# The Hope of the Gospel: A Modern Paraphrase

*The Hope of the Gospel, by George MacDonald, restated paragraph by paragraph in modern English. This paraphrase follows the order and content of the original without adding interpretation. Drafted with the help of AI.*

## SALVATION FROM SIN

*The passage:* You are to call him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. (Matthew i. 21.)

I want to help some people understand what Jesus came from our Father's home to be and do for us. Everything in the world is at first misunderstood; we must learn what it is, and come to see that it could not be otherwise. Only then do we really know it.

I suppose hardly anyone, speaking openly, would deny having something that plagues him, something he would gladly be rid of, which keeps him from calling life altogether good. Most imagine that without this or that adversary life would be an unmixed satisfaction. The discomforts range from simple uneasiness to a misery that makes annihilation the sufferer's highest hope, and perhaps most of the world's energy goes into escaping them. Some keep climbing the social scale, finding fresh trouble at every height, as they think; in truth they brought it with them. Others hurry to be rich, slow to learn that the poverty of their souls will keep them unhappy while their purses fill. Some court endless change, not knowing that the change that will free them must pass on themselves. Others enlarge their souls with knowledge, only to find that content will not live in the great house they have built. All seek the thing whose lack seems the *cause* of their misery, but it is only the changeable *occasion*, the cause of its shape and not of the misery itself; remove one apparent cause and another succeeds it. The real cause is something the man may not have recognized as existing, and does not yet know in its true nature.

However absurd it seems to one who has not yet found it out, the cause of every man's discomfort is moral evil: first his own sin and wrongness, and then the evil in those he loves, which I leave aside, since the only way to be rid of it is for the man to be rid of his own sin. No particular sin may explain this or that physical discomfort, which may have begun with some ancestor; but evil in ourselves is why it continues, and it prevents the patience that would soon blunt its sting. The evil is *essentially* unnecessary and passes when its purpose is reached, the development of pure will in man; the suffering is also essentially unnecessary, yet while the evil lasts it is absolutely necessary. Foolish is the man, and there are many, who would rid himself and others of discomfort by setting the world right and warring on the evils around him, while neglecting his first business, his own character and conduct. Even if the world could be righted from outside, a man who helped and stayed what he was could never enjoy the result: out of tune himself, he would think the organ he had tuned still jarring. The philanthropist who sees the wrong as in the race forgets that the race is made of conscious, wrong individuals; that wrong is always generated in and done by an individual, who passes it on as a tendency; and that no evil can be cured in the race except in its individuals. Tendency is not absolute evil; it is there to be resisted. Three men can be made right only by making each right, but the cure of one man who repents and turns begins the cure of the whole race.

Even if a man's suffering is a distant inheritance that this life is too short to cure, faith and obedience will make it endurable and overflow in help to his fellow-sufferers. The groaning body, wrapped in the garment of hope, will look with outstretched neck for its redemption, and endure.

The one cure for any organism is to be set right, all its parts brought into harmony, and the one comfort is to know this cure in process. Return to its true self is its only ease. To free a man from suffering he must be put in health, and the health at the root of his being is freedom from wrongness, from sin. I do not mean freedom from the sins he has done, which will follow, but from the sins he is doing or capable of doing: the wrongness that spoils his nature, the evil he consents to, the sin he is, which makes him do the sin he does.

To save a man from his sins is to say to him, in a perfect and eternal sense, 'Rise up and walk. Be free as the son of God is free.' To do this Jesus was born, and remains born to all the ages. When misery drives a man to call out to the source of his life (and I take the growing outcry against existence as a sign that the race is growing toward a sense of its need of regeneration), the answer, I think, will be a quickening of his conscience. This will probably not be what he wants, for he wants only to be rid of suffering, which he cannot have except by deliverance from its root, infinitely worse than any suffering. If he will not have that, he must keep his suffering; through chastisement he will at last take the only way into liberty. There is no deliverance but to come out of his evil dream into the glory of God.

It is true that in delivering us from our sins Jesus came also to deliver us from their painful consequences. But these consequences exist by the one law of the universe, the true will of the Perfect. When the creature disobeys it, suffering is inevitable; it is the natural consequence of the unnatural, and in God's perfect creation it tends to heal the breach. The Lord never came to deliver men from the consequences of their sins while the sins remained; that would be to throw the medicine out of the window while the man lay sick. Yet men who love their sins have constantly taken this word to mean that he came to save them from the punishment of their sins, and this miserable fancy has terribly corrupted the preaching of the gospel. Unable to believe in their Father's forgiveness, imagining him unable to forgive outright, or bound by his own nature or by a law above him to exact satisfaction for sin, many teachers have taught that Jesus came to bear our punishment and save us from hell. They have made a result the object of his mission, one no true man would want except as following from the real object. His mission came from the same source and had the same object as the punishment of our sins: he came to side with it and set us free from our sins. No man is safe from hell until he is free from his sins; but one to whom his sins are a burden will soon forget he ever had any hell to think of but that. To him his sins are hell; he would go to the other hell to be free of them, and free of them could endure it. For hell is God's and not the devil's, on the side of God and man, to free the child of God from the corruption of death. No soul will be redeemed from hell except by being saved from the evil in him; if hell is needed, hell will blaze, and the worm will writhe and bite, until he takes refuge in the Father's will. Salvation from hell is salvation as conceived by those to whom hell, not evil, is the terror. But if even for dread of hell a poor soul seeks the Father, he will be heard, and taught to seek the immeasurably greater gift, and in the greater will receive the less.

There is another important misunderstanding of the messengers of the good news: that they threaten punishment for the sins we have committed, whereas their message is of forgiveness, not vengeance; of deliverance, not evil to come. No man is condemned for his past sins; even for the worst he need not dread remaining unforgiven. His present, live sins, those that pervade his thoughts and rule his conduct, which he clings to though called to abandon them, and which cause his misery though he may not know it, are what he is condemned for even now. The memory of past wrongs is or will become very bitter, but that is not condemnation, and once what made them possible in us was abolished, remorse would lose its worst bitterness in the hope of amends. The condemnation, in Scripture's words, is that light has come into the world and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.

It is the indwelling badness, ready to produce bad actions, that we need delivering from. If a man will not strive against it, he is left to commit evil and reap the consequences; to be saved from those consequences would be no deliverance but an ever deepening damnation. Jesus came to deliver us from the evil in our being, no essential part of it, thank God: the miserable fact that the very child of God does not care for his father and will not obey him, so that we desire wrongly, act wrongly, or, where we try not to, still cannot help feeling wrongly. He came to save us not from the things we have done but from the possibility of doing them any more; when that goes, and with the hope of confessing hereafter to those we have wronged, the power of the evil we have done goes too. Our evil judgments, unjust desires, hate, pride, envy, greed and self-satisfaction, the essential opposites of faith and love, are the souls of our sins, our live sins, more terrible than their bodies, the deeds (our dead works), because they make us loathsome as well as producing loathsome things. When we turn against them and refuse to obey them, they rise in fierce insistence but begin to die. We are then on the Lord's side, as he has always been on ours, and he begins to deliver us from them.

Anything in you that would make your own child less pleasant to you than you would have him is something wrong. What one parent would not mind fills another with horror, who sees the present evil and the serpent-brood to follow. But the love of him who is love is as much higher than ours as the heavens are higher than the earth, so he must desire in his child infinitely more than the best mother. He would have him rid of all discontent, fear, grudging and bitterness in word or thought, and of measuring his own by a different rod from another's. He will have no curling of the lip, no indifference to the man whose service he uses, no desire to excel another or contentment at gaining by his loss, no service received without gratitude, no tone or word that makes another's heart ache, however briefly. From such sins, as from all others, Jesus was born to deliver us, not primarily from their punishment. When all are gone, the holy punishment will have departed too. He came to make us good, and so blessed children.

One master-sin lies at the root of all the rest. It is no single action or product of mood or passion; it is the man's failure to recognize, and so to act in, the highest of all relations, the root of every other true relation of the soul: his lack of harmony with the being whose thought is his existence and whose word is his power of thought. As St Paul affirms, God is not far from any of us; were we not in closest contact as created and creating, we could not exist at all. But there is a closer contact still, as necessary to our well-being as the other is to our being. For God's highest creation in man is his will, and until the highest in man meets the highest in God, their true relation is not yet a spiritual fact. The flower lies in the root, but the root is not the flower; while one party neither knows, loves, nor acts on the relation, it is as yet unborn. The highest in man is not his intellect, imagination or reason, all of which depend on his will. His will must meet God's, and be *distinct* from God's, or no *harmony* between them would be possible; yet this makes all the more, not less, God's, for God creates in the man the power to will His will. It may cost God a suffering man can never know to bring him to that point; but when the man declares for God's will he becomes one with God, and the end for which Jesus was born and died is gained. He is saved from his sins, and the universe flowers again in his redemption. But I would not be supposed to imagine the Lord without sympathy for the pains that reveal what sin is, and by which he would make men sick of sin. He sympathizes with everything human and feels every human pain himself. Evil is not human but the defect and opposite of the human; the suffering that follows it belongs to the human that has sinned, and is *for* the sinner, that he may be delivered. With tenderest love he wills his brothers and sisters free, that he may fill them with joy, for which they were created; but from the moment they exist truth, not happiness, comes first, and he must make them true. Were it possible for pain to continue after evil was gone, he would never rest while one ache was in the world. A man may recognize the evil in him only as pain, and care nothing about his sins, yet the Lord is sorry for his pain. He cries, 'Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,' not 'all ye that feel the burden of your sins'; he opens his arms to all weary enough to come in the poorest hope of rest. He would gladly free them, but knows only one way: to teach them to be like himself, meek and lowly, gladly bearing the yoke of his Father's will. With them the weariness comes first, with him the sins; there is one cure for both, the Father's will, which is his joy and will be their deliverance. He might take from them the human, send them down to a lower stage of being and so free them from suffering, but that would be a descent toward annihilation or a new beginning to grow up toward the suffering they left, for what is not growing must die out of creation. The disobedient and selfish would fain have, in the hell of their hearts, the liberty and gladness of purity and love, but cannot; they are weary with what they are and with what they were made for but are not. The Lord knows they need purity, while they know only that they want ease. Their very existence is an evil, of which, but for his resolve to purify them, their maker must rid his universe. Must the creator send forth his virtue to hold alive a thing that ought not to be and has no claim but to cease? The Lord himself would not live save with an existence absolutely good.

My reader may want me to say *how* the Lord will deliver him from his sins. That is like the lawyer's 'Who is my neighbour?' The spirit of such a question is the root of all the horrors of a corrupt theology, so welcome to lovers of weak and beggarly hornbooks of religion; it springs from the passion for the fruit of the tree of knowledge, not the tree of life. Men want to understand and do not care to *obey*, though it is impossible to understand except by obeying; by searching into the Lord's work instead of doing their part, they hinder both his work and their own power to see it. Instead of at once obeying the Lord of life, the one condition on which he can help them and itself the beginning of their deliverance, they question their unenlightened intellects about his plans, not only how he means to deliver them but how he is able. They would bind their Samson until they have scanned his limbs and thews. Unable to understand the first motions of freedom in themselves, they turn his glorious verse into their paltry commercial prose, and then, grown presumptuous, insist that their neighbours accept these distorted shadows of 'the plan of salvation' as the truth of him in whom is no darkness, and as the one condition of acceptance with him. They will not set foot on the only stair to the house of wisdom until they have settled how it is built; for the sake of knowing they postpone what alone can enable them to know, and put a false persuasion that they understand in place of true understanding. They will not act upon their highest privilege, obeying the Son of God. On those who do his will the day dawns; to them the day-star arises in their hearts. Obedience is the soul of knowledge.

By obedience I do not mean obedience to man, or submission to authority claimed by any man or community, but obedience to the Father's will, however revealed in our conscience.

God forbid I should seem to despise understanding; the New Testament is full of urgings to understand, and our whole life must be a growth in it. What I cry out against is the misunderstanding that comes of trying to understand without obeying. Our energy must go to obedience; understanding will follow. If we are not anxious to know our duty, or know it and do not do it, how shall we understand what only a true heart and clean soul can? The power in us that would understand, were it free, lies in the bonds of imperfection and impurity, and cannot judge the divine; it cannot see the truth, and if it could, it would not know it or have it. Until a man begins to obey, the light in him is darkness.

Any honest soul may understand this much, for we can judge it right of ourselves: the Lord cannot save a man from his sins while he holds to them. An omnipotence that could both do and not do the same thing at once is too absurd for mockery; so is one that could make a man at once free and a self-degraded slave, the very likeness of God yet good only because he could not help it.

But the Lord is not unreasonable; he requires no high motives where they could not yet exist. He does not say, 'You must be sorry for your sins, or you need not come to me': to be sorry a man must love God and man, and love is just what has to be developed in him. It is common sense that a man who longs to be freed from suffering, or made able to bear it, should go to the Power by whom he is; equally that, to be delivered from the evil in him, he must himself begin to cast it out and work righteousness, expecting his Father's help. Alone he might labour to all eternity and not succeed: he who has not made himself cannot set himself right without him who made him. But his maker is in him and is his strength. The man who broods speculating on the metaphysics of him who calls him, instead of doing what he is told, stands leaning his back against the door by which the Lord would enter to help him. The moment he begins to put straight what is crooked, doing right where he did wrong, he gives way for the Master to come in. He cannot make himself pure, but he can leave what is impure and spread the 'defiled, discoloured web' of his life before the bleaching sun of righteousness; he cannot save himself, but he can let the Lord save him. The struggle of his weakness is as essential to the coming victory as the strength of Him who resisted unto death, striving against sin.

The sum of the matter is this: the Son has come from the Father to set the children free from their sins; the children must hear and obey him, that he may send forth judgment unto victory.

Son of our Father, help us to do what you say, and so die with you to sin, that we may rise to the sonship for which we were created. Help us to repent even to the sending away of our sins.

## THE REMISSION OF SINS

*The passage:* John baptized in the wilderness and preached a baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. (Mark i. 4.)

God and man must combine for salvation from sin, and the New Testament seems to use the same word, translated *remission*, for the share of either in the great deliverance.

First, a word about *repentance*. I would not suggest a mistranslation, but the idea behind the word has been so misunderstood and mistaught that we must look at the word itself to see the moral fact it stands for.

The Greek word of which *repentance* is the accepted and fundamentally accurate rendering is made of two words meaning together *a change of mind* or *thought*. It has no hint of *sorrow* or *shame* or the other states that often accompany repentance and have been mistaken for part of its essence. Here the evangelist adds three words, as if he thought it insufficient alone to convey the Baptist's meaning: 'preaching a baptism of repentance *unto a sending away of sins*.' The phrase *\[Greek: aphesis amartiôn\]* may sometimes mean God's forgiveness, and reading it as 'repentance to obtain God's pardon' would not be inconsistent; but *\[Greek: eis\]* is rather *unto* than *for*; *\[Greek: aphesis\]*, translated *remission*, means fundamentally a *sending away*, a *dismissal*; and the writer seems to add the phrase to make certain what he means by *repentance*: one that reaches to the abjurement of sins. 'A change of mind unto the dismissal of sinning' is far more logical than 'a change of mind unto the pardon of sin.' The revised version chooses *unto* but keeps *remission*, which now means only God's forgiveness. I think the same word is used here for man's dismissal of his sins as elsewhere for God's; in both it is a sending away of sins, differing only in the source of the action. I do not enter the question whether God's *aphesis* may mean sending sins out of a man as well as pardoning them; I am sure the one deed cannot be separated from the other.

That the phrase here means repentance unto ceasing from sin, the giving up of what is wrong, I will try to show is at least probable.

First, the user of the phrase either defines the change of mind as aimed at God's pardon or as reaching to a new life, and the latter seems to me by far the more natural. What seems intended is the kind and scope of the change, not an end to be gained by it: a change of will and conduct, a radical change of life. The man must change his mind not to a different opinion, not even to a mere betterment of conduct, but to nothing less than a sending away of his sins.

Next, in St Matthew's gospel, the Baptist's motive for urgency is that the kingdom of heaven is at hand: because the king is coming, give up your sinning. His quotation from Isaiah ('Prepare ye the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God') makes the same argument. The only possible preparation for the coming Lord is to cease from evil and do well, to send away sin; they must cleanse not their streets, houses, garments or persons but their hearts and doings. The Baptist did not see that the kingdom was not of this world but in the hearts of men, and in prison his faith failed because he heard of no martial movement or show of power; but he saw plainly that righteousness was essential to it. That he did not yet see that righteousness *is* the kingdom, and that the Lord was already beginning it by sending sin out of his people's hearts, is not wonderful. The Lord's answer to his doubt was to send his messenger back an eye-witness, to wake in him the perception that the kingdom came by other means to another end than John had recognized: wherever obedient love arose in the heart of the poorest he healed or persuaded.

Again, when the Pharisees came to John he said, 'Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance': is that not the same as 'Repent unto the sending away of your sins'?

Note also that when the multitudes, and the publicans and soldiers, the classes most obnoxious to the rest, asked what they should do, plainly recognizing that something was required of them, his instruction went one way: send away your sins, each beginning with the fault nearest him. The kingdom was at hand; they must prepare for it by beginning to do as must be done in it.

