that once man is put in the midst of it, the clashing becomes a storm terrible to heart and brain: human thought, feeling, hope, fear, love, and sacrifice make nature’s motions alive with mystery and the shadows of destiny. But the relief may be partial and temporary; for what if this mingling of man and Nature in man’s mind only casts a coloured shadow over her cold indifference? What if she means nothing, never was meant to! What if in truth “we receive but what we give, and in our life alone doth Nature live!” What if the language of metaphysics as well as poetry comes from human fancy about Nature and not from Nature at all!

At length from the unknown whence he came an angel appears to deliver him from this horror, this stony look (ah, God!) of soulless law. The woman is on her way whose part is to meet him with a life other than his own, at once its complement and the visible presentment of what in it is beyond his understanding. The enchantment of love is upon him. Some call it a deceiving glamour, others an opening of the eyes; men will still divide between those who believe the horses and chariots of fire are present at their need and those who rank prophet with drunkard. But he who thinks he knows least understands what love is. Let foolish maidens and vulgar youths jest over it as they please, it is one of the most potent mysteries of the living God. The man who can love a woman and still be a lover of his wretched self is fit only to be cast out with the broken potsherds of the city, the salt in him having lost its savour. With this love a man puts on at least the vision robes of the seer, if not the singing robes of the poet; the paltriest human animal rises for the time above himself, and a truth of the great world penetrates, dimmed, the self-shadowed fog of his microcosm. He is for the time something of a friend as well as a lover, with a touch of his far-off childhood. To the youth of my history, in the light that passes outward from the lover’s eyes, the world grows alive again, radiant as an infinite face. He sees the flowers as in boyhood but with a deeper glow and more unspeakable soul. He is pitiful over them, unwilling to break their stems and hurt the life he more than half believes they share with him; he cannot think anything made only for him, any more than only for itself. Nature is no longer a mere contention of forces whose heaven and hell in one is the dull peace of equilibrium, but a struggle, through splendour of colour, grace of form, and evasive vitality of motion and sound, after an utterance hard to find and marred by the imperfection of the small and weak that would embody the great and mighty. The tree-tops wave with a hidden delight, the sun lifts his head intent on glory, no day lasts too long or night comes too soon, and twilight draws the loving on shadowy arms to the bosom of Night. In the woman the infinite he thirsts after is given him for his own.

Man’s occupation with himself turns his eyes from the great life beyond his threshold. When love awakes he forgets himself for a time, and glimpses of strange truth come through his windows, no longer blocked by his own shadow; he may even glimpse the possibilities of his being and dimly perceive the image after which he was made. But too soon self, radiant of darkness, wakes, the windows turn opaque, and he is a prisoner again. For the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the lust of other things choke more than the highest word. Waking from the divine vision (if that is waking which is dying into the common day), the common man calls it a foolish dream; the wise man still believes it, holds fast the memory of the vanished glory, and looks to have it again one day as part of his life’s light. He knows that, because his nature is imperfect, dull, and weak, enclosing clouds follow every vision with the threat of ever-during dark, and that even if the vision could stay it were not well, for the sake of what must yet be done with him and made of him. But the youth of my history is neither like the former nor as yet like the latter.

From whatever cause, fault, natural law, or supernal will, the flush that seemed to promise an eternal day fades, though with him, like the lagging skirt of the northern sunset, it does not vanish but travels on, a withered pilgrim, all night, to rise at last the aureole of the eternal Aurora. New paths entice him now, or old paths with fresh horizons. With stronger thews and keener nerves he turns again to the visible, drawn by changelessness amid change, law amid seeming disorder, unity amid units, and begins to see the indwelling poetry of science. The untiring forces working in inconceivable spans of time and room fill him with an awe that threatens to uncreate him with a sense of littleness, while their grandeur fills him with such glory that he forgets himself and in humility is great and knows it not. Rapt under the magic wand of Science, he watches billions of billions of miles of incandescent vapour begin to revolve, grow swift, condense through slow eternities, and throw off rings that break into globes speeding on through space. The glowing ball cools and condenses yet still glows. Presently, after tens of thousands of years, its fiery heart and its atmosphere contend fiercely; he hears the rush of torrent rains shocking into vapour, rising, and falling again against the citadel of fire, until the water wins and the darkened globe is covered by a sea boiling high as the hills to come with veritable heat. He sees the hills and mountains rise as wrinkles with water avalanching down them, and race after race of living things appear as the earth becomes a passing home for each new and higher kind, terrible convulsions dividing kind from kind until his own arrives. Endless are the visions of unfathomable material grandeur awaked in his soul by the bare facts of external existence.