They could not rid themselves of their sins, but they could quarrel with them and begin to turn them out, while the Lord came to do his part in the final banishment. Those who had repented he would baptize with a holy power to send their sins away indeed: the will to be rid of them would be baptized with a fire to burn them up. When a man breaks with his sins, the wind of the Lord's fan will blow them away, the fire of his heart consume them.

I think, then, that what is meant here is the repentant man's part, not God's, in the sending away of sins: his one preparation for receiving the power to overcome them, the baptism of fire.

What comes in the name of the gospel must often seem, even to one not far from the kingdom, no good news at all; it wakes no hope in him, and the God it tells of is not one he would draw nearer to. But when such a man sees that God must be his Life, and that in rousing himself to put away evil and do the duty at his door he may fearlessly claim the help of him who 'loved him into being,' then his will sides with his conscience, and he begins to try to *be*, first of all by ridding himself of what is antagonistic to all being, namely *wrong*. Multitudes will not even approach the appalling labour and pain of *being*. God is doing his part, in an age-long creation, endowing men with power to be; but few yet take up theirs and put forth a divine effort after real existence. To the many the prophet's spirit cries: 'Turn, and change your way! The kingdom of heaven is near you. Let God throne himself in you, that his liberty be your life and you free men. Clear the house for him; send away the bad things out of it. Depart from evil and do good. The duty at your door, do it, great or small.'

For in this region there is no great or small. 'Be content with your wages,' the Baptist told the soldiers; to many now the word would be 'Rule your temper,' 'Be courteous to all,' 'Let each hold the other better than himself,' or 'Be just to your neighbour that you may love him.' To make a highway for our God in the desert we must bestir ourselves on the very spot where we stand and cast away the evil thing that blocks his chariot-wheels; otherwise those wheels will never roll through our streets, nor our desert blossom with his roses.

John's message was then, and is yet, the one message to the world: 'Send away your sins, for the kingdom of heaven is near.' Some of us (I cannot say *all*) who long ago began to send away our sins need fresh repentance every day, God knows how many times a day, so ready are we to take a path that seems parallel to the narrow way and not notice its divergence. When we find we are out of the way, what is there but to bethink ourselves and turn? By those 'who need no repentance' the Lord may have meant those who had repented perfectly and were with him in his Father's house; also those who have never sinned, and those who no longer turn aside for any temptation.

We may now be able to understand the Lord's own relation to John's baptism.

He came to John to be baptized, and most would say John's baptism was of repentance for the pardon of sins. But he could not be baptized for remission of sins, having never done a selfish, untrue or unfair thing, never wronged his Father or any brother or sister; there was nothing to forgive. Nor for repentance, which in him would have been turning to evil. Where then was the propriety of his coming to be baptized and insisting on it? It must lie elsewhere.

Take John's words to mean 'the baptism of repentance unto the sending away of sins,' and remember that in Jesus repentance could not be, since what repentance must bring about in man already existed in him. Then, altering the words to fit the case, 'the baptism of willed devotion to the sending away of sin,' we see at once how his baptism was right and fit.

That he had no sin to repent of was not because he was so made that he could not sin; it was because, by his own will, he sent sin from him with the full energy of his nature. God knows good and evil and, blessed be his name, chooses good; his righteous anger will never make him unfair to us or forget that we are dust. His son, like him, chose good, and in that choice resisted every temptation to help his fellows otherwise than as their father and his would. Instead of crushing evil by divine force, destroying the wicked, making peace by the rule of a perfect prince, or gathering the children of Jerusalem under his wings whether they would or not, he let evil work its will while it lived. He contented himself with the slow, unencouraging ways of essential help: making men good, casting out and not merely controlling Satan, carrying to perfect issue on earth the principles for which the Father honoured him, anointing him with the oil of gladness above his fellows because he loved righteousness and hated iniquity. To love righteousness is to make it grow, not to avenge it; and to win its true victory he, like his brethren, had to send away evil. All his life he resisted the impulse to work more rapidly for a lower good, strong perhaps when he saw old age, innocence and righteousness trodden underfoot. What else gives reality to the temptation in the wilderness, and to the devil's coming again after leaving him for a season? In the whole attitude of his being he was driving sin away from himself and, as Lord and saviour of men, from others, bringing them to abjure it like himself. No man, least of all any lord of men, can be good without willing to be good, setting himself against evil, sending away sin. Other men send it out of them; the Lord sent it away from before him, that it should not enter. So the stand against sin is common to the captain of salvation and the soldiers under him.

What did Jesus come into the world to do? The will of God in saving his people from their sins: not from the punishment of their sins, that blessed aid to repentance, but from the sins themselves, the paltry as well as the heinous. His whole work was and is to banish sin from the earth, to cast it into the abyss of non-existence behind the back of God. His was the holy war: he resisted unto blood, and taught the soldiers who followed him to resist also unto blood, striving against sin; so he became the captain of their salvation, and they, freed themselves, fought and suffered for others. This was the task to which he was baptized, and it is still his labour. 'This is my blood of the new covenant which is shed for many unto the sending away of sins.' The new covenant was that God would put his law in their inward parts and write it on their hearts, and be their God and they his people, not according to the covenant they broke.

John baptized unto repentance because those he was sent to had to repent and send away the sin in them. But a man aware of no sin in him, yet aware that life would be no life unless sin were kept out, would be right to receive John's baptism unto the continual dismissal of the sin ever wanting to enter at his door. The object of the baptism was the sending away of sin; repentance was its object only where needed to introduce that. He who needed no repentance was baptized for the same object, the banishment of sin from his Father's dominions, and first by his own sternest repudiation of it in himself. Thence came his victory in the wilderness: he would have his Father's way, not his own. Could he be less fit for the baptism because its object was no new thing to him, who had been about it from the beginning, indeed from all eternity? We shall be about it, I presume, to all eternity.

Those baptized by John were initiated into the company whose work was to send sin out of the world, first out of themselves. Their earliest endeavour would, as I have said, open the door to the help without which no man could succeed in so arduous a task: the work must be wrought in the roots of his own being, where, knowing nothing of the secrets of his existence, he can do nothing immediately, and only his maker is potent and present. The change that must pass in him more than equals a new creation, being a higher one. But its necessity is involved in the former creation, so we have a right to ask our creator's help, for he requires of us what he has created us unable to do without him. Nay, could we do it without him, it were a thing to leave undone. Blessed fact that he has made us so near him: that we are completed only by his presence in us, are not men without him, can be one with our self-existent creator, and in him must share infinitude or be enslaved by the finite! The patent of our royalty is that not for a moment can we live our true life without the eternal life present with our spirits; without him at our unknown root we cease to be. A dog cannot live without the presence of God, but I presume a dog may live a good dog-life without knowing it; man is dead if he does not know the Power that is his cause, his deepest selfing self, the Presence which is not himself and is nearer to him than himself, infinitely more his very being than he is. The being of which we are conscious is not our full self; our consciousness is infinitely less than we, and God is more necessary even to it than self-consciousness is to our humanity. Until a man becomes his own God, the sole thing necessary to his existing is the will of God, and to its well-being and perfecting, that he should know his maker present in him. All that the children want is their Father.

The one true end of all speech about holy things is to persuade the individual to cease to do evil, to set himself to do well, and to look to the lord of his life to be on his side in the new struggle. Supposing my suggestions correct, I do not care that my reader understand them unless he turns against the evil in him and begins to cast it out. If he does not, it is of no consequence whether he agrees with me; if he does, it is equally little, for, setting himself to do the truth, he is on the way to know all things.

I am not sure what the Lord means by 'Thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness'; baptism could not be that! Perhaps he means: 'We must by a full act of the will give ourselves altogether to righteousness, making it the business of our lives to send away sin and do the Father's will. That is my work as much as the work of any man who must repent before he can begin. I will not be left out when you call men to be pure as our father is pure.'

To be certain whom he means by *us* might help: all of us men, or 'my father and me,' or 'you and me, John'? If the saying means what I suggested, the *us* applies to all who know good and evil: 'Every being that can must devote himself to righteousness; to be right is no adjunct of completeness but the ground and foundation of existence.' But perhaps it was a lesson for John himself, who, mighty preacher of righteousness as he was, did not yet count it the all of life. I cannot tell.

Note that when the Lord began his teaching, neither using nor inculcating any rite, he used John's own words: 'Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.'

That kingdom had been at hand all through his infancy, boyhood and young manhood: he was in the world with his Father in his heart. Lonely man on the hillside or boy the cynosure of doctors' eyes, his Father was everything to him: 'Wist ye not that I must be in my father's things?'

## JESUS IN THE WORLD

*The passage:* 'Son, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in distress.' He said to them, 'Why did you search for me? Did you not know that I must be about my father's business?' And they did not understand what he said to them. (Luke ii. 48-50.)

Was that his saying? Why did they not understand it? Do we? The Greek is not perfectly clear, and who can tell whether the Syriac words he used were more precise? But had we heard his very words we too, like his parents, would have failed to understand. Must we fail still?

Our first difficulty shows if I give the latter half of the saying as the revised English version has it, departing from the authorized: 'Wist ye not that I must be in my father's house?' His parents had his exact words and did not understand; we lack them and are in doubt what the Greek means.

If the authorized translation is true to the Greek, how could his parents, who knew him from all that had been said of him and all they had seen in him, have failed to understand that wherever he was he must be about his father's business? And supposing they did know it, was that reason enough, given their spiritual development, for him to expect them not to be anxious at losing him? Thousands who trust God for their friends in spiritual things do not trust him for their health or well-being. His parents knew how prophets had always been treated, and a boy like him seemed exposed to many dangers; these could be met only by a faith able to say, 'Whatever has happened to him, even death, can be no evil to one about his father's business,' and I think the Lord could not yet expect that of them. So long as they had not learned what God is, which he came to teach, he would have seen misfortune befalling him on his father's business as reason for their anxiety. His words rather imply there was no need to worry about his personal safety. Fear of some accident seems to have caused their trouble; he did not mean they should not mind if he died doing his father's will, but that he was in no danger from accident or misfortune. So much for the authorized version.

Let us now take the Revisers' translation: 'Wist ye not that I must be in my father's house?'

Are the Revisers authorized in translating the Greek so? I know no justification, though I am not learned enough to say there is none. That the Syriac has it so weighs little, since it is a retranslation. If he said 'my father's house' and meant the temple, why would he assume his parents knew it? The temple so little suggested itself to them that either it was the last place they looked or they had been there and had *not* found him. And if they might have known without being told, why did they not understand even when he set it before them? I do not believe he meant the temple.

What makes those who give this translation prefer it to 'about my Father's business'?

One or other of two causes, most likely both: an ecclesiastical fancy, and the mere fact that he was found in the temple. An ecclesiastical mind presumes the temple the likeliest place for the Son of God, and does not reflect that it was a place where the Father was worshipped neither in spirit nor in truth, built by one of the vilest rulers of this world, less fit than many another spot for the presence of him who says he dwells in the high and holy place, and with the contrite and humble in spirit. Jesus, in the same breath in which he once called it his father's house, called it a den of thieves. His expulsion of the buyers and sellers was the first waft of the fan with which he came to purge his father's dominions; nothing could cleanse that house, and his fanning rose to a tempest that swept it out of his father's world.

The second cause, the mere fact that he was found in the temple, can hardly be a reason for his expecting his parents to know he was there; and if it witnessed to some habit of his that they knew, it is hard to see why they failed to see what the interpreters find so easily. The parents looked for a larger meaning in such a son's words, one too large for them to find.

When, in the Greek, the Lord elsewhere says 'my father's house,' he says it plainly, using the word *house*; here he does not.

Let us see what the Greek offers toward the thought in his mind. Literally it says, 'Wist ye not that I must be in the------of my father?' The authorized version supplies *business*, the revised *house*. The Greek has no noun, and the article 'the' is plural: 'Wist ye not that I must be in the things of my father?' The question is what *things* he means. The word might mean *affairs* or *business*, but I do not know why a plural article should be contracted to mean *house*. In a great wide sense *house* might be used, as I shall show, but surely not as meaning the temple.

He was arguing for confidence in God on the part of his parents, not for knowledge of his whereabouts. What made them anxious kept them from understanding his words: lack of faith in the Father. The words were meant to teach his parents the one thing he came to teach men. They are spirit and life, holding the one principle by which men shall live, and the same core as his words to his disciples in the storm, 'Oh ye of little faith!'

'Why did you look for me? Did you not know that I must be among my father's things?' What do we understand by 'my father's things'? The authorized 'about my father's business' or 'affairs' is, as to the words themselves, thoroughly justifiable; I refuse it only because it does not fit the logic of the narrative as *things* does. Of course he was about his father's business, and they might know it and still be anxious, lacking perfect faith in that father. But their fear was not of what might befall him for doing the Father's will; he seemed too young for that. It was the vague perils of life that appalled them, the uneasiness of every parent whose child is missing; had they trusted in their father as he did, they would have known what he meant by being in the midst of his father's things: that the very things from which they dreaded accident were his home-surroundings, and that he was doing the Father's business not in a foreign country but in the Father's own house. Understood as the world or the universe, 'my father's house' would be a better translation than the authorized; understood as the poor, God-forsaken temple, no more the house of God than a dead body is the house of a man, it is immeasurably inferior.

The Lord meant, I say, to remind them, or rather make them feel, for they had not yet learned it, that he was never away from home and could not be lost; he was in his father's house all the time, where no hurt could come to him. 'The things' about him were the furniture and utensils of his home, and he knew them all and how to use them. The world was his home because it was his father's house. He was no stranger there, no lost child, but with his father all the time.

Here is one main thing wherein the Lord differs from us: we are not at home in this great universe, our father's house. We ought to be, and one day shall be, but are not yet. This reveals Jesus as more than man by revealing him more man than we. We are not complete men, and so are more or less out of harmony with everything in the house of our birth. We struggle to make our home in the world without success, because we are not at home with the lord of the house, not one with our elder brother, his right hand. Only the son, the daughter, abides ever in the house. When we are true children, if not the world then the universe will be our home, felt and known as such, and we would not change it. Until then comes the hard strife with *Nature*, as we call the things of our father: invaluable for our development, yet showing we are not men enough to be lords of the house built for us. We cannot command in it as the Lord did, because we are not at one with his father, and so neither in harmony with his things nor rulers over them. Our best power is to find out wonderful facts about them and turn these to our uses on systems of our own. For we discover what we seem to discover by working inward from without, while he works outward from within, and we shall never understand the world until we see it in the direction in which he makes it, which we cannot do until we are one with him. Meanwhile both we and his things are so much his that we can err about them only as he has made possible: we can wander only in the direction of the truth, if but to find that we can find nothing.

Think how Jesus was at home among the things of his father. It seems to me a spiritless explanation of his words that the temple was where he was naturally at home. Does he make the least lamentation over the temple? He weeps over Jerusalem, the men of Jerusalem, the killers and stoners. He prayed on the mountain-top, not in the temple. His symbols for what passes in the mind and before the face of his father in heaven he finds not in the temple, its rites, altars or holy of holies, but in the world and its lovely-lowly facts: roadside, field, vineyard, garden, house, family, and the commonest of its affairs, the lighting of the lamp, the leavening of the meal, the neighbour's borrowing, the losing of the coin, the straying of the sheep; and even in its unlovely facts, such as the unjust judge and the false steward. See how he drives devils from men's souls and bodies as we drive wolves from our sheepfolds, and diseases hurry and flee before him! The world has for him no chamber of terror. He walks to the door of the sepulchre, the sealed cellar of his father's house, and calls out its four days dead; he rebukes the mourners, stays the funeral, and gives the departed children back to their parents. The roughest of its servants do not make him wince, and none is so arrogant as to disobey his word; he falls asleep in the storm that threatens his boat, and rebukes his disciples for trembling: God's little ones afraid of a storm in their own house! Hear him tell the watery floor to be still and no longer toss his brothers, and see it obey; see the creatures under it come at his call; see him walk over its heaving surface to help his men of little faith; see its water turn to wine and its bread grow more bread at his word; see him go from the house for a while, and returning with fresh power take what shape he pleases, walk through its closed doors, and go up and down its invisible stairs!

All his life he was among his father's things, in heaven or in the world, not only when they found him in the temple. He is still among them everywhere in the universe. Whatever he laid aside to come to us, he dealt with the things about him in such lordly, childlike manner as made it clear they were not strange to him but his father's. He claimed none as his own, and would have had none his except through his father; only as coming from the Father and full of his thought had they any existence to him. That they were his father's made them precious. He had no care for having, as men count having; all his having was in the Father. I doubt he had a pocket. Did he ever say 'This is mine, not yours'? Did he not say, 'All things are mine, therefore they are yours'? Only by knowing them as our Father's can we escape enslaving ourselves to them; through the false, infernal idea of *possessing* them we make them our tyrants and the relation between us evil. The world was a blessed place to Jesus because everything in it was his father's. What pain it must be to him to see his brothers defile the Father's lovely house, each grasping at the family things in greed and haste to be rich! If one polluted spot disturbs our pleasure in a whole landscape, how much more him.