But soon comes a change. As far as he can learn, all the motion, the seeming dance, is a rush for death, a panic flight into moveless silence. Wind and tornado, softest tide and fiercest storm alike rush, fighting as they rush, into the arms of eternal negation: down to a cold stirless solidity where wind blows not, water flows not, and seas lie frozen and tideless to their gulfy basin. All things are on the steep path to final uncreation. He is filled with horror, less at the dreary end than at the weary hopelessness of the way. Then a dim light breaks and a faint hope revives, for he seems to see in the innumerably varied forms of life a spirit rushing upward from death, escaping the downward cataract and the rest that knows not peace. “Is it not,” he asks, “the soaring of the silver dove of life from its potsherd-bed, the heavenward flight of some higher and incorruptible thing? Is not vitality, revealed in growth, itself an unending resurrection?”

The vision of the oneness of the universe, ever reappearing through the vapours of question, also keeps hope alive. To find, for instance, that the law of the arrangement of leaves on different plants corresponds to the law of the planets’ distances from their sun wakes in him hope of a central Will, which alone can justify one ecstatic throb at any seeming loveliness of the universe. Without a centre, delight is unreason, a mockery, not the skeleton at the Egyptian feast but a crowned corpse at a feast of skeletons. Life without the higher glory of the unspeakable, the atmosphere of a God, is not worth living. He would rather cease to be than walk the dull level of the commonplace among men he would lift but who will not rise, and for whom he cherishes the hope they do their best to kill. Those who seem to him great recognize the unseen, believe the roots of science are hid there, count the bringing of the invisible into sight the end of all Art, and judge the true leader of men to be him who leads them closer to the essential facts of their being. Alas for his love and hope, alas for himself, if the visible exists for its own sake only, if a flower’s face means nothing beyond the science that would unveil its growth! He cannot believe its structure exists for the sake of its laws; that would be building a scaffold for the sake of its joints where no house was to stand. Those who put their faith in Science are trying to live in the scaffold of the house invisible.

At times he finds harbour in his fellows’ written poetry, delighting to analyze and grasp the thought behind the utterance. The fine figure and delicate phrase make him jubilant and strong for a moment, but not for long, for no forms, even thought-forms of truth, can give his soul rest.

History attracts him little; he finds in its records no principles giving hope for his race. What hope has the rising wave that knows in its rise only its doom to sink and be dashed on the low shore of annihilation?

But time would fail me to follow the soul doubling as the hounds of Death course it, or to set down the countless forms in which the golden Haemony springs in its path,