Whoever can understand Wordsworth or Henry Vaughan when either speaks of the glorious insights of his childhood can imagine a little how Jesus, in his eternal childhood, regards the world.

Hear what Wordsworth says:

| Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
| The Soul that rises with us, our life\'s Star,
| Hath had elsewhere its setting,
|     And cometh from afar:
| Not in entire forgetfulness,
| And not in utter nakedness,
|   But trailing clouds of glory do we come
| From God, who is our home:
|   Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
|     Shades of the prison-house begin to close
| Upon the growing Boy,
|   But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
| He sees it in his joy;
|   The Youth, who daily farther from the east
| Must travel, still is Nature\'s Priest,
| And by the vision splendid
| Is on his way attended;
| At length the Man perceives it die away,
| And fade into the light of common day.

Hear what Henry Vaughan says:

| Happy those early dayes, when I
| Shin\'d in my angell-infancy!
| Before I understood this place
| Appointed for my second race,
| Or taught my soul to fancy ought
| But a white, celestiall thought;
| When yet I had not walkt above
| A mile or two, from my first love,
| And looking back---at that short space---
| Could see a glimpse of His bright-face;
| When on some gilded cloud, or flowre
| My gazing soul would dwell an houre,
| And in those weaker glories spy
| Some shadows of eternity;
| Before I taught my tongue to wound
| My conscience with a sinfull sound,
| Or had the black art to dispence
| A sev\'rall sinne to ev\'ry sence,
| But felt through all this fleshly dresse
| Bright shootes of everlastingnesse.
|   O how I long to travell back,
| And tread again that ancient track!
| That I might once more reach that plaine,
| Where first I left my glorious traine;
| From whence th\' inlightned spirit sees
| That shady City of palme trees.

Whoever has gazed thus on flower or cloud, or can recall the poorest memory of the trail of glory about his childhood, has some faint idea how his father's house and its things always looked, and must still look, to the Lord. With him there is no fading into the light of common day. He has never lost his childhood, the essence of childhood being nearness to the Father and the outgoing of his creative love; so, with the insight of his eternal childhood, of which the insight of little ones here is a fainter repetition, he sees everything as the Father means it, as he thought of it when he uttered it. For God is father not only of the child but of the childhood that makes him a child, so childness is of the divine nature. The child cannot look into the father's method, but he can in a measure understand his work, has free entrance to his study and workshop, and may ask questions. If Jesus could always see his father's things even as some men and more children see them at times, he might well feel *almost* at home among them; he could not cease to admire and love them, since the life in them, the presence of the creative one, would always be plain to him. In the Perfect, would familiarity ever destroy wonder at things essentially divine? To cease to wonder is to fall from the childlike to the commonplace, the most undivine of intellectual moods. Our nature can never be at home among things that are not wonderful to us.

Could we see things always as we have sometimes seen them, and as we must one day always see them, only far better, should we ever know dullness? Should we fly to art, or to other men's eyes and thoughts, for deliverance from *ennui* or any haunting discomfort, and not just open our own child-eyes, look on the things themselves, and be consoled?

Jesus, then, would have his parents understand that he was in his father's world among his father's things, where nothing could hurt him; he knew them all, was in the secret of them all, and could use and order them as his father did. To this I think all we humans are destined to rise. Though many of us do not know what home we are capable of, we too shall inherit the earth with the Son eternal, doing with it as we would, willing with the Father's will. We are travelling to such a home as we now inhabit, only perfected and perfectly beheld, never to reach it save by the obedience that makes us children and so heirs of God. And, thank God, there the father does not die that the children may inherit; we inherit with the Father.

All the dangers of Jesus came from the priests and the learned in the traditional law, whom his parents had not begun to fear for him. They feared the thieves and robbers of the hill-road; the scribes, pharisees, priests and rulers would surely be the first to acknowledge their Messiah and king! Little they imagined, finding him where he ought to have been safest had it been indeed his father's house, that he sat there amid lions, the great doctors of the temple. He could rule all the *things* in his father's house, but not the men of religion who called his father their Father. He might have compelled them with a word or a glance, but the Lord of life despised such supremacy over his brothers. He would have them know themselves of his own family, at home among the things of God, loving and hating as he and his father did, ruling themselves by the essential laws of being. Because they would not, he let them do to him as they would, that he might reach their hearts by some unguarded door in their diviner part: 'I will be God among you; I will be myself to you. You will not have me? Then do to me as you will. The created shall have power over him through whom they were created, that they may be compelled to know him and his father. They shall look on him whom they have pierced.'

His parents found him in the temple, but never really found him until he entered the true temple, their own adoring hearts. A temple that knows not its builder is no temple; no divinity dwells in it. But at length he comes to his own, and his own receive him, in the might of his mission to preach good tidings to the poor, heal the broken-hearted, and preach deliverance, sight, liberty and the Lord's own good time.

## JESUS AND HIS FELLOW TOWNSMEN

*The passage:* On the sabbath, as was his habit, Jesus stood up to read in the synagogue at Nazareth, where he grew up. He was handed the scroll of Isaiah and read the place that says the Spirit of the Lord is on him to bring good news to the poor, heal the brokenhearted, free captives, restore sight to the blind, release the oppressed, and proclaim the Lord's year of favour. He closed the scroll and sat down, every eye on him, and said: "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing." (Luke 4:14-21.)

The Sermon on the Mount reads like an expansion of these words, and might have followed this reading had Nazareth been willing to listen. And the evangelist's wording matches neither of the differing originals behind the English and Greek versions, which alone should end the crude, spiritually shallow idea that Scripture is inspired word for word.

Where the Lord stops reading is telling. He closes the book, leaving unread "and the day of vengeance of our God" (the Septuagint has "the day of recompense"). God's vengeance is as holy as his love, indeed is love, since God is love and not vengeance. But he evidently did not want the word in his announcement: his hearers would hear it as vengeance on their enemies, not on the selfishness of those who refuse to be their brother's keeper.

He did not begin with Nazareth, or even Galilee. "A prophet has no honour in his own country," he said, and began where he was likelier to be heard. At Cana he worked his first miracle only at his mother's request, and did not begin teaching there. He went first to Jerusalem, drove the dealers out of the temple and did other notable things John mentions; his former neighbours in Galilee had seen this and were ready to listen. The Nazarenes, who knew him best, kept the most prejudice: he was from their own city, and they had known him since childhood! Those in whom familiarity with the high and true breeds contempt are low indeed; they are already judged. Such was his fame that even they would hear him and judge his claim, but their judging eye was not clear, and they were full of darkness. If they could be satisfied that he was the great Prophet, they would eagerly claim the glory of producing him; he was that Prophet, and within minutes they would have killed him for Israel's honour. In ignoble people even love of country is largely ignoble.

The Lord began his mission by driving dishonest dealers from the temple, a shadow of God's hateless vengeance and his first parable to Jerusalem. To Nazareth he comes with the prophet's sweetest words of hope, good news of healing, sight and liberty, and announces that he has come to fulfil them. That day the scripture was fulfilled in their hearing. It was foretold that he would save his people from their sins; here he announces what they would grasp more easily: he has come to free people from sorrow, pain, ignorance, oppression, everything that makes life hard and unfriendly. I imagine women heard it most gladly: they had hardly been heard before he came, and things have been improving for them ever since, and still are. He is the refuge of the oppressed, freeing the world from sin and woe through its very woes, like bitter medicine, and he keeps at the cure though the sick, mistaking the symptoms for the disease, blame their physician. "What power can heal the broken-hearted?" they ask. It takes a God, and the God is here! In better words than the prophet's, he says: "Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." He has come to free us from everything that keeps life from being pure bliss; no other gospel would be worthy of the God of humanity.

Everyone, I presume, has some misery. Its apparent source may be this or that; its real source is a dislocation of the joint between the created life and the creating life. This primal evil breeds countless others. Under their weight the arrogant person rails against life and misuses it, while the child looks around for help, and who can help him but his father? The Father is with him all along, though it may be a long, troubled time before the child knows he is in his arms. Doubt may hide the Light of the world and failure baffle his hope, but now and then the blue of a great sky breaks through, and gradually he can imagine a world where every thinkable good is real. Best of all, the story of the one who is himself God's good news grows easier for his heart to believe, and helps him in his struggle and in his trust that a living Father hears his children cry. The gospel according to this or that expounder may repel him beyond words; the gospel according to Jesus Christ draws him most strongly and keeps its hold. When a priest, scribe or elder accuses him of self-sufficiency for refusing their teaching, he answers: "This is life or death to me. I cannot take your gospel; believing as you want me to would mean losing my God. Your God is no God to me, and I would rather die than believe in him. I reject your gospel in the true God's name, because believing it would wrong the one in whom my only hope lies."

"But to believe in such a man," he might go on, "as the New Testament shows him, is life from the dead. I no longer live by the idea of self but by the life of God. I give him the creature he made, to live in and develop as he intended. I accept his ways for me, trust him, and try to obey. I look to see his will clearly and be freed from the prison of my limits, the bondage of finite existence; for the finite that lives in the infinite, and in which the infinite lives, is finite no longer, and those who are children in this way are little Gods, the divine brood of the infinite Father. Mere rescue from the consequences of sin would be no gospel to me. Nothing less than a holy heart's liberty, the Lord's own freedom, will satisfy a human soul. Father, set me free in the glory of your will, so that I want only what you want. Your will is both your perfection and mine. You alone are deliverance, absolute safety from every trouble that ever was, is or can be in your universe."

But the people of the Lord's town, to whom he applied the prophet's gracious words, were the wise and prudent of their day. In effect they cry: "These things are good, but they must come our way. The promise to our fathers must be fulfilled: we, the chosen children of Abraham and Israel, will rule the world. We want to be free, run our own affairs, live in plenty and do as we please. Only liberty can cure the woes you speak of. We don't need to be better; we are well enough. Give us riches and honour, keep us satisfied with ourselves, and you can be the Messiah." They may never say this, but their minds often run this way. What will they complain of if God gives them their heart's desire? When it closes in on them as torturing slavery, when they find that what they took for their own will was a prompting from they knew not where, when they find that life is not good yet they cannot die: will they not turn and beg their maker to save them his way?

Let us try to understand the evangelist's brief account of what happened in the Nazareth synagogue.

"Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing," said Jesus, and went on with his divine talk. I trust we shall yet learn what the "gracious words" were; surely some who heard them still remember, for "all bare him witness, and wondered." How did they bear him witness? Must the narrator not mean that their hearts bore witness to the power of his presence: that the light of truth in his face lifted even those who did not know the truth, because the true something common to all hearts answered words that had found a way to the divine in them, so that they thought, "Never man spake like this man"? So they were drawn to him, all but ready to accept him, on their own terms, alas, not his. For a moment he seemed a true messenger, but his truth was not theirs; had he been what they took him for, he would have been no saviour. They were well disposed toward him, partly by mistake, and with a growing sense of being honoured by their tie to him they said, "Is not this Joseph's son?"

But the Lord knew what was in their hearts: the false notion on which they were almost ready to declare for him, and the final test their wisdom and prudence were about to put him to. He did not look like a prophet, having grown up among them with no credentials; they had a right to proof positive! They had heard of wonders he did elsewhere: why not first before their eyes? Who had a better claim, or knew him well enough to judge? His words were gracious, but words were nothing; he must *do* something wonderful! Without such proof Nazareth at least would never acknowledge him.

They would gladly have the honour of a true prophet as their townsman, as the son of Joseph might turn out to be; the credit of producing him would be theirs, and they would stand up for him before the world! That he was the Messiah was sheer absurdity: did they not all know his father, the carpenter? But he might be the prophet so many of the best in the nation were expecting. Let him do something wonderful!

They were not a gracious or good people, and the Lord saw that their thoughts were far from his. His mighty works were not meant to convince them of what they could not understand or accept: those who will not believe without signs could never believe worthily with any number of them, and none would be given. The works were to rouse the love and strengthen the faith of the meek and lowly in heart, people ready to come to the light and show they belonged to it. He knew how little the Nazarenes made of the words he read, and how low their hopes of the Messiah were even when they longed for him most; they did not hear the prophet while he read the prophet! A few little wonders, nothing to him, would prove him the Messiah *they* wanted, and they would cheer and rush to be his officers and soldiers in a triumphant campaign to drive the accursed Romans from their sacred land. Their Messiah would make the nation the Lord's redeemed, themselves his favourites, the tyrants of the world. Salvation from their sins was nowhere in their thoughts. They had heard him read his commission to heal the broken-hearted; they would rush to break hearts in his name. He would have no followers on false conceptions, whom wonders would delight but not improve. They were not yet people who needed just one change to be his. He had come to help them, and until they accepted it, they could give him none.

The Lord never did a mighty work to prove his mission, though he would do anything to help a growing faith in himself and his Father. He healed those whom healing would help more deeply, in whom suffering had done enough that its removal would carry its work on. He would not show his power to the Nazarenes, since it would only confirm their arrogance and ambition. Wonderful works can only nourish a faith already there; someone who believes without them *may* be granted a miracle. The Israelite indeed met with one: "You believe because I said I saw you under the fig tree? You will see the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man." Those who laughed at him were not allowed to see Jairus's daughter raised. Peter, when he wanted to walk on the water, was given permission and power. The widow received the prophet and was fed; the Syrian went to the prophet and was cured. In Nazareth, because of unbelief, he could lay his hands on only a few sick people; the rest had no leaning toward the truth to make room for a miracle. They soon showed it.

The Lord saw them about to demand a display of his power, and refused before they could ask.

Let me paraphrase his words: "You will quote me the proverb, 'Physician, heal yourself,' and demand that I do here what is said of me in Capernaum. But another proverb says no prophet is accepted in his own country, and unaccepted I do nothing wonderful. In the great famine Elijah was sent to a Sidonian, not to any of Israel's many widows, and Elisha cured Naaman the Syrian, not any of Israel's many lepers. Those fit to see signs and wonders are not always the prophet's kin."

The Nazarenes heard with indignation, and their wonder at his gracious words turned to bitter wrath. Their ugly religion rested on party spirit, exclusiveness and pride in imagining that God favoured them alone of all nations. To hint that God's glory might be shown to a stranger, and that a stranger might be fitter to receive it than a Jew, was a gross insult, and it came from a common man of their own town! "You're only a well-known carpenter's son, and you teach *us*? Are you saying God prefers Capernaum to Nazareth?" Despised by other Jews, they only grew prouder.

The *whole* synagogue, notice, rose in a fury. Such a fellow a prophet! Worse than the worst Gentile, a false Jew, a traitor to his God, a friend of the idol-worshipping Romans! Away with him! His townsmen led his rejection by his own people, and would have forestalled the crucifixion by those of Jerusalem. What! A Sidonian woman fitter to receive the prophet than any Jewish woman! A heathen worthier of being kept alive by a miracle in famine than a worshipper of the true God! A leper of Damascus less displeasing to God than the lepers of his chosen race! They had seen through him! Finding it useless to pose as a prophet among people who knew his breed, he had turned to insult them, not daring to try in his own city the tricks, done with Satan's help, that had fooled the idiots of Capernaum! Let him take the consequences! To the brow of the hill with him!

How could there be a miracle for such people? They were well satisfied with themselves, and

|         Nothing almost sees miracles
| But misery.

He whose love wants us to trust him prizes need, the upward look, the embryonic faith that believes where it can. Whoever seeks him, not with curious questions about whether the story might be true, but ready to accept him fully if he can, will find him; doubt will not keep us from help to believe. But if the questioner would stay disobedient even with his doubt gone, the Power of truth has no interest in convincing him. Why cast out a devil so the man can do the devil's work better? Childlike doubt, as it softens, feeds the seed of faith at its heart with all that was good in it, while wise and prudent unbelief is left to develop its own misery. The Lord could easily have convinced the Nazarenes he was the Messiah, but they would only have hardened into the core of an army to conquer the world. No miracle could have persuaded them to fight their own sins and bring their doing and desiring under the great Father's will; hearts like theirs cannot be truly convinced. A low man cannot believe a thousandth part of what a noble man can, or anything as a noble man does. They could believe in Jesus as their saviour from the Romans, but not from their sins, which they loved. The king of heaven offered them a share in his kingdom, but they were not poor in spirit, so it was not for them. They would gladly have inherited the earth, but they were not meek; the earth was for the lowly children of the perfect Father.

## THE HEIRS OF HEAVEN AND EARTH

*The passage:* Jesus opened his mouth and taught them: 'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven ... Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.' (Matthew v. 2, 3, 5.)

The Lord's words are the sower's seed. They must fall into our hearts to grow, watered by meditation and prayer and kept in the sun by obedience, so that they bear fruit for his gathering.

Disciples, that is, obedient hearers, with some experience of trying to live would at once understand the words in part, and as they obeyed and pondered, the meaning kept growing, as the apostles' writings show. So it will be with us, who need to understand all he said as much as those he first spoke to. Our obligation is greater, having two thousand years' experience of the kingdom's continued coming: it is not yet come, but is slowly drawing nearer.