Now the shadows begin to lengthen toward night, which, whether or not a morning follows, is night and spreads the wings of darkness. As it nears, the man grows aware of a want unlike any I have described: a sense of insecurity, not the same as doubt of life beyond the grave, a need more profound even than that which cries for a living Nature. He now plainly knows that all his life this sense has haunted his path like a duty unfulfilled, like a cold mist about his heart. What if this lack were the root of every other anxiety! Revived, this sense of lacking something, he knows not what, never leaves him more. With it the terror returns that there may be no Unseen Power, as his fathers believed and his mother taught him, filling and meaning all things, no Power with whom he will find final refuge in his last extremity. With the quickening doubt a tenfold blight falls on poetry, in Nature and in books. Far worse than the early chill of science’s assertions about what it knows is the shivering death that its pretended denials about what it knows not now send through his frame. The soul leaves the face of beauty when the eye begins to doubt that a soul is behind it; he feels like one I knew who always saw a corpse’s face in the living face. What can the world be to him who lives for thought if there is no supreme and perfect Thought, only the poor struggles after thought he finds in himself? Take the eternal thought from the heart of things and no beauty is real, and nothing in nature has significance in itself or sympathy with the human soul. At best the beauty he saw was the projected perfection of his own being, and from himself as the crown of things he shrinks in horror: it is the more imperfect being who, seeing so little beyond himself, most easily imagines himself the apex of things and rejoices in the fancy. The killing power of a godless science returns tenfold: the ocean-tempest is again a clashing of water-drops, the evening sky’s sadness a mockery of sorrow, his own soul and its sadness a mockery of himself. To tell him, as comfort, that the meaning lives in his own thought if nowhere else is the worst mockery of all: if these things embody no truth, to make them serve as embodiments is to put a candle in a death’s-head to light the dying through the place of tombs. Once a primrose could preach childlike trust to his foolish fancy, and the lilies sow higher seeds in his troubled heart; now they are no better than the colour a painter wipes from his brush on the doorpost at night. The look in his dog’s eyes, happy in being short-lived, is one of infinite sadness. All graciousness must be a sorrow, less because a thing must perish than because its nature is not real, that is, eternal. His children are shadows, their life a dance, a sickness, a corruption. The unselfishness that exists, however feebly, in all love, and gives life its only dignity, only adds to the sorrow. Nowhere at the root of things is love; it came after, a fungous excrescence in the hearts of men grown helplessly superior to their origin. Cold, impassive, material law is the root, happily lifeless and so not knowing itself, else it were a demon instead of a creative nothing. Endeavour is paralyzed in him. “Work for posterity,” says he of the skyless philosophy; “How can I work without hope?” answers the man. “Little heart have I to labour where labour is so little help. What can I do to make my children’s life less hopeless than my own? Give me all you would secure for them, and my life would be the worse mockery. The true end of labour would be to lessen the number doomed to breathe the breath of this despair.”

Straightway he develops another, deeper mood. He turns, led by suspicion or sudden insight, and regards himself, and finds such imperfection, wrong, shame, and weakness that he cries, “It were well I should cease! Why should I mourn after life? What good is it to prolong it in a being like me? ‘What should such fellows as I do crawling between heaven and earth!’” The seers, in general, do their best to obscure such insights; they regard suspicion of themselves as a monster and would stifle it, resenting any attempt to raise their buried best as an offence against intercourse. A man takes his social life in his hand who dares it. So few understand Hamlet’s judgment on himself: readers cannot imagine he meant it of his whole character and attribute it to shame at postponing vengeance, which the critic would have to be such as Hamlet to carry out on no better proof than he had. When the man whose unfolding I represent regards even his dearest love, he finds it so poor, selfish, and low-lived that in his heart he shames himself before his children and friends. How little labour, watching, or pain has he endured for them, beside the great things he reads of! How often has he been wrongfully displeased, wrathful with the innocent, hurt a heart more tender than his own! Has he ever once been faithful to his ideal, and is his life to be regarded with complacency or troubled over? Beyond him spread infinite possibilities, height beyond height, glory beyond glory, each rising from his conscious being; but where is any hope of ascending them? These hills of peace seem to infold him as a land where he could dwell at home, surely the place of his birth, while against their purity his conscious being shows miserable, dark, weak, a shadow that would be substance. But alas if the whole thing is only in himself, a vision of nothing, a revelation of lies, the outcome of what, helplessly existent, is not created and so cannot create; if the dreamer too is a self-dreamed dream, with no master of dreams to cry to! Where then is his hope of atoning one day to those who loved him? They are nowhere, dissolved in the primeval darkness! If truth is but the hollow of a sphere, he shall never cast himself before them to tell them that after long years of separation he knows himself and them, that love of them is now part of his being, and to implore forgiveness on the ground that he hates and scorns the self that showed them less than absolute love. They do not even rest, for they will never know it; there is no voice or hearing in them, and how can he have any heart to live! The one comfort left is that, unable to follow them, he shall die and cease, and fare as they, go also nowhither!

To a man in the dismay of existence dissociated from power, who knows not being and God together, unrooted in a creating Will who is Love, the Father of Man, the idea of a death that knows no reviving must be, and ought to be, the blessedest thought left. “O land of shadows!” he may well cry, “where shadows love to ecstatic self-loss, yet forget and love no more! land of sorrows and despairs that sink the soul into a deeper Tophet than death has sounded! broken kaleidoscope! shaken camera! promiser that speaks truth to the ear but lies to the sense! where my friend’s heart is sorrowful as mine, the more that I have been a poor and far-off friend! where sin is strong, righteousness faint, and love dreams mightily but walks abroad so feebly! where my father’s face is dust and my mother’s hand will never caress again, and my children will spend a few years of trouble like mine and drop from the dream into the no-dream! Gladly, O land of sickliest shadows, I take my leave of thee! Welcome the cold, pain-soothing embrace of immortal Death! Hideous are his looks, but I love him better than Life: he is true and will not deceive us. Nay, he only is our saviour, setting us free from the tyranny of the false that ought to be true and sets us longing in vain.”

But through all the man’s doubts and fears a rumour, a vague legendary murmur, has been about (rather than in) his ears, haunting his air though he has hardly heeded it. It has come down the ages, and in every age some have been influenced by it, more or less. On those he has chiefly known it has made no impression beyond a remarkable legend: the story of a man represented as at least greater, stronger, and better than any other. He has had a recurring, undefined suspicion that he has something to do with this tale’s hero, strongest (though never strong) when he is most aware of evil in himself; between the idea of this man and his knowledge of himself some imperative duty seems dimly to lie. He knows the matter is commemorated in many of his country’s oldest institutions, but he has shrunk from the demands which, by spiritual insight, he foresaw would follow if he admitted certain things to be true. He has known some, and read of more, who by faith in the man conquered anxiety, doubt, and fear, lived pure, and died in gladsome hope. But the faith that was once easy now seems almost impossible. And what is he called to believe? One says one thing, another another. Much that is asserted is unworthy of belief, and the foundation of the whole looks something like a cunningly devised fable. Even if true, he thinks, it cannot help him, for it does not touch the things that make his woe: the God the tale presents is not the being whose very existence alone can be his cure.

But he meets one who says to him, “Have you come to your time of life and still accept hearsay as ground of action (for there is action in abstaining as well as doing)? Suppose the man in question took all possible pains to be understood: does it follow that he is or was fairly represented by most of his followers, with such a moral distance between him and them?”

“But the whole thing has from first to last a strange aspect!” our thinker replies.

“As to the last, that is not yet come. As to its aspect, no human eye could convey its reality to a reading heart; every human idea of it must be more or less wrong, and yet perhaps the truer the aspect the stranger it would be. But is it not just with ordinary things you are dissatisfied? Should the strangeness of these things, to you little better than rumours, not make you examine them? Will you assert that nothing strange can concern human affairs? Much once scarce credible is now so ordinary that men have grown stupid to its wonder. Nothing around you serves your need: try what is of another class. What if the rumoured things belong to a more natural order than these, lie nearer the roots of your dissatisfied existence, and look strange only because you have lived in the outer court and not the penetralia of life? The rumour has been vital enough to float down the ages, emerging from every storm: see for yourself what is in it. So powerful an influence on history must show signs by which to tell whether the man understood himself and his message or owed his greatness to his followers’ deluded worship. None will deny that he has always had foolish followers, and none but a fool would judge a leader by that; wisdom as well as folly serves a fool’s purpose, for he turns all to folly. I say nothing of my own conclusions, because what you imagine my opinions to be is as hateful to me as it is disagreeable and foolish to you.”

So says the friend; the man hears, takes up the old story, and says to himself, “Let me see then what I can see!”