The sermon on the mount seems the Lord's first free announcement of the kingdom's good news to a large assembly. He had been teaching disciples and messengers, and had already brought the glad tidings that his father was their father to others: Nathanael, Nicodemus, the woman of Samaria, everyone he cured or who cried to him for help. His epiphany was gradual, beginning, where it continues, with the individual. We cannot guess how many heard him now; he seems to have gone up the mount to speak from a more open place because of the crowd, and those who wished to be taught followed, with doubtless many drawn mainly by curiosity. Disciple or gazer, he addressed each one with ears to hear. Peter, Andrew, James and John are all we know as his disciples then; but though he spoke to those who came to learn, his words were eternal truths, essential to life for every child of his father, and so for all: whoever heard to obey was his disciple.

How different the good news must have sounded from what those awaiting the Messiah expected! Even the Baptist in prison listened for something else. The Lord sent him word by eye-witnesses of his doings, to remind him that God's thoughts and ways are not ours, and his design is other and better than men's expectation. His summary of his gifts ended with the preaching of good news to the poor. If John knew these doings, he had not seen them as the Lord's special mission; he must recognize them as the work the Son of God came to do, so divine as to be the very business of him in whom the Father was well pleased.

Wherein lay the goodness of the news? What in it made the poor glad? Why was his coming with such words the coming of the kingdom?

All good news from heaven is of essential *truth*, which involves duty and promises help to do it. There is no good news but of uplifting love, and no one can be lifted who will not rise; were God to try to raise his little ones without their consenting effort, they would fall from his foiled endeavour. He will carry us till we can walk, and when we are weary with walking; he will not carry us if we will not walk.

Very different is Jesus' good news from certain prevalent representations of the gospel, founded on the pagan notion that suffering offsets sin and culminating in the vile assertion that the suffering of an innocent man, just because he is perfect, satisfies the holy Father for his children's evil deeds. As a theory of atonement nothing could be worse intellectually, morally or spiritually, and announced as the gospel itself it is as monstrous as any Chinese dragon. However good men accept it as God-sent, it is evil news, dwarfing, enslaving, maddening, news of dreariest damnation to the child-heart. Elements of the gospel are doubtless mixed with it, but that does not make it his message. It can be good news only to those willing to be delivered from a God they fear but unable to accept the gospel of a perfect God to trust perfectly.

The good news of Jesus was just the news of the Father's thoughts and ways in the midst of his family. He told them that men's way of thinking for themselves and their children was not God's way for himself and his children; that the kingdom of heaven was founded, and must at length show itself founded, on principles very different from those of the world's kingdoms and families, 'the world' meaning that part of the Father's family which will not be ordered by him or even try to obey. The world's great, successful, honourable man may have and do as he pleases, his strength in money and men's praise; the greatest in the kingdom of heaven is the humblest, who serves his fellows most. Multitudes, even of those who look for the world to come, honour the proud and seek deliverance from this world's evils in this world's powers, as if God were God of the world to come only. The oppressed of the Lord's time looked for a Messiah to set their nation free, rich and strong; the oppressed of ours believe in money, knowledge, and the will of a people that needs only power to be in turn the oppressor. The Lord's first words here were: 'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.'

Not the proud, the greedy of distinction, those who hoard or lay down the law to their neighbours, those who condescend or shrug and shoot out the lip, have any share in the Father's kingdom. It resembles nothing in this world's kingdoms and deals with nothing that distinguishes their rulers except to repudiate it. The Son of God will favour no smallest ambition, even in him who leans on his bosom. The kingdom of God, the refuge of the oppressed, the real Utopia, the newest yet oldest Atlantis, the home of the children, will not admit the most miserable man who would rise above an equal in misery or look down on one more miserable. It is the home of perfect brotherhood. Its citizens of the new Jerusalem are the poor, the beggars in spirit, the unambitious and unselfish, who never despise men or seek their praise, who see nothing to admire in themselves and so cannot seek admiration, who give themselves away. They know their essential poverty: not poverty in friends, influence, acquirements or money, but in spirit, *feeling themselves poor creatures*, with nothing to be pleased with themselves for, knowing they need much to make life worth living and themselves fit to live. These the Lord calls blessed. When a man says, I am low and worthless, the gate of the kingdom begins to open, for the true enter there, and he has begun to know the truth about himself. Whatever he has attained he forgets; it is behind him; his business is with what he has not. The man proud of what he thinks he has reached has not reached it; he is proud only of himself, and imagines a cause. He who delights in contemplating what he has attained is already in the dirt of self-satisfaction, the gate closed and he outside. The child who, clinging to his Father, dares not think he has attained while not yet as his Father, has his Father's heart for his natural home. To find himself thinking himself above his fellows, or feel the least motion of self-satisfaction, would be a shuddering terror, a flash from the nether abyss. God is his life and lord, and his whole care is that his father be content with him. He would not choose to be less than his neighbour, but would choose him greater; he looks up to every man, and differently gifted, his neighbour is more than he. All come from the one mighty father: shall he judge which live thought of God is greater? In thus turning his back on himself he has no thought of saintliness, only of his father and his brethren. To such a child heaven's best secrets are open. He clambers about the Father's throne unrebuked; his back is ready for the smallest heavenly playmate, his arms a refuge for any blackest little lost kid of the Father's flock, which he will carry up the very steps of the great white throne to lay on the Father's knees. For the glory of that Father is not in knowing himself God but in giving himself away, in creating and redeeming and glorifying his children.

The man who does not house self has room to be his real self, God's eternal idea of him. By the creative power present in him each moment, he *is* and lives eternally. He thinks nothing of ruling or surpassing, sees no good in being greater than another, and wishes himself other than he is only to be more what God made him for, the highest willing of God's will. His brother's wellbeing is essential to his bliss; to stand higher in God's favour than his brother would make him miserable. He would lift every brother to the Father's embrace. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they are of the same spirit as God, and the kingdom of heaven is theirs by nature.

'Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth' expresses the same principle: the same law holds in the earth as in the kingdom of heaven. Has the creator of the ends of the earth ceased to rule it his way because his rebellious children have so long, to their hurt, vainly tried to rule it theirs? The earth as God sees it, and as those of the kingdom see it, is very good, fit for the meek to inherit; and one day they shall, not as men of the world count inheritance but as its maker and owner has from the first counted it. So different are the two ways that one of the meek may enjoy his possession while one of the proud selfishly walls him out from the spot he loves best.

The meek do not assert or defend themselves, never dream of avenging themselves or returning anything but good for evil, and do not think it their business to take care of themselves. The meek man may take much thought, but not for himself. He builds no exclusive wall and shuts out no honest neighbour. He will not always serve his neighbour's wish, but always his good, and his service must be true. Self shall be no umpire in his affairs: man's consciousness of himself is but a shadow, which vanishes in the light of a real presence. His nature lies open to the Father of men, and as it were empty to every good impulse. No bristling importance or fancied rights and wrongs crowd his house; it is left free for angels. Abandoned thus to the truth, he receives the many souls of the visible world, lights from the father of lights, as the sparks from the gleaming river dip into the flowers in Dante's unperfected vision, and by them he inherits the earth he was created to inherit, possessing it as his father made him capable of possessing and the earth of being possessed. Because he is meek his eye is single; he sees things as God sees them: to confront creation with pure eyes is to possess it.

How little he can make his own who would ravish all! The man who would grasp any portion of the earth by excluding others from the space he calls his only befools himself; even the bread he has swallowed cannot truly be his. There is no such power of possessing as he arrogates, no such sense of having as the shadow he has conceived in his degenerate imagination. The real owner of his demesne is the pedlar passing his gate, a divine soul receiving the sweetnesses that all the greed of the so-counted possessor cannot keep within his walls: they overflow the coping to the footfarer. The air's motions and the sounds and odours of those imprisoned spaces are the earnest of a possession his growing power of possessing is ready for, and it does not interfere with the claim of the man who calls them his: each has them as far as he is able to possess them. For possession is determined by the kind and scope of the power of possessing, and the earth has a fourth dimension of which the mere owner of its soil knows nothing.

The child of the maker is naturally the inheritor. But if he tries to possess as a house what his father made an organ, will he succeed? Or if he nestles in a corner of its case, will he oust the Lord of its manifold harmony, who sits regnant and draws with 'volant touch' from the child's house the liege homage of its rendered wealth? Such is the poverty left to all who think to have and hold after the corrupt fancies of a greedy self.

We cannot see the world as God means it except as our souls are meek; only in meekness are we its inheritors. Meekness alone makes the spiritual retina pure to receive God's things as they are, mingling no imperfection or impurity of its own. A thing so beheld that it conveys to me the divine thought issuing in its form is mine; nothing can be mine but by its mediation between God and my life. The man dull enough to insist that a thing is his because he bought it should consider that all law, justice and goodwill combined cannot keep it his, while not even death can take the world from the man who possesses it as his maker cares he should. That man leaves it but carries it with him; the other carries with him only its loss. Its *ownness* to him was only the changes he could make in it and how near he could bring it to his body. That body the earth now possesses; is that the fine of the great buyer of land? In the soul of the meek the earth remains an endless possession, his because he who made it is his, by his divine relation to him who sent it forth as a tree sends out its leaves. To inherit the earth is to grow ever more alive to the presence in it of him who is the life of men. How far one may advance in this while in the body depends on the meekness he attains there; but it may be, as Frederick Denison Maurice, the servant of God, thought while with us, that the new heavens and the new earth are those in which we now live, righteously inhabited by the meek with deeper-opened eyes. What if the meek among the dead possess it even now! But I do not care to speculate. It is enough that the man who refuses to assert himself, seeks no recognition by men, leaves the care of his life to the Father and busies himself with the Father's will, shall find himself by and by at home in the Father's house with all the Father's property his.

Which is the richer possessor of the world: the man with a thousand houses who, his money spent, would have no refuge, or the man with none of his own but ten where his knock would rouse jubilation, and for whose need a hundred would sacrifice comfort? Which possessed the earth, king Agrippa or tent-maker Paul?

Who really possesses a book: the man who has the first edition and every later one, shows visitors now this binding, now that, with possessor-pride, and can produce from a secret shrine the author's manuscript; or the man who cherishes one little, coverless, untitled, thumbed copy, which he takes on solitary walks and broods over in his chamber, always finding something new, a live companion?

For what makes the thing a book? Is it not that it has a soul, the mind in it of him who wrote it? So only life can possess it. The dead possess their dead only to bury them.

Does not he who loves and understands his book possess it as the other cannot? So the world may be possessed: as a volume unread, or as 'the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life'; as a book of words from the mouth of God, or only its golden-clasped covers; as an incarnation of God, or a house built to sell. The Lord loved the world and its things, not as the men of the world love them, but finding his father in everything that came from his father's heart.

The same spirit, then, is required for possessing the kingdom of heaven and inheriting the earth, since one Power is the informing life of both. If we are the Lord's, we possess the kingdom of heaven and so inherit the earth. How many who bear his name would have it otherwise, possessing the earth and inheriting the kingdom! They fill churches and chapels on Sundays; anywhere suits for the worship of Mammon.

Yet earth as well as heaven may be largely possessed even now.

Two men walk abroad together. To one the world yields thought after thought of delight; he sees heaven and earth embrace, feels an indescribable presence over and in them, and will break into song afterward in his chamber. To the other, oppressed by his poverty or ruminating how to make much more, the glory of the Lord is only a warm summer day; it enters no window of his soul, for in the very temple of God he looks for no God. Nor need there be two men: one *subject* to changing mood will see the same world of the same glad creator quite diversely. Alas for us if it changed as we change, if it lost its meaning when we lose faith! Worry for a morrow that may never come, dread of the death that divides yet works for endless companionship, anger with one we love, will cloud the radiant morning. At evening, having bethought ourselves and returned to him who feeds the ravens, watches the dying sparrow, and says to his children 'Love one another,' the sunset is glad over us, the western sky as refulgent as the Father's court when a sinner has repented. We mourned in the twilight of our little faith, but, having sent away our sin, the glory of God's heaven over his darkening earth has comforted us.

## SORROW THE PLEDGE OF JOY

*The passage:* Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. (Matthew v. 4.)

Grief, sorrow, pain of heart, mourning is no wall between man and God. It does not block God's light from a man's soul; the Lord congratulates those who mourn. There is no evil in sorrow. It is not an essential good, a good in itself like love, but it mixes with any good and opens the heart's door to any good. More sorrowful than joyful people are always standing at the everlasting doors into the presence of the Most High. Joy is by nature more divine than sorrow: man must sorrow and God shares it, but in himself God is not sorrowful, and the glad creator never made man for sorrow, which is only a stormy strait on the way to his ocean of peace; he "makes the joy the last in every song." Still, a man in sorrow is generally far nearer God than a man in joy: gladness may make him forget to give thanks, but misery drives him to prayer. For we *are* not yet; we are only *becoming*. A day will dawn when every moment lifts our hearts Godward and we will hardly need to raise them. For now the house of prayer has two door-keepers, and Sorrow is quicker to open than her grandson Joy.

The happy child runs farther afield; the hurt child turns for home. The weeper sits down by the gate, and the lord of life draws near from within. God does not love sorrow, yet he is glad to see a man sorrowful, because then the man leaves his heavenward door on the latch, and God can enter to part him from whatever makes the sorrow a welcome sight. When Ephraim bemoans himself, he is a pleasant child. Sorrow is such good medicine, so powerful to kill the moths that devour the human heart, that the Lord congratulates a man on his sadness. Grief is ill-favoured, but she is Love's own child, and her mother loves her.

The promise to mourners is not *the kingdom of heaven* but that their mourning shall end. To mourn is not to fight evil, only to miss what is good, so it is not an essential heavenly condition like poorness of spirit or meekness. No one will carry mourning into heaven; if he does, it will soon turn to joy, or to redemptive action, which leads to joy.

Mourning is a canker-bitten blossom on the rose-tree of love. Is there any real mourning that does not have love for its root? Men mourn because they love. All human feeling is fashioned from love: love shaped by faith is hope; love shaped by wrong is anger, though pure of sin; love invaded by loss is grief.

The garment of mourning is most often a winding-sheet; the death of the loved is the chief cause of the world's mourning. The Greek word used here generally means *those who mourn for the dead*. It is not used only so in the New Testament, nor do I think it is here: there are griefs far sorer than death and harder to comfort, even for God. Still, it may please us that the promise may apply especially to those who mourn because their loved ones are beyond sight and the reach of their cry. For divine love their sorrow is a small matter, easily met. The father whose elder son is with him but whose younger is in a far country wasting his substance in riotous living is unspeakably more to be pitied, and harder to help, than a father whose two sons both lie in the sleep of death.

Much of what is called comfort is worthless, and I would not care to comfort anyone who could be comforted by it. Time may bring forgetfulness, new scenes may lead thought from the vanished, new loves may bury grief in the grave of the old; such consolation could never have crossed the mind of Jesus. Would The Truth call a man blessed because his pain would eventually leave him, no better off than before and certainly poorer, with the beloved, the sorrow and the love behind the sorrow all gone? Blessed of God because restored to an absence of sorrow? Such a God would be fitly adored only where no heart worshipped in spirit and in truth.

Someone may say: "The Lord means, of course, that the mourners' comfort will be the restoration of what they have lost. He means, 'Blessed are you although you mourn, for your sorrow will be turned into joy.'"

Happy are those whom nothing less than restoration will comfort! But would restoration be comfort enough for the heart of Jesus to give? Was ever love so deep and pure as to be good enough for him? And if the parted two had so loved, would the mere return of what he once had be reason enough to call the man blessed now, in the midnight of his loss, knowing nothing of his deliverance? To call a man *blessed* in sorrow because of something to be given him surely implies something better than he had before. *Blessed* is a strong word, and in the mouth of Jesus means all it can mean; a merely temporary interruption of his blessedness would hardly justify it. Can his saying mean less than: "Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted with a bliss well worth all the pain of the medicinal sorrow"? And surely the man is blessed *because* of his mourning, not in spite of it: it is part of the Lord's ground, the present means by which the consolation becomes possible. I do not think the Lord would call a man blessed merely for going to be restored to a former, far from perfect bliss. He congratulated the mourners on their grief because he saw the glory of the coming comfort and the immeasurably greater joy to which the sorrow was leading them. By *greater* I do not mean *other*: I mean the same bliss, divinely enlarged and purified, passed again through the hands of the creative Perfection. The Lord knew the whole history of love and loss, and saw the winged Love discrowning the skeleton Fear throughout the universe. God's comfort must be larger than man's grief, or there would be gaps in his Godhood; mere restoration would leave a barren hiatus in the development of his children.