I will not follow him through the many shadows and slow dawns by which he arrives at this much: A man claiming to be the Son of God says he has come to be the light of men; says, “Come to me, and I will give you rest”; says, “Follow me, and you shall find my Father; to know him is the one thing you cannot do without, for it is eternal life.” He has learned from the man’s words, and from the man as the tale presents him, that the bliss of his conscious being is his Father; that his one delight is to do the Father’s will, the only thing worth doing; that he would make men blessed with his own blessedness; that the cry of creation and humanity shall be answered into the deepest soul of desire; that nothing less than the godlike way of being can satisfy any man; that not this world only but the whole universe is the inheritance of those who consent to be children of their Father in heaven and put forth the power of their will to be of the same sort as he; that to as many as receive him he gives power to become sons of God, partakers of the divine nature, joy, and power, who shall have whatever they desire, know no fear, love perfectly, and never die; that the world’s knowing ones will scorn the message, but the time will come when its truth is apparent, to some in confusion of face, to others in joy unspeakable; only we must beware of judging, for many that are first shall be last, and there are last that shall be first.

To find himself in conscious as well as vital relation with the source of his being, with a Will by which his own will exists, a Consciousness by which he is conscious, would end all his ills! He can imagine no other way to meet and annihilate his sorrows, for the ills that oppress him are within and without and over each he is powerless. If only the message were true! If only this man knew what he talked of! But if help for man exists beyond him, some one might know it first, and may not this be he? If the message is as great and perfect as this man says, only a perfect, eternal man at home in the Father’s bosom could know, bring, or tell it. According to the tale, the Father intended from the first to reveal himself to man as man, since without knowing the Father after man’s own modes of being, man could not grow to real manhood. The grander the idea, the likelier it is what it claims; unless it is high as the heavens above the earth, beyond us yet within our reach, it is not for us and cannot be true. Fact or not, a God such as Christ, infinitely a good man, is the only idea with hope enough for man! If such a God has come to be known, marvel must surround the first news of the revelation. Shall men turn from the gracious rumour of what, if true, is the event of all events, because of its marvel? Could marvel be lovelier than the marvel reported? Only the humble of heart can believe in the high and perceive and embrace grandeur. Humility is essential greatness, the inside of grandeur.

The man glimmeringly sees something of such truths, but endless doubts and questions wake in him. What if the whole idea of the man’s mission was a deception born of his very goodness? What if men pretending to be his followers invented the whole? What if it was a little truth greatly exaggerated? Yet whatever it is, less than its full idea would not suffice for the wants and sorrows that weigh him down!

He passes through many a thorny thicket of inquiry; gathers evidence upon evidence; reasons on the goodness of the writers (they might be deceived, but they dared not invent); weighs a thousand arguments, historical, psychical, and metaphysical, that would take volumes to set out; hears many an opposing and scoffing word from men “who surely know, else would they speak?” and finds himself much where he was. But at least he haunts the borders of possible discovery, while those who turn their backs on the idea are divided from him by a great gulf, perhaps of moral difference. A grand auroral hope still draws him; they take the thing from the merest report of opinion and look anywhere but thither. He who would not trust his best friend to state his views of life accepts the random judgments of unknown others as sufficient disposal of what the highest of the race have regarded as a veritable revelation from the Father of men, and sees only folly, since what he takes for the thing nowhere meets his nature. Our searcher at least holds the door open for any voice from the invisible region: if truth is there, he is where it will find him.