But alas, what a pinched hope most who call themselves the Lord's disciples draw from their notions of his teaching! No wonder they dread death as the one thing to avoid and lament for ever; who would leave even the windowless hut of sorrow for the poor mean place they imagine the Father's house to be? Many do not even expect to know their friends there, or tell one face from another in the holy assembly. A fine saviour their Jesus is, to hold out such a word of darkness to our world of sorrow! Is the Lord such as they believe him? "Good-bye, then, good Master!" cries the human heart. "I thought you could save me, but you cannot. If you save the part of us that can sin and let the part that can love sink into hopeless perdition, you are not he who should come; I look for another! Your father is not my father. Ah, to whom shall we go? This Jesus has not the words of eternal life, and the universe is dark as chaos! O father, your son is good, but we need a greater. Your children will never love you under this new law, that they are not to love one another as you love them!" How does he love God who cannot believe that God loves every throb of the human heart toward another? Did the Lord not die that we should love one another and be one with him and the Father? And can there be oneness without difference, or is knowing difference not essential to the deepest love? Are all to have the same face? Then why faces at all? If heaven's plains are crowded for ever with one face repeated, monotony will turn bliss ghastly in a moment; why not featureless ivory spheres instead? Or are we to start afresh with countenances all new, each beautiful, each a revelation of the infinite father, each distinct and all blending toward a full revealing, but never again the dear old faces, each with its whole story, that at the mere thought draw our hearts out of our bosoms? Were they created only to become dear and be destroyed? Is it in wine only that the old is better? Would the Son of Man congratulate the mourner on such a prospect? It is a shame that such monstrous unbelief should call for argument.

A heaven without human love would be inhuman, and still more undivine, to desire; no one made in God's image ought to. The lord of life died that his father's children might grow perfect in love, loving their brothers and sisters as he loved them: must they then cease to know one another? To annihilate the past of our earthly embodiment would crush under an iron heel the very idea of tenderness, human or divine.

We shall all doubtless be changed, but in what direction? To something less, which is degradation? To something that is not we, which is annihilation? Or to something more we, a further development of the divine germ of us, holding all we ever were and must become? What constitutes a man? Not what he thinks he is, nor what his friends at any moment think him. In which of his changing moods is he more himself? Does any lover love so little as to desire *no* change in the beloved, nothing to bring her closer to the indwelling ideal? In the loveliest there is some little thing unlike her, in which a change would make her not less but more herself. Is it not the essence of the Christian hope that we shall be changed from much bad to all good? A wife who would keep every inconsistency in her husband's still partly harmonious character does not love well enough for the kingdom of heaven. If his imperfections are essential to the individuality she loves, she may be sure that were he restored to her as she wished, she would soon love him less, perhaps not at all; for whoever does not love perfection will not keep constant in loving. Fault is not lovable; only the good in which the alien fault dwells makes it seem so. Nor do a man's peculiarities make him beloved, but the essential humanity under them. They may make him interesting, and where not offensive may be loved for the man's sake, but in themselves they are of smallest account.

We must not confuse peculiarity with diversity: diversity is from God, peculiarity from man. The real man is the divine idea of him, the man God had in view when he began to send him out of thought into thinking, the man he is perfecting by casting out what is not he and developing what is. Among God's real, that is ideal, men the diversity is infinite: he never repeats his creations, and each child's difference is lovable. In his children God gives an analysis of himself that will never be exhausted. It is the original God-idea of the individual that will at length be given, without spot or blemish, into the arms of love.

Such, surely, is the heart of the comfort the Lord will give those whose love makes them mourn, and their present blessedness is the expectation of the time when the true lover finds the restored the same as the lost, with precious differences: what was unlike the true self gone or going, the loveliest lovelier still, the restored not merely more than the lost but more the person lost than he or she was. For all that made the person lovable and essential will be more present, being more developed.

Whether or not the Lord was thinking specially of those who mourn for the dead, as I think he was, he surely does not limit the comfort to them; his father has perfect comfort for every human grief. Out upon those miserable theologians who, instead of taking his words into a generous heart to bear truth a hundredfold, pare them till the life is gone, and still offer the dead letter as a creator's comfort to the sore hearts he made! Some, "as if they were God's spies," say the Lord blesses only those who mourn for their sins. What honest man would make a promise that was all reservation but for one unmentioned point? Assuredly those who mourn for their sins will be gloriously comforted, but so will all who are bowed down with any grief. Sorrow is not a part of life but a wind blowing through it, to winnow and cleanse. Where shall the woman go whose child is dying, or whose husband has forsaken her, but to her Father in heaven? Must she keep away until she is sorry for her sins? How could she care to be delivered from them, or accept any comfort, who believed her child lost for ever? Would the Lord have her cheerful because her sins were forgiven? Would such a mother be a woman of whom the saviour of men might have been born? If a woman forgets the child she bore, how shall she remember the father she came from? The Lord came to heal the broken-hearted; therefore he said, "Blessed are the mourners." Hope in God, mother, for the deadest of your children, even for him who died in his sins. You may wait long, but he will be found; perhaps you yourself will be sent to find him. Rest your hope not on excuses your love would make for him, nor on any theological or sacerdotal quibble, but on him who created him and loves him more than you. God will excuse him better than you can, and his uncovenanted mercy is larger than his ministers'. Shall not *the* Father do *his* best to find his prodigal, the good shepherd his lost sheep? The angels in his presence know the Father and watch for the prodigal. You shall be comforted.

One more phase of our mourning for the dead I must consider, the pain within all our pain: the recurring pangs over things we said or did, or failed to say or do, while we were with the departed. The life that would give itself to the other aches at not having given what it might. We cast ourselves at their feet crying, Forgive me, my heart's own! but they are pale with distance and seem not to hear. They may be longing after us in like agony of love, but know better, or are more assured than we, that we shall be comforted together by and by.

Consider, brother, sister, the splendour of God, and answer: would he be perfect if his restitution of all things gave us no chance to declare our bitter grief and shame for the past, to sob, I am your slave, and make amends? Yet when the moment comes, one look in the eyes may be enough, for we shall know one another even as God knows us. Like the prodigal's purposed words in the parable, our confession may hardly find place; heart may so speak to heart as to forget there were such things. Mourner, hope in God, and comfort where you can, and the lord of mourners will comfort you the sooner. Your very severity with yourself may already have moved him to take your part.

To those who mourn lost love, from whom a friend, brother or lover has turned away: what shall I cry to them? You too shall be comforted, only listen. Whatever selfishness clouds your mourning love must be burned out of it, by extreme pain if need be. Your loss may have come from what in your love was not love; anyhow, you must suffer for its defect until it is supplied. God will not, like the unjust judge, avenge you to escape your crying, and no crying will make him comfort your selfishness. He will not make you incapable of loving truly. He despises neither your love, though mingled with selfishness, nor the suffering that springs from both; he will disentangle the selfishness and burn it. His cure for both is to make you love more and more truly, not with the love of love but with love for the person whose lost love you bemoan; for the love of love is love of yourself. Begin to love as God loves and your grief will ease, but wait his time for comfort. What he will do for you, only he knows; you may never know what he will do, only what he has done, which was too good for you to know except by receiving it. The moment you are capable of it, it will be yours.

One thing is clear about every trouble: the natural way with it is straight to the Father's knee. He is father *for* his children, else why did he make himself their father? Would you not, mourner, rather be comforted in the one eternal fashion, the child by the father, than in some poor temporary way that leaves you exposed to your worst enemy, your own unreclaimed self, whose one good point is that he always brings you to sorrow?

The Lord has come to wipe away our tears, and will do it as soon as he can; until then he would have them flow without bitterness, so he tells us it is blessed to mourn, because of the comfort on its way. Accept his comfort now, and so prepare for what is at hand. He is getting you ready, but you must work with him, or he will never be done. He *must* have you pure in heart, eager after righteousness, a very child of your father in heaven.

## GOD\'S FAMILY

*The passage:* Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the peace-makers, for they will be called the children of God. (Matthew v. 8, 6, 9.)

The deepest cry in man has always been to see God. It was the cry of Moses and Job, of psalmist and prophet, and to it a coming answer was faintly heard. In the fullness of time the Son proclaims that a certain class of men shall behold the Father: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." He who always saw God, and sees him now, says, "Be pure, and you also shall see him." Seeing God was the Lord's own eternal happiness, so he knew that the essential bliss of the creature is to behold the creator's face. In that face lies the mystery of a man's own nature; only one who knows God a little can understand himself or his fellow. The blessed in Dante's Paradise read each other's thoughts in God: looking to him, they find their neighbour. All the creature needs or can see or know is the face of him from whom he came. Without it he will never rest; with it, existence remains a mystery and an awe, but no longer a dismay. To know that one exists, unable either to continue or to cease, must be sheer terror to any soul alive enough to feel it, unless it also knows the Power by which it exists as one with it. The man who feels that Power in him loses loneliness, anxiety and fear; he is no longer an orphan astray on the cold waste of a helpless consciousness. "Father," he cries, "hold me fast to your creating will, that I may know myself its willed embodiment and rejoice without trembling. Let me know I am your child, born to obey you. Do you not justify your deed to yourself by your tenderness toward me, and to your child by revealing his claim on you, since you parted him from yourself and he depends wholly on you? Father, you are in me, else I could not be in you, and my soul would have no house to dwell in nor any world to walk in."

These truths are, I believe, necessities of fact, but a man does not always know them. Yet he must know these spiritual relations to his Origin, and have them always present and potent, the all-pervading substance of his consciousness. To have seen them once is not always to see them. Often the cares of this world, which have no right to any part in our thought (since either they are unreasonable or God is imperfect), so blind the soul's eyes that it sees the eternally true only as something that ought to be true, not must be; true perhaps in thought but not in fact. Our senses, filled with passing things, add to the doubt. Had we once seen God face to face, would we not be sure of him for ever? We have had only glimpses. And if we had seen him and then become impure of heart, if that fearful thought is possible, we would no longer believe we had ever beheld him, for a sin-beclouded soul could never recall a vision whose essential truth was its only proof. None but the pure in heart see God; only the growing-pure hope to see him. Even those who saw the Lord, the express image of God's person, did not see God. They saw only Jesus, and only the outside Jesus or a little more. Not being pure in heart, they saw him with their eyes but not with the eyes that alone can see God, which were not yet born in them. Neither the eyes of the resurrection body nor those of unembodied spirits can see God; only the eyes of that eternal something of God's very essence, thought-eyes, truth-eyes, love-eyes. Nor is it because we are created and he uncreated that we cannot see him. If he took a shape and we saw it, we would not thereby see God. Even if we were told it was a shape of God and believed it, but did not see the *Godness* and so could not recognize him without being told, we would see only the tabernacle he dwelt in for the moment, not the presence that could only be God.

To see God is to stand on the highest point of created being. Only when we see God, not in some partial, passing embodiment but as the abiding presence, do we stand on our own mountain-top, the height of existence he has given us and is leading us up to. That is the end of our creation. This truth is at the heart of everything, and no language will compass it. Nor shall we ever know God perfectly, any more than we shall absolutely know any man, woman or child; yet we may know him as we never can know a human being, or ourselves. We not only may but must so know him, and it can never be until we are pure in heart. Then we shall know him with an ever-growing knowledge, infinite.

"What is it, then, to be pure in heart?"

I answer that it is not necessary to define this purity or have a clear form of it in mind; to know perfectly what purity of heart is, were that possible, would not be to be pure in heart.

"How then am I to try after it? Can I do so without knowing what it is?"

Though you know no definition of purity, you know enough to begin to be pure. You do not know what a man is, yet you know how to make his acquaintance, perhaps even win his friendship. Your brain does not know what purity is, but your heart has some acquaintance with it, and the brain's seeking may even hinder the heart in deepening that friendship. A man must already be pure to know what purity is; but whoever can ask the question knows enough to begin to become pure. If you determine this moment to start, your conscience will tell you where to begin. If you answer, "My conscience says nothing definite," I reply, "You are only playing with your conscience. Determine, and it will speak."

If you care to see God, be pure. If you will not, you will grow more and more impure, and instead of seeing God will find yourself face to face with a vast inane, filled by a single inhabitant, that devouring monster, your own false self. If you do not care even for that, there is a Power that will not have it so, a Love that will make you care by the consequences of not caring.

You who seek purity and want others to seek it, do not labour on the stony ground of their intellect, explaining what purity is. Give their imagination the one pure man; call up their conscience to witness against their own deeds; urge them to resolve to be pure. At a soul's first endeavour toward her, Purity begins to draw near, asking admittance, and he will never need to stop and ask what is required next: the demands of the indwelling Purity will always run ahead of his slow-labouring obedience.

If someone says, "Alas, I am not pure in heart; I am shut out from this blessing and shall never see God!" here is another word from the same eternal heart, making his grief its own consolation. We would be unhappy men if God were the God only of the perfected and not of the growing. Blessed, says the Lord of the not yet pure, are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. Filled with righteousness, they are pure; pure, they shall see God.

From the beginning, long before the Lord appeared, his spirit worked on earth for righteousness; in the fullness of time he came in person to fulfil all righteousness. He came to his own, who shared his mind and hungered and thirsted after righteousness. They should be filled!

To hunger and thirst after anything implies a sore personal need, a passion. Those who hunger and thirst after righteousness seek with their whole nature the design of that nature, and nothing less will satisfy them. They long to send their sins away and be clean and blessed by their absence, in a word to become God's men; for with sin gone, all the rest is good. The revolting legal fiction of imputed righteousness arose in no such heart. What they desire is righteousness itself, God's righteousness, rightness in their own being, in heart and brain and hands. Of such men were Nathanael, in whom was no guile; perhaps Nicodemus, though he came by night; and Zacchaeus. The temple could not deliver them, but by their very futility its observances developed desires they could not meet and made them hunger the more for genuine righteousness. The Lord must bring them this bread from heaven. With him, the live original rightness, in their hearts, they must speedily become righteous; with that Love as their friend, the root and flower of things, they would strive vigorously as well as hunger eagerly. Love is the father of righteousness, which could neither exist nor be hungered after without it. Even the lord of righteousness could not live without the Father in him. Every heart was created for and can live only in and upon love eternal, perfect, pure and unchanging; and love necessitates righteousness. In how many souls has the very thought of a real God waked a longing to be different, pure, right! That a soul can grow dissatisfied with itself and desire a change reveals God as an essential part of its being. The soul knows it cannot set itself right: a need has arisen in it for which it can generate no supply. A presence higher than itself must have caused that need, and a greater power must supply it, for the soul knows its very lack is of something greater than itself.

But the primal need of the human soul is greater still; the longing after righteousness is only one manifestation of it. The need itself is that of *existence not self-existent* for the consciousness of the presence of the causing Self-existent. It is man's need of God. A moral, that is, a human, spiritual being must either be God or one with God. This begins to show itself when a man feels he cannot cast out what he hates or be what he loves. That he hates and loves thus is because God is in him, but he finds he has not enough of God. His awakening strength shows itself in his sense of weakness, for only strength can know itself weak; it is a little strength that longs for more, infant righteousness that hungers after righteousness.

To every soul dissatisfied with itself comes this word, at once rousing and consoling, from the Power that lives and makes him live: in his hungering and thirsting he is blessed, for he shall be filled. His hunger is the divine pledge of the divine meal. The more he hungers, the more blessed he is, and the more room there is in him for what God is even more eager to give than he to have. As with the body, so the soul hungers after what belongs to its nature: a man hungers after righteousness because he was made for it. His nature is good and desires more good. So no one need be discouraged that he is empty of good, for what is emptiness but room to be filled? The emptiness that desires good is itself good. Even if the hunger partly springs from a desire for self-respect, it is not therefore *all* false; a man could not even be ashamed of himself without some "feeling sense" of the beauty of rightness. By divine degrees he will grow sick of himself and desire righteousness with a pure hunger, as a man longs to eat what is good without thinking of the strength it will restore.

To be filled with righteousness will be to forget even righteousness in the bliss of being righteous, that is, a child of God. The thought of it will vanish in the fact. A creature who is just what he is meant to be never thinks what he is; he *is* that thing, and it is no longer outside him to be contemplated or desired.

God made man and woke in him the hunger for righteousness; the Lord came to enlarge it. The first effect of his words must be to make the hungry and thirsty long yet more. If their passion grows into a despairing sense of the unattainable, let them remember that the Lord congratulates the hungry and thirsty, so sure is he they will one day be satisfied. Their hunger is precious, though it would be bad to keep it unappeased: it springs from the lack but also from the love of good, and makes the lack possible to supply. Happy, then, you pining souls! The food you want is the very thing the Lord came to bring! You shall have righteousness enough, none to spare, yet enough to overflow upon every man. See how he goes on filling his disciples, John, Peter, James and Paul, with righteousness from within! What honest soul, interpreting the servant by the master and unbiased by the tradition of those who would shut the kingdom of heaven against men, can doubt what Paul means by "the righteousness which is of God by faith"? He was taught of Jesus Christ through his words, and whoever does not understand Jesus will never understand his apostles. What righteousness could Paul mean but that which the Lord would have men hunger after, the very righteousness with which God is righteous? Those who hunger and thirst after such righteousness only shall become pure in heart and shall see God.

If your hunger seems long in being filled, it is well that it should. But what if your righteousness tarries because your hunger is not eager? Some sit long at the table because their desire is slow; they eat as if to say, We need no food. In spiritual things, increasing desire is the sign that satisfaction is nearer. But it is better to hunger after righteousness for ever than to dull the sense of lack with the husks of the Christian scribes and lawyers: whoever trusts in the atonement instead of in the father of Jesus Christ fills his fancy with the chimeras of a vulgar legalism, not his heart with the righteousness of God.

Hear another like word. The Lord assures us that the Father hears the cries of his elect, those who worship him in spirit and in truth: "Shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him?" What can they keep crying for but righteousness? He allows that God seems to delay, but assures us he will answer speedily. Even now God must be answering their prayers; increasing hunger is the best sign of it. For some divine reason they are not yet to know it in themselves; but the day must come when we shall be righteous as he is righteous, when no word of his will be misunderstood for lack of our righteousness and no unrighteousness will hide the Father's face.

These two promises, of seeing God and of being filled with righteousness, hold directly between the individual and his father in heaven. The next holds between a man and God as the God of other men also, the father of the whole family in heaven and earth: "Blessed are the peace-makers, for they shall be called the children of God."

Those on their way to see God, growing pure in heart through hunger and thirst after righteousness, are indeed God's children; but the Lord specially calls his children those who, on the way home, are peace-makers in the travelling company, for in any family those are specially children who make peace with and among the rest. The true idea of the universe is the whole family in heaven and earth. Not all earth's children are good, and it is far from a true family; yet the life-germ at the root of the world is its relation to God the father of men. The church, whose idea is the purer family within the more mixed, growing like leaven in meal (though alas not easily told from the world it would change), is one passing means of developing this germ in the children's consciousness. For the same purpose the divine family is made up of numberless human families, in which men may learn to love one another. God would make the world a true family, and the primary necessity of any family is peace. Many a human family is no family, and the world none yet, for lack of peace. Wherever peace grows, it counteracts disruption. The one question about any family is whether peace or strife is increasing, for peace alone lets the binding grass-roots of life, love and justice, spread through what would else be a wind-blown heap of drifting sand. The peace-makers quiet the world's winds and tend the interlacing grass-roots, spinning uniting cords and weaving supporting bands. For truth's sake they serve the individual, the family, the world, the great family of heaven and earth: its true children, and fellow-workers with God in creating the family and perfecting his father-idea. They radiate peace, welcome love but do not seek it, and provoke no jealousy. They are children of God, for like him they would be one with his creatures. His eldest son, his very likeness, was the first of the family peace-makers. Preaching peace to those far off and those near, he stood undefended in the turbulent crowd of his fellows, and only over his dead body did his brothers begin to come together in the peace that will not be broken. He rose again; his peace-making brothers, like him, are dying to sin; and the evil children have not yet made their father hate or their elder brother flinch.

Those whose influence divides, turning men's hearts away from each other, make themselves children of the evil one: born of God, they turn from him and adopt the devil as father. They set their God-born life against God's whole creative, redemptive purpose, obstructing the first-born's one prayer, that the children may be one with him in the Father. The sowers of strife contend ceaselessly against the heart-end of creation, that for which the Son gave himself utterly, and with all the other powers of evil do their part to make the world, which God's love holds together, one heaving mass of dissolution. But they labour in vain. Through that mass, that it may cohere, move the children of God, the lights of the world, the peace-makers, guided in an inexplicable dance of prophetic harmony, ever weaving the web of the world's history after a pattern known only to him who orders their ways. But for them the world would have no history; it would vanish, a cloud of windborne dust. As they share his labour, they shall share the joy of God in victorious endeavour. Blessed are the peace-makers, for they shall be called the children of God: *the* children, because they set the Father on the throne of the Family.

The main practical difficulty, for some peace-makers at least, is how to behave toward the undoers of peace. Perhaps the most potent of these are not the powers of the visible church who care for canon and dogma more than truth, and for the church more than Christ, who take uniformity for unity and strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, not knowing what spirit they are of. Nor, I imagine, are the party-liars of politics the worst foes of divine unity, ungenerous and often knowingly false as they are to opponents. I think the worst must rather be the babbling liars of the social circle, and the faithless brothers and unloving sisters of disunited families. But why inquire? Every self-assertion, every self-seeking however small or grotesque, is a separating force, and they are multitudinous because mean souls so passionately want to seem great and feel important. If they cannot attract the attention of the great-little world, or even become "the cynosure of neighbouring eyes," they will try to make a party in whatever sphere they can call their own, each revolving on his own axis, centring a private whirlpool of human monads. To draw such a following, the partisan of self will sometimes gnaw asunder the most precious bonds and poison whole broods of infant loves. Such real schismatics go about, if not inventing evil, rejoicing in iniquity, mishearing, misrepresenting, paralyzing affection, separating hearts. Theirs is the calling of the strife-maker, the child of the dividing devil. They belong to *the perfidious*, whom Dante places in the lowest infernal gulf. Many a woman who now imagines herself standing well in morals and religion will find herself at last just such a child of the devil; and her misery will be the hope of her redemption.

But it is not for her sake that I write this: would such a woman recognize her likeness if I drew it as closely as words could? I am rather groping for light on how to behave toward her kind. Are we to treat known liars and strife-makers as children of the devil or not? Are we to turn away and refuse to acknowledge them, rousing an ignorant strife of tongues about our conduct? Are we guilty of connivance when silent about the ambush from which we know the wicked arrow is shot? Are we to call the traitor to account, or give warning in some way? I have no answer. Each must carry the question to the Light of the World. To what purpose is God's spirit promised to those who ask, if not to help them order their way aright?

One thing is plain, that we must love the strife-maker; another nearly as plain, that if we do not love him we must leave him alone, for without love there is no peace-making and words only cause more strife. Kindness neither hurts nor compromises; it has many phases, and the fitting form may avoid offence, and must avoid untruth.

We must not fear what man can do to us, but commit our way to the Father of the Family. We must not be anxious to defend ourselves; and if not ourselves, because God is our defence, then why our friends, who have the same defence? Commit your friend's cause to him who judges righteously. Be ready to bear testimony for your friend as you would be to take the blow struck at him, but do not plunge into a nest of scorpions to rescue his handkerchief. Be true to him and show you love and honour him; but defence may dishonour, for men may say, What! is your friend's esteem so small? He is unwise who drags a rich veil from a cactus-bush.

Whatever our relation with any peace-breaker, our mercy must be always within call; and against an indignation too strong to be pure, it may help to remember that anyone reviled for righteousness' sake is blessed.

## THE REWARD OF OBEDIENCE

*The passage:* Blessed are the merciful, for they will obtain mercy. Blessed are those persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when men revile and persecute you and falsely say every kind of evil against you for my sake; rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for your reward in heaven is great, since so they persecuted the prophets before you. (Matthew v. 7, 10, 11, 12.)

Mercy cannot get in where mercy does not go out; the outgoing makes way for the incoming. God takes humanity's part against the man, who must treat others as he would have God treat him. The Lord says that if we forgive men their trespasses our heavenly father will forgive ours, and if we do not, he will not. In the prophecy of the Son of man's judgment he represents himself as saying that what we have done to the least of his brethren, we have done to him.

But the demand for mercy is far less for the sake of the man who needs mercy than of the man who must show it: it matters little whether his neighbour is merciful to him, but it is life or death whether he is merciful to his neighbour. The greatest mercy to a man is to make him merciful, so if he will not be, God's mercy must compel him. In the parable of the king taking account of his servants, the unmerciful debtor is delivered to the tormentors until he pays all he owes. The king had forgiven him, but since he would not pass the forgiveness on to his neighbour, the only way to repay in kind, the king withdraws it. If we do not forgive men, our trespasses remain; for how can God send away a sin that a man insists on keeping? God is merciful, and we must be: there is no blessedness except in being like God, and it would be unmerciful to leave us unmerciful. The reward of the merciful is that by their mercy they become able to receive the mercy of God, indeed God himself, who is Mercy.

To draw men to taste and see, the Lord links reward with righteousness. He would have men love righteousness, but how can they without knowing it, or keep loving it without growing knowledge of it? To draw them toward it, and to encourage them against the disappointments of endeavour, he tells them simply that in doing it there is great reward. No one should start back at this, saying virtue is its own reward: virtue is a reward, and no other is worth mentioning beside it. A man may mistake the promised reward, but he must still have it or perish. Who will feel deceived by overfulfilment? Would a parent deceive his child by saying, "You will have a great reward if you learn Greek," foreseeing the boy's delight in Homer and Plato, now a valueless waste to him? When the reward comes, will the youth feel aggrieved that it is Greek and not bank-notes?

The nature of the promised rewards is hardly to be mistaken, yet the foolish remarks one hears make me wish to say that the Lord is neither proclaiming an ethical system nor blundering by calling it righteousness to do a good thing for what it will gain. When he promises, he states a fact to encourage his disciples to meet the difficulties of doing right and so learning righteousness; he aims to make men righteous, not to teach philosophy. I doubt that those who set aside his teaching because of the reward mentioned are as anxious to be righteous as to prove him unrighteous; otherwise they would take more care to represent him truly, and would not want the man the world confesses its best, and whom they perhaps confess their superior in conduct, to be found less pure in theory than they. Must the Lord hide from his friends that they will have cause to rejoice in their obedience, and tell them only the horrors of persecution, not the sweet sympathies that will help them through, or that where he was going they should go also? He could not ask more righteousness than he does: that they be perfect as their father in heaven is perfect. But not to help them by word of love, deed of power and promise of good would have shown him far less a brother and saviour. It is the enemy of righteousness who increases the difficulties of becoming righteous and lessens those of seeming so. Jesus desires no righteousness for the pride of it, any more than for advantage; so while requiring a purity the man cannot beforehand imagine, he gives all the encouragement he can. He will magnify victory not by difficulties, of which there are enough, but by completeness. He will not demand the loftiest motives of a soul far from lofty; it must grow to them. He will hearten the child with promises, and fulfil them to the contentment of the man.

Men cannot be righteous without love, and to love a righteous man is the best, the only way to learn righteousness. The Lord gives us himself to love, and promises his closest friendship to those who overcome.

God's rewards are always in kind: "I am your father; be my children, and I will be your father." Every obedience opens another door into the boundless universe of life. As long as the world continues to be made by God, righteousness can never fail of perfect reward; before it could, the government would have to pass into other hands.

The idea of merit is not essential to reward. Jesus says the lord who finds his servant faithful will make him sit down to meat and serve him, and also that when we have done all we should say we are unprofitable servants who have done only our duty. Reward is the rebound of Virtue's well-served ball from the hand of Love; a sense of merit is the most sneaking shape self-satisfaction can take. God's reward lies closed in all well-doing: the doer of right grows better and humbler, nearer God's heart as nearer his likeness, and more capable of God's own blessedness and of inheriting the kingdoms of heaven and earth. To be made greater than one's fellows is the offered reward of hell, and involves no greatness (a man might be set above all his fellows and be so much less than before); to be made greater than oneself is the divine reward, and real, for no one can rise a hair's-breadth above himself without rising nearer God. The reward itself, then, is righteousness; and the man who was righteous for such a reward, knowing what it was, would be righteous for righteousness' sake, though that would not yet be perfection. But I must distinguish no farther now.

The reward of mercy is not often of this world; the merciful seldom receive mercy in return from their fellows, and perhaps not much gratitude. Yet being children of their father in heaven, they will go on showing mercy, even to enemies. They must give like God, and like God be blessed in giving.

There is a mercy in the endeavour to share with others the best things God has given: those who do so will be persecuted, reviled and slandered as well as thanked, loved and befriended. The Lord not only promises the greatest reward; he tells his disciples the worst to expect. He shows them the fair countries they are bound for and the truth about the rough weather and hardships on the way, so that they will not choose in ignorance, and he strengthens them for coming difficulty by teaching them its real nature. All this prepares them to take his yoke and labour with him in his father's vineyard. They must not imagine that serving his father will make their work easy; they will only find the reward great. Nor must they fancy, when evil comes, that something unforeseen has befallen them. It is just then that their reward is near: when men revile and persecute them, they may know they are blessed. Their suffering is ground for exceeding gladness. The ignominy leaves the name of the Lord's Father written on their foreheads, the mark of the true among the false, of children among slaves. For all who suffer for the world, persecution is the seal of their patent, a sign they were sent: they fill up what is lacking of Christ's afflictions for his body's sake.

Let us look at the similar words the Lord spoke later to his disciples, in the presence of thousands on the plain, together with his lament over those who have what they desire: St Luke vi. 20-26.

*Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when men hate you, shut you out of their company, reproach you and cast out your name as evil for the Son of Man's sake. Rejoice that day and leap for joy, for your reward in heaven is great; their fathers did the same to the prophets.*

*But woe to you who are rich, for you have had your consolation. Woe to you who are full, for you will hunger. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for so their fathers treated the false prophets.*

Here he uses the word *hunger* without limit. Every true want, every genuine need, every God-created hunger is provided for in the idea of the universe; but any attempt to fill a void otherwise than the Heart of the Universe intended can only be a woe. God forgets none of his children, the naughty any more than the good: love and reward for the good, love and correction for the bad. The bad will trouble the good but cannot hurt them; the evil a man does his neighbour works for the neighbour's good, while the doer must mourn. This is a cause of jubilation to the neighbour, not for the evil done to the doer (over that there is sorrow in heaven) but for the good it brings him. The poor, hungry, weeping and hated may lament as if God had forgotten them; but he is all the time caring for them. Blessed in his sight now, they will soon know it. "Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh": welcome words from the Saviour's glad heart, comfort even to laughter! The poor, the hungry, the weeping, the hated and persecuted are the powerful, opulent, merry, loved and victorious of God's kingdom, to be filled with good things, to laugh for very delight, to be honoured, sought and cherished!

But alas for those who have their poor consolation in this life, who have yet to learn what hunger is, whose laughter is the crackling of thorns, who have loved the praises of men: the rich, the jocund, the full-fed! Silent-footed evil is on its way to seize them. Dives must go without; Lazarus must have. God's education uses terrible extremes. There are last that shall be first, and first that shall be last.

The Lord knew what trials, even tortures, awaited his disciples after his death, and that they would need every encouragement to keep their hearts strong, lest in some moment of dismay they deny him. If they had, where would our gospel be? If none are now ready to be crucified for him, alas for the age to come! What a poor travesty of the good news of God will reach their doors!

Those our Lord felicitates are all children of one family, and every blessing comes of the same righteousness. A disciple blessed in any one thing has every other already or on its way, for he is on the way to receive the very righteousness of God. Each good thing opens the door to the next, and so to all the rest. But as if these assurances were not large enough, as if any condition might discourage some humble man with a sense of unfitness, and he say, "Alas, I am proud, neither poor in spirit nor meek; at times I am not at all hungry after righteousness; I am not half merciful and am quick to feel hurt and indignant: I am shut out from every blessing!" the Lord, knowing the multitudes who can urge nothing in their own favour and sorely feel they are not blessed, looks over the wide world of his brothers and sisters and calls aloud, including every living soul with the one qualification of unrest or discomfort: "Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."

## THE YOKE OF JESUS

*The passage:* At that time Jesus answered and said (Luke adds that in that hour he rejoiced in spirit): "I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and revealed them to babes. Yes, Father, for so it seemed good in your sight. All things have been delivered to me by my father; no one knows who the son is except the father, nor who the father is except the son and whoever the son chooses to reveal him to." And: "Come to me, all you who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden light." (Matthew xi. 25-30; Luke x. 21, 22.)

Matthew and Luke both place the first two of these sayings after the Lord's denunciation of Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum; Luke alone puts the return of the seventy between, and there the rejoicing over the Father's revelation to babes seems to refer to them. Since the return of the seventy is mentioned nowhere else, the words may well have been spoken then. But the circumstances matter little for understanding the words.

The Lord makes no complaint against the wise and prudent. He only recognizes that his father does not reveal his best things to them, and he thanks, or praises, his father for this and its reasons. The Greek word seems to carry something of each: "I bless your will; I see you are right; I am of one mind with you."

"Why not reveal true things first to the wise, the fittest to receive them?" Only if these things and their wisdom lie in the same region. Skill in physical science does not fit a man to argue a metaphysical question, and the wisdom of this world, the philosophy of prudence, self-protection and precaution, specially unfits him to receive what the Father reveals: the more we care for our own well-being, the less we can understand and welcome the Father's care. With all their energy of thought, the wise and prudent could never see the Father's things well enough to know them as true. Absorbed in their own earthly questions and conclusions, they cannot see the eternal foundations God laid in man or the necessities of their own nature. They are proud of discoveries that are all less than themselves, imagine them the goal of the human intellect, and count whatever lies beyond out of reach or not worth interest. They gather by the senses and deduce the prudential, probable, expedient and protective, and never think of the essential, what must be in itself. Cautious and shy of enthusiasm, they take *things* for the universe and love of facts for love of truth. They know nothing deeper in man than surface mental facts and their relations, and turn from any truth the intellect cannot formulate. Zeal for God will never eat them up; he does not interest them, though theology may, for religion to them means theology. How should the Father's treasure be open to them? In their hands his rubies would lose their fire. They never go past the porch of the temple, unsure there is any *adytum* and not caring to look. Even when they know their duty, they must dissect it and weigh its claim before obeying. All the evil doctrines about God that work misery and madness originate in the brains of the wise and prudent, not the hearts of children. Careful to make the words of his messengers rhyme with their conclusions, they interpret God's great heart by their miserable intellects, postpone the obedience that alone gives understanding power, and press on men's minds their wretched interpretations of the Father's will instead of the doing of it. They call their philosophy the truth of God and say men must hold it or stand outside. They are slaves of the letter in all its weakness until the spirit of obedience sets them free.