As he reads and reflects it grows clear that, if there is truth in the matter, he must first of all heed the man’s reported words themselves, what he says and not what is said about him. And he finds that the man says, or plainly implies, that only the obedient, childlike soul can understand them. So no disobedient man’s judgment of them or their speaker can be received: a man who hates his enemy, lies, or thinks to serve God and Mammon, whether or not he calls himself a Christian, has no right to an opinion about the Master or his words, at least in the Master’s eyes. This is in the nature of things: obedience alone puts a man where he can see well enough to judge what is above him. In respect of great truths investigation counts for little, speculation for nothing; to know them he must obey them, for obedience is the only door. And the truth-seeker sees, with no loophole of escape from life, that what the Son of Man requires of him is either what his conscience backs as just or what seems too great for any man. But if help exists, it must recognize the highest in him and urge him to use it. Help cannot come to one made in God’s image except in the obedient effort of whatever life and power is in him, for God is action. Only in such effort can need meet help; the upstretched hand meets the downstretched. He alone who obeys can pray with confidence, and only to him does an answer seem possible. And if anything the Son of Man says seems unreasonable, the majesty of duty in the rest compels him to conclude he has not yet seen its true nature or its relation to life.

Now comes the crisis: if the man sets himself honestly to do what the Son of Man tells him, he sets out on the path that will lead him, if there is truth in these things, to knowledge of the whole matter; not until then is he a disciple. If the message is true, the condition of knowing its truth is not only reasonable but unavoidable; if there is help for him, how else should it draw nigh? Only by obedience does a man come into such contact with truth as to know what it is, and in regard to truth knowledge and belief are one. It is absurd that things which appear only to an eye capable of seeing them, or are recognized only by a mind of a certain development, should be examined by an incapable eye and pronounced on by an undeveloped mind. The deliverance offered is a change such that the man shall be the rightness he talked of: while his soul is not hungering and groaning after righteousness, longing to be honest and upright himself, it is absurd that he should judge the way to it; while he does not walk in it he is and shall be dishonest, and how can he know the way! What he can judge is his duty at a given moment, not in the abstract but as something to be done, neither more nor less nor other than done. Thus judging and doing, he takes the only possible step toward righteousness and righteous judgment; doing otherwise he grows more unrighteous and blind. For the man who knows not God, whether or not he believes there is a God, there can be, I repeat, no judgment of things pertaining to God. To our searcher, then, the crowning word of the Son of Man is this: “If any man is willing to do the will of the Father, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.”

Having thus brought my type to the borders of liberty, my task for now is done; let the reader prove the rest for himself. Obedience alone convinces, and I would take no bootless labour to convince without it; that would be a gain only for hell. If any man calls these things foolishness, his judgment is insignificant to me. If any says he is open to conviction, I answer that he can have none except by obedience. If a man says, “The thing is not interesting to me,” I ask, “Are you following your conscience? By that, not by your interest in a thing, you shall be judged; and in that day, whatever that day means, nothing will be said to you or of you of which your conscience will not echo every syllable.”

Oneness with God is the sole truth of humanity. Life parted from its causative life would be no life, at best a barrack of corruption, an outpost of annihilation; the derived life is imperfect as the union is incomplete. No man can be one with neighbour, child, or dearest except as he is one with his origin, and he is not perfect while there is one being in the universe he could not love.

He is bound above all men to hold his face like a flint in witness of this truth who owes everything that makes for eternal good to the belief that at the heart of things, causing them to be, at the centre of monad, world, protoplastic mass, loving dog, and cruellest man, is an absolute, perfect love, and that in the man Christ Jesus this love is with us to take us home. To nothing else do I owe any grasp on life; in this I see the setting right of all things. For the believer in the Son of God poetry returns in a mighty wave, history unrolls in harmony, and science is crowned with its own aureole of holiness. Nothing enlivens the imagination, enables the judgment, or strengthens the intellect like belief in a live Ideal at the heart of all personality and of every law. Without one, falsehood does more for the race than the facts of its being; an unreality is needed for the man’s development in all that is truly real; falsehood is greater than fact, and an idol is needed for lack of a God. Those who deny cannot, in the nature of things, know what they deny. Whoever sees a chaos taking the shape of an ordered world will hardly be persuaded it is by the power of a foolish notion bred in a diseased fancy.

Let the man then who would rise to the height of his being be persuaded to test the Truth by the deed, the highest and only test that can be applied to the loftiest of all assertions. To every man I say, “Do the truth you know, and you shall learn the truth you need to know.”