The babes must beware lest the wise and prudent come between them and the Father. They must yield no claim to authority over their belief, from man or community, church or synagogue alike. They are to believe only what the Lord reveals to their souls as true; only that is belief as he counts it. The one divine object of teacher or church is to persuade the individual heart to come to Jesus, the spirit, to be taught what he alone can teach.

Terribly has his gospel suffered in the mouths of the wise and prudent. Had its first messages been committed to persons of repute instead of simple fishermen, it would be nowhere, or unrecognizable: from the first we would have had a system built on human interpretation, and the gospel itself would have vanished. As it is, one dull, miserable human system after another has usurped its place, yet, thank God, the gospel remains, and the little child, heedless of his trailing cloud of glory and aghast in an unknown world, may still see and run to the arms open to children. How often has a New Testament symbol been forced into service for some contemptible scheme of redemption, which were no redemption, while the truth the symbol was meant to convey lies unregarded beside the heap of rubbish! Had the wise and prudent been God's confidants, the letter would at once have usurped the spirit's place, and a system of religion with its rickety, malodorous plan of salvation would have replaced a living Christ, and kept the place. The great brother, the human God, would have been as hidden from the weary and heavy-laden as if he had never come to call the children home out of the shadows of a self-haunted universe. But the Father revealed his things to babes, who loved and began to do them, and so began to understand them, and grew in knowledge and in power to communicate; while to the wise and prudent the deepest words of the most babe-like of them all, John Boanerges, are even now a finger-worn rosary of platitudes. The babe understands the wise and prudent, but only the babe understands the babe.

The Father revealed his things to babes because they were his own little ones, uncorrupted by the wisdom or care of this world and so able to receive them. The others, though his children, had not begun to be like him; his things could not have entered their minds without leaving all their value and spirit outside the unchildlike place. The babes are near enough to where they came from to understand a little how things go in their father's presence, and so to interpret the Son's words. The child who has not yet "walked above a mile or two from" his "first love" is not out of touch with his Father's mind, and will quickly seal the old bond when the Son, the first and one perfect babe of God, leads the children out of the lovely "shadows of eternity" into the land of the "white celestial thought." As God is the one real father, only to God can anyone be a perfect child.

The leader of the great array of little ones, himself first recipient of his father's revelations by virtue of his firstborn childhood, having given thanks and said why, breaks out afresh, renewing his delight that God willed it so: "Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in your sight!" I venture to translate it, "Yea, O Father, for thus came forth satisfaction before you!" and think he meant, "Yea, Father, for at this all your angels were filled with satisfaction." The babes were the prophets in heaven, and the angels were glad that it was to be so on earth; they rejoiced to see what was bound in heaven bound on earth. Compare Matthew xviii. 10 and 14, and Luke xv. 10: their angels in heaven always behold the face of my father; it is not the will before your father in heaven (among the angels who stand before him, I think he means) that one of these little ones should perish; there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.

Having thanked his father for doing his good and perfect will, he turns to his disciples and says that he knows the Father, being his Son, and he alone can reveal the Father to the rest of his children: all things are delivered to him by his father; no one knows the son but the father, nor the father but the son and whoever the son wills to reveal him to. It is almost as if the mention of babes brought his thoughts back to himself and his father, between whom lay the secret of all life, all sending, all loving. The relation of Father and Son contains the idea of the universe. His father had no secrets from him; he knew the Father as the Father knew him. Only the Son could know the Father, and so reveal him, making the other, imperfect children know the Father and become such as he. All things were given him because he was the Son, and for the same reason he could reveal the Father's things to the Father's child. The child-relation is the one eternal, unchanging relation.

Note that while the Lord describes the knowledge his father and he have of each other as limited to themselves, he states a fact, not a design: he is in the world to remove that limit. The Father knows the Son and sends him that we may know him; the Son knows the Father and dies to reveal him. The glory of God's mysteries is that they are for his children to look into.

When the Lord took the little child before his disciples and declared him his representative, he made him the representative of his father too; but only the eternal child can reveal him. To reveal is immeasurably more than to represent: it is to present to eyes that know the true when they see it. Jesus represented God; the spirit of Jesus reveals him. A represented God a man may refuse, as many refused the Lord; no one can refuse the revealed God, for to see God and love him are one. He can be revealed only to the child, perfectly only to the pure child. All the world's discipline is to make men children, that God may be revealed to them.

No man, when first he comes to himself, can truly know God, only desire to; and while he does not know him he cannot become God's child in his heart. So the Father draws nearer, sending his firstborn, who knows him, is exactly like him and can represent him perfectly. The children, drawn to him, receive him, and then he can reveal the Father. No wisdom of the wise can find out God, no words of the God-loving reveal him; the simplicity of the whole natural relation is too deep for the philosopher. The Son alone can reveal God; the child alone understand him. The elder brother keeps company with the younger and makes him more a child like himself, interpenetrating him with his obedient glory. He lets him see how he delights in his father, and know that God is his father too. He rouses in his little brother the sense of their father's will, and the younger, hearing and obeying, begins to see that his elder brother must be the very image of their father. So he becomes more a child, and the Son reveals more of the Father; for the Son knows that to know the Father is the one thing needful to every child. To see the Father is the cry of every child-heart, and the need, where not the cry, of every living soul. Comfort yourselves, brothers and sisters: he to whom the Son will reveal him shall know the Father, and the Son came to reveal him. "Eternal Brother," we cry, "show us the Father. Be yourself to us, that in you we may know him. We too are his children: let the other children share with you in the things of the Father."

Having spoken to his father and then to his disciples, the Lord turns to the whole world and lets his heart overflow. St Matthew alone has saved the eternal cry: "Come to me, all you who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." It is as if he said, "I know the Father; come to me." He is not calling here those who want to know the Father; his cry goes far beyond them, to the ends of the earth. He calls the weary, who do not know that ignorance of the Father is the cause of all their labour and the weight of their burden.

This is the Lord's own form of his gospel, more intensely personal and direct, yet wider in inclusion, than what he took from Isaiah at Nazareth, and interfused with the strongest persuasion to the troubled to share his own eternal rest. I will turn his argument a little: "I have rest because I know the Father. Be meek and lowly of heart toward him as I am; let him lay his yoke on you as on me. I do his will, not my own. Take the yoke I wear; be his child like me, a babe to whom he can reveal his wonders. Then you too will find rest for your souls, the same peace I have, and be weary and heavy laden no more. I find my yoke easy, my burden light."

We must not imagine that "Take my yoke upon you" means a yoke he lays on those who come to him. "My yoke" is the yoke he wears himself, which his father lays on him, and out of which, at that very moment, he speaks, bearing it with glad patience: "Take the yoke I have taken; the Father lays it on us."

The best of the good wine remains; I have kept it to the last. A friend pointed out that the Master does not mean a yoke like his, but the very yoke he is carrying.

Dante, describing how on the first terrace of Purgatory he walked stooping, to be level with Oderisi, who went bowed to the ground by the burden of the pride he had cherished on earth, says, "I went walking with this heavy-laden soul, just as oxen walk in the yoke." This picture almost always comes to me with the Lord's words "Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me," whose intent is, "Take the other end of my yoke, doing as I do, being as I am." Think of it: to walk in the same yoke with the Son of Man, doing the same labour and sharing the same feeling! This alone is offered to the man who would have rest to his soul, required of him who would know the Father, and pressed on him by the Lord who would give him the peace of his own eternal heart.

But a yoke is for drawing: what is the cart laden with that he would have us help him draw? What but the will of the eternal, perfect Father? How should the Father honour the Son but by giving him his will to embody in deed, making him hand to his father's heart, and hardest of all, in bringing home his children? His yoke-fellow must share especially in this load, and learn how from him who draws beside him.

Whoever, in the commonest duties that fall to him, does as the Father would have him do, bears the Father's yoke along with Jesus, and the Father takes his help for the redemption of the world, delivering men from the slavery of their own rubbish-laden waggons into the liberty of God's husbandmen. Bearing the same yoke, he learns to walk step for step with Jesus, rejoicing with his joy. The glory of existence is to take up its burden and exist for Existence eternal and supreme, for the Father who does his divine and perfect best to share his glad life with us, making us sharers of the nature which is bliss and the labour which is peace. He lives for us; we must live for him. The little ones must take their full share in the great Father's work, which is the business of the family.

Does your soul start and your brain tremble at the thought of such a burden as the will of the eternally creating, eternally saving God? "How shall mortal man walk in such a yoke," you say, "even with the Son of God bearing it too?"

Why, brother, sister, it is the only burden bearable by mortals! Under any other, the lightest, he must at last sink outworn, his very soul gray with sickness!

He on whom lay the other half of God's burden, the weight of his creation to redeem, says, "The yoke I bear is easy; the burden I draw is light," and said it knowing the death he was to die. The yoke did not gall his neck, nor did the goal on Calvary frighten him from the straight way to it. His father's will was his strength as well as his joy; the one thing worth living for was the share his father's love gave him in his work. He loved his father even to the death of the cross, and eternally beyond.

When we give ourselves up to the Father as the Son gave himself, we shall find our yoke easy and our burden light, and also that they communicate ease and lightness, giving rest even from all other weariness. Let us not waste a moment asking how; that rest is a secret for every heart to know and no tongue to tell, and the only way to know it is to take the yoke on us. If that seems impossible, let us attempt the impossible: lay hold of the yoke, bow our heads, and try to get our necks under it. Give our Father the opportunity and he will not fail to help. He is helping us every moment, when we least think we need it; when we most think we do, then we may most boldly, as we must most earnestly, cry for it. God alone understands what his creatures can do or bear; when it seems most impossible, we must be most confident that he will neither demand too much nor fail with the vital creator-help, which will be there the moment it can be help. To imagine beforehand ourselves doing or bearing, we have neither claim nor need.

It is vain to think any weariness or burden, however slight, can be got rid of except by bowing the neck to the Father's yoke. There is no other rest for the heart and soul he created. That yoke frees us from every burden, anxiety and dread of shame or loss, even loss of love itself.

These words of the Lord, the thanksgiving and the statement about the mutual knowledge of his father and himself reported in common by Matthew and Luke, meet me like a well-known face unexpectedly encountered, like heavenly bread cut from the gospel of St John. The words are not in John, nothing more of the kind is in Matthew or Luke, and nothing like them in Mark. The passage seems to me one solitary flower testifying that Matthew and Luke have the same root of thought and feeling that blossoms everywhere in John. It looks as if it had crept out of the fourth gospel into the first and third, a true sign, though no proof, that however unlike the others the fourth is, they all have one origin. Some disciple remembered one such word, of which the promised comforter brought many to John's remembrance. I do not see how the more phenomenal gospels can be understood without a right perception of the Lord's relation to his father, the main subject of John's gospel.

As for the loving cry of the great brother to the whole weary world, which Matthew alone has set down, I seem aware of an indescribable individuality in its tone, distinguishing it from all his other recorded sayings.

Those who come at the Lord's call and take the rest he offers, learning of him and bearing the Father's yoke, are the salt of the earth, the light of the world.

## THE SALT AND THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD

*The passage:* You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its savour, how shall it be salted? It is then good for nothing but to be cast out and trodden underfoot. You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do men light a candle and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick, where it gives light to all in the house. Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your father in heaven. (Matthew v. 3-16.)

The Lord knew these men and had their hearts in his hand; otherwise would he have told them they were the salt of the earth and the light of the world? Though they were in danger of pluming themselves on it and seeing themselves other than God saw them, he does not hesitate to call his few humble disciples the salt of the earth, and every century since has borne witness that he spoke simple fact. Where would the world be now but for their salt and their light! Those who have chosen aspiration over ambition will cry, But for those men, where should we be bound? Their Master set them to be salt against corruption and light against darkness, and our souls answer, Lord, they have been the salt, they have been the light of the world!

The Lord at once supplements the incompleteness of the salt symbol. They were salt that must remember it is salt: must live, choose and be salt. The whole worth of salt is in being salt, and the saltness of moral salt lies in the will to be salt. Salt that loses it ceases to exist, except as a vile thing whose being is unjustifiable. What is to be done with saltless salt, with those who would teach religion and know not God?

Having carried the figure as far as it will serve, the Master changes it for one he can carry farther; salt only keeps things from going bad and makes nothing better, and his disciples are more than that. Having warned the human salt to be salt, he goes on, "You are the light of the world, a city, a candle," resuming his persuasion: "It is so; therefore make it so." Be salt; shine; be seen on your hill; let no bushel cover you. Every disciple of the Lord must be a preacher of righteousness.

Cities are the best lighted parts of the world, and perhaps the Lord meant, "You are a live city; light up your city," since the city on the hill comes in the midst of what he says about light. Anyhow, the city is the best centre from which to diffuse moral light: a man brooding in the desert may find the very light of light, but he must go to the city to let it shine.

From the general idea of light, associated with the city visible to all the country around, the Lord turns at once, in this probably fragmentary report, to the homelier, more personal figure of the lamp: men do not light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, to give light to all in the house.

Let us meditate here a moment. For whom is a lamp lit, or a man? Not for itself, but for those who need light, and so for all. A light that serves only self is no true light; its one virtue is that it soon goes out. A man's own soul needs light, but light for itself only, covered by the bushel, is darkness to soul and bushel alike. Light unshared is darkness; it is of the essence of light to be for others, in the spiritual as in the physical.

The lights of the world are live lights. The lamp the Lord kindles is a soul that can will to shine and must shine. Its true relation to the spirits around it, to God and its fellows, is its light. It shines fully only when its love shows it to all the souls within its scope and those souls to each other, and so does its part to bring all toward one. In the darkness each soul is alone; in the light the souls are a family. The Lord seems to say, "I have lit you not to shine for yourselves but to give light to all, and set you like a city on a hill that the whole earth may see and share your light. So shine that men see works so good and so plainly the Father's that they recognize his presence in you and thank him for you." The danger was always the self-bushel clouding the lamp: the moment they ceased to show the Father, the light in them was darkness. God alone is the light, and ours is the shining of his will in our lives; nothing is light that does not bear him witness. The man who sees God's glory would turn sick at the thought of glorifying his own self, whose one possible glory is to shine with God's. He alone shines who, like his Lord, seeks not his own but the will of him who sent him; whoever would shine in men's praises will sooner or later find himself a Gideon's pitcher left broken on the field.

Let us then bestir ourselves to keep this word of the Lord, and ask how we are to let our light shine.

To the man who does not try to order his thoughts, feelings and judgments by the Father's will I have nothing to say; he has no light to let shine. To let our light shine is to see that in everything, even the smallest, our lives correspond to what we know of God, and to do everything as true children of our father in heaven. It means being just, honourable, true and courteous, more careful of our neighbour's claim than our own, knowing we are in danger of overlooking it and are not bound to insist on every claim of our own. What claim to call Jesus master, or to Christianity, has the man who takes no count of what is fair, friendly, pure, unselfish, lovely and gracious? Is it not merest mockery?

Any human light must shine out first as obedience to truth recognized as such: our first show of light as disciples is doing what the Lord tells us. So we naturally declare him our master, ruler of our conduct and enlightener of our souls; and while a man learns the loveliness of righteousness by doing his will, he can hardly fail to let some light shine across the dust of his failures. So his disciples will shine as lights in the world, holding forth the Word of life.

To shine we must keep in his light, sunning our souls in it by thinking of what he said and did and would have us think and do. So we shall drink the light like some diamonds, keep it, and shine in the dark. Doing his will, we show men that we count the world his, and that his will, not ours, must be done in it. Our very faces will shine with the hope of seeing him and being taken home. Only let us remember that trying to look what we ought to be is the beginning of hypocrisy.

If we really expect better things, we must let our hope appear. A Christian who looks gloomy at the mention of death, still more one who talks of his friends as if he had lost them, turns the bushel of his little faith over the Lord's lamp. Death is only our visible horizon; our look should be focussed beyond it, and we should never talk as if death were the end of anything.

To let our light shine we must have no respect for riches; if we have none, there is no fear of showing any. To treat the poor man with less attention or cordiality than the rich is to serve Mammon. Likewise we must neither value nor seek the praise of men, honour no man for intellect, fame or success, not shrink from openly doing what we hold right for fear of men's judgment, nor acknowledge as lawgiver what calls itself Society, nor be anxious for its approval.

In business, the custom of the trade must be understood by both parties, or it can have no place, as law or excuse, with the disciple of Jesus. A man to whom business is one thing and religion another is no disciple; if he refuses to make his business religion he has chosen Mammon, and if he thinks not to settle it, it is settled. To serve God and Mammon is the most futile of human endeavours. Whoever tries betrays his Master in the temple and kisses him in the garden, takes advantage of him in the shop and offers him "divine service!" on Sunday; his church-going is further service of Mammon. But let us not waste strength despising such men; let us turn the light on ourselves. Are we in some way denying him? Is our light shining before men so that they glorify God for it? If not, it is darkness, and in the darkness a man takes for light he will thrust at the heart of the Lord himself.

He who goes about his everyday duty as the work the Father has given him lets his light shine. But he will not be content with this; he must share with his neighbour whatever makes his heart glad. The body is a lantern, and must not be a dark one: the glowing heart must show in the shining face. His glad thought may not be one to impart to his neighbour, but he must not quench the vibration of its gladness before it reaches him. What shall we say of him who comes from his closet or mountain-top with such a veil over his face as masks his very humanity? Has he had communion with the Father, whose every movement is self-hampered and in whose eyes dwell no smiles for the people of his house? One who receives the quiet ministrations of wife or son or daughter without a sign of pleasure or gratitude can hardly have been with Jesus, or has left him behind in his closet. If his faith in God takes away a man's cheerfulness, how shall his face ever shine? And why are they always glad before the Father's face in heaven? Pain or inward grief may blamelessly banish all smiling, but even heaviness of heart has no right to tumble the bushel over the lamp so that no ray can tell that love still burns within. The man must at least let his dear ones know that something other than displeasure with them clouds his countenance.

What a sweet colour the divine light takes in courtesy, whose perfection is recognizing every man as a temple of the living God. The temple may be sorely ruined and defiled, but if God had left it, it would be a heap and not a house.

Next to love, the light shines out especially in fairness. What light can he have who is always on his own side and never sees reason or right on his adversary's? And surely he who shows mercy, as well as he who shows justice, ought to do it cheerfully.

But if all our light shines out and none of our darkness, shall we not be in utmost danger of hypocrisy? Yes, if we only hide our darkness and do not strive to slay it with our light; for how do we show it while struggling to destroy it? Hiding evil is hypocrisy only when we cherish it. A man honestly fighting it, giving it no quarter, is already conqueror in Christ, or soon will be, and more than innocent. But our good feelings, those that make for righteousness and unity, we ought to let shine, for they claim to commune with the light in others. Many parents hold back words that would lift hundredweights from their children's hearts and make them leap for joy; a stern father and a silent mother make mournful, or far worse, hard children. Need I add that if anyone, hearing the injunction to let his light shine, makes himself shine instead, the light is not in him!

But what shall I say of those who in the name of religion let out only their darkness, the darkness of worshipped opinion, lip-honour and disobedience! They tear the body of Christ asunder with the explosives of dispute, pleading a unity they can understand only as paltry uniformity. What have the "good church-man" and the "strong dissenter" not to answer for, who each hide what true light they have under the bushel of party-spirit and radiate only repulsion! There is no schism in using diverse forms of thought or worship; true honesty is never schismatic. The real schismatic withholds love and justice from the neighbour whose religious theories or church constitution differ from his own, denies or avoids his brother because he does not follow with him, and calls him a schismatic for preferring another mode of public worship. The other *may* be schismatic; he himself certainly *is*. He walks in the darkness of opinion, not in the light of life, not in the faith that works by love. Worst of all is division in the name of Christ, who came to make one. Neither Paul nor Apollos nor Cephas would lead a party, least of all Christ, except the party of his elect, the party of love: love that suffers long and is kind, does not envy, is not puffed up, does not behave unseemly, seeks not its own, is not easily provoked, thinks no evil, does not rejoice in iniquity but in the truth, bears, believes, hopes and endures all things.

If I have no light, the call to let it shine cannot apply to me; but I must take care lest, in the night I cherish, the Lord come on me like a thief. There may be many, though, who have some light, or imagine they have much, yet not enough to know the duty of letting it shine on their neighbours. The Lord would have his men so alive with his light that it flashes from each to all for ever, and all in eternal response keep glorifying the Father. Friend, do you look for a good time coming when you shall know as you are known? Let the joy of your hope stream out on your neighbours; fold them round in what makes you glad. Let your nature grow more expansive. Look like the man you are, one who knows something very good. You believe yourself on the way to the heart of things: walk so, shine so, that all who see you shall want to go with you.

What light comes from those who make their faces long at the very name of death and look and speak as if it were the end of all things and the worst of evils? Jesus told his men not to fear death, that his friends should go to be with him in his father's house, and has since risen from the tomb and gone to prepare a place for them. What are these miserable refusers of comfort? Not Christians, surely! Oh yes, they are Christians! "They are gone," they say, "to be for ever with the Lord," and then weep and lament and seem more afraid of joining them than of anything under the sun, clinging to what they call life to the last attainable moment. Were there ever such children, hanging crying on their mother's skirts and refusing to be lifted to her bosom? They are not of Paul's mind: to be with Him is not better! They worship their physician, and their prayer to the God of their life is to spare them from more life. Where shines their light? Alas for you, poor world, if you had no better lights than these!

You who have light, show yourselves sons and daughters of Light, of God, of Hope, heirs of a great completeness. Let your light shine freely.

Only take heed that you do not do your righteousness before men, to be seen by them.

## THE RIGHT HAND AND THE LEFT

*The passage:* Do not do your righteousness before people to be seen by them, or you lose your Father's reward. When you give alms, let not your left hand know what your right hand does; give in secret, and your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you. (Matthew vi. 1, 3.)

Let your light out freely, so that men may see it but not so that they may see you. If I do something not because God would have it so, or from love of the thing, but that I may be seen as the doer and praised or famed, then however good the thing, my reward is from men; there is none for me with the Father. If I do it with the light as my pleasure, that it may shine and men may know *the* Light, the Father of lights, I do well. But if I do it that I may be seen shining, with the light noted as mine and not another's, I seek glory of men and worship Satan; the light that may illuminate others through me is, in me and for me, darkness.

*But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth*.

How am I to let my light shine, if I take pains to hide what I do?

The injunction is not to hide what you do from others but from yourself. The Master would have you not plume yourself on it or confer with yourself in satisfaction over it. A man must not desire to be satisfied with himself; his right hand must not seek the praise of his left, but let the thing go as done with. We must imagine no merit in ourselves, either in doing a fine thing or in having done it: that would be to love a lie, for we have none. What is there to be proud of in refusing to worship the devil, or in denying ourselves a selfish indulgence, any more than in washing our hands? When we have done all, we are unprofitable servants; our best is only decent, and what more could it be? The worst villains would be those proud of not committing a villainy, and their pride would make them readier for it when temptation next came. Even perfect duty, once we pride ourselves on it, drops us into a hell of worthlessness. What are we for but to do our duty? We must do it and think nothing of ourselves for it, and not care what men think; their blame may be good, their praise cannot be. But the worst praise of men is the praise we give ourselves. We must do nothing to be seen of ourselves, and seek no approval but God's, or we shut the door of the kingdom from outside; and his approval will only deepen our sense of unworthiness. What! seek praise of men for being fair to our brothers and sisters, or of God for laying our hearts at the feet of him to whom we utterly belong? There is no pride so mean (and all pride is essentially mean) as the pride of being holier than our fellow, except the pride of being holy. Such imagined holiness is foulness; religion in the hearts of the unreal is a dead thing, and what seems life in it is the crawling life of a corpse.

One word in the Authorized Version used to trouble me, because it seemed to make publicity part of the reward for doing right in secret: the word *openly*, at the ends of the fourth, sixth and eighteenth verses. The Lord seemed to say, "Avoid the praise of men, and you will at length have the praise of men"; your reward seen of men, and you seen receiving it! How else could the word be understood? It must be the interpolation of some Jewish scribe who, even after learning a little of the Christ, could not conceive a reward that did not draw some sweetness from the gazing eyes of the crowd. I was glad to find the word is not in the best manuscripts, and is left out of the revised version. Of like sort is the daring of much exposition of the Master's words: what men lack faith to receive, they dilute to the level of their own power of reception. If anyone asks why the Lord let the word stay so long if he never said it, perhaps it was that his disciples might be troubled, rise against it, and do him right by casting it out, and so Wisdom be justified of her children.

Some who are not naturally troubled by the notion of reward have come to be, because of objectors who think they take a higher stand than the Christian and call reward for doing right a low idea. It would be low for a child to do his father's will in hope of being rewarded. But it is quite another thing for a father, seeing his child try to please him, to let him know he recognizes his childness and will be fatherly good to him. What kind of father, because there can be no merit in doing well, would give his child no smile or pleased word for trying his best? That smile is the child's perfect reward. Suppose he loves his child so much that he wants to give him everything but dares not until his character is developed: must he not be glad, and show it, at each step toward the day he can throne his son over all he has? "I am an unprofitable servant," says the man who has done his duty; yet his lord, finding him at his post, girds himself, sits him down to meat, and serves him. How could the divine order, founded for growth, proceed without return for a thing done? How can we work with God and he never say "Thank you, my child," like a husbandman taking all the profit and muzzling the ox? When a man works for another he has his wages, and society exists by this dependence of man on man. The devil did not invent this society; he invented the notion of degradation in work and a greater in wages, and has built a Society after his own likeness, which despises work, leaves it undone, and so can claim its wages without disgrace.

If you say, "No one ought to do right for the sake of reward," I go further: no man *can*. A man may do something indifferent, or wrong, for reward; but a thing right in itself, done for reward, ceases in the doing to be right. Yet a man who does right cannot escape being rewarded, and to refuse the reward would be to refuse life and foil the creative love. The whole question is what reward is expected. The first reward of doing well is to grow purer in heart and stronger in hope of seeing God; without it a man must perish. As for happiness and the lower rewards that naturally follow, is God to destroy the sequence of cause and effect and say, "Do well, but gain no good by it; live joylessly for eternity, that lack of delight may show you pure"? Could Love create for that end? Righteousness does not demand creation; it is Love, not Righteousness, that cannot live alone. The creature must already be before Righteousness can put in a claim; but once hearts and souls are there, Love, which created for love and joy, presses Righteousness's demand first.

A righteousness that created misery to uphold itself would be unrighteous. God will die for righteousness, but never create for a joyless one. To create the necessarily incomplete, to create for the knowledge of himself and then not give himself, would be cruel injustice; and if he gives himself, what reward is left out, seeing he is Life and all her children, the All in all? It will take the utmost joy God can give to let men know him, and what man, knowing him, would mind losing every other joy? What other joy could be kept from entering where the God of joy already dwelt? The law of the universe holds, the name of the Father be praised: a man reaps what he sows, the whirlwind from the wind, corruption from sowing to the flesh and life everlasting from sowing to the spirit; to him who has more is given, and from him who has not even that is taken.

To object to Christianity as selfish is foolishness; it alone gives hope of deliverance from selfishness. Is it selfish to desire to love, or to hope for purity and the sight of God? What better can we do for our neighbour than become altogether righteous toward him, and so bring him nearer to sharing the reward of a return to the divine idea?

Where is the evil toward God, or wrong to my neighbour, if I sometimes think of the joys that follow perfect loving? Is not love itself, the Father's breath, in which no thinnest pollution of selfishness can float, the only material to build the castles of heaven? The childlike heart might cry: "Creator, give me all the reward your father-heart can give your unmeriting child. My fit wages may be pain, sorrow, humiliation of soul; I welcome them. Your reward will be to lift me out of the mire of self-love and bring me nearer to you and your children, the divinest of good things. Your highest reward is your purest gift, yourself; you made me for it, and have been labouring to fit me for it. I can seek only what you wait to give: let your love flow into me."

It seems to me that the only merit that could live before God is the merit of Jesus, who of himself, untaught and unimplored, laid himself aside and turned to the Father, refusing his life save in him. Like God, he chose righteousness of himself, and so merited to sit on the throne of God. In the same spirit he afterward gave himself to his Father's children, and merited the power to pour his life-redeeming spirit into theirs: made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey him. Yet to say that Jesus had no thought of merit, that he saw only what he had to be and must do, is a word of little daring. Where is a man's merit in refusing to go down to an abyss of loss, of the right to be, of his father, of himself? Would Satan, with all the instincts of his origin in him, have *merited* eternal life by refusing to be a devil? He would still have had it, and the Father's love; that would have been his reward. I cannot imagine any created thing meriting anything save by divine courtesy.

I suspect the notion of merit belongs to a low stage of development; the higher a man rises, the less he finds it worth a thought. Perhaps it exists only because man thinks it. I suspect it is not a thought of the eternal mind, and is to God merely a thing man thinks.

|       For merit lives from man to man,
| And not from man, O Lord, to thee.

So the man who does right and seeks no praise from men, though he merits nothing, will be rewarded by his Father, and will prize the reward.

We must let our light shine, make our faith, hope and love manifest, so that men may praise not us for shining but the Father for creating the light. No one with faith, hope and love alive in his soul could make a show of them to win admiration; yet they must appear in our words, looks and carriage, above all in honourable, unselfish, hospitable, helpful deeds: in cheerfulness, joy, and, where a man has the gift, merriment; in freedom from care save for one another, in interest in others' concerns, in fearlessness, tenderness, courtesy and graciousness. In our anger and indignation, especially, must it shine. But we must give no quarter to the faintest thought of how this or that will look, or of the praise of men. No man can be a disciple of Christ and desire fame. To desire fame is ignoble, a beggarly greed; there is no aspiration in it, only ambition, selfishness that would be proud if it could. Fame is the applause of the many, whose judgment is foolish; the greater the fame, the greater the foolishness that swells it and the worse that which longs for it. Aspiration is the only escape from ambition. He who aspires, who strives to rise above himself, neither lusts to be higher than his neighbour nor seeks to mount in his opinion. His light shines the more because he does nothing to be seen of men. He stands in the mist between the gulf and the glory, and looks upward; he does not love his own soul but longs to be clean.

| Out of the gulf into the glory,
|   Father, my soul cries out to be lifted.
| Dark is the woof of my dismal story,
|   Thorough thy sun-warp stormily drifted!---
| Out of the gulf into the glory,
| Lift me, and save my story.

| I have done many things merely shameful;
|   I am a man ashamed, my father!
| My life is ashamed and broken and blameful---
|   The broken and blameful, oh, cleanse and gather!
| Heartily shame me, Lord, of the shameful!
| To my judge I flee with my blameful.

| Saviour, at peace in thy perfect purity,
|   Think what it is, not to be pure!
| Strong in thy love\'s essential security,
|   Think upon those who are never secure.
| Full fill my soul with the light of thy purity;
| Fold me in love\'s security.

| O Father, O Brother, my heart is sore aching
|   Help it to ache as much as is needful;
| Is it you cleansing me, mending, remaking,
|   Dear potter-hands, so tender and heedful?
| Sick of my past, of my own self aching---
| Hurt on, dear hands, with your making.

| Proud of the form thou hadst given thy vessel,
|   Proud of myself, I forgot my donor;
| Down in the dust I began to nestle,
|   Poured thee no wine, and drank deep of dishonour!
| Lord, thou hast broken, thou mendest thy vessel!
| In the dust of thy glory I nestle.

O Lord, your creature earnestly waits for the sons of God to be revealed.

## THE HOPE OF THE UNIVERSE

*The passage:* The creature waits in earnest expectation for the sons of God to be made manifest. (Romans viii. 19.)

Let us try to reach the idea in St Paul's mind that these words stand for. It is no worthless idea or platitude a man may leave behind because he fails to grasp it at once; Paul believes it vitally tied to the life and death of his Master. He had seen Jesus with bodily eyes, but also with the real eyes that see only by understanding, and the sight lifted his whole nature, first his pure will for righteousness, then his hoping imagination. Out of these, in the knowledge of Jesus, he spoke.

Written in the power of this uplifting, Paul's letters have waked only poor ideas in poor minds, for words always seem to mean something within the scope of the mind hearing them. They cannot carry a thinker's thought to a no-thinker, or the mind of a soul aspiring and discontented with itself to one satisfied with his poverty and counting his meagre faculty the human standard. The higher the idea Paul's words wake in us, the likelier it is the same that moved the man who had seen Jesus. If we err in interpreting him, it will hardly be by attributing too high an intent.

First, what does Paul mean by 'the creature' or 'the creation'? If the *visible world*, he surely did not, without saying so, exclude its noblest part, the sentient; and if he did, it is doubly strange that he then attributes conscious sense to what remained, the insentient. If you call this a figure of speech, a figure that means less than it says is unworthy of the Lord's messenger.

To exclude the sentient from *creation* and then give the sentient's capacities to the insentient, as a figure for men's hopes of perfecting it for their comfort, would be a violence unfit in rhetoric and in itself. Consider also: 'the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.' To read that of the imperfections of the insensate material world would make it a worthless hyperbole. I am inclined to believe the apostle saw the whole visible creation as, in widely differing degrees of consciousness, a live outcome of the heart of the living one who is all in all, though I do not insist on it. I argue only that *creature* or *creation* must include everything with sentient life, all creatures capable of suffering. Their state lets him speak of the whole creation as suffering in its divine development, groaning in the pangs of birth toward a better self, a nobler world. The creation need not know what it groans after: the human race groans for deliverance, yet how much does it know that its redemption lies in becoming one with the Father and sharing his glory? Here and there one knows it, which is a pledge for the race, but the race has no notion of what alone can stay its groaning. So the whole creation groans after an unforeseen yet essential birth, to be freed from a transitional state that nowise answers the intent in which existence began.

To believe that God made many lower creatures merely for prey, or as slaves of a slave under a cruel master, or made an endless succession of them to get little from life but its end (a doctrine some hold and multitudes practically accept), is to believe in a demon, toward that part of his creation at least. A creative demon is an absurdity; were such a creator possible, he would not be God, and the real God would one day destroy him. Still, suffering abounds among them, and even if God did not foresee how creation would turn out for them, it lies at his door. He has made them so far dumb that they cannot move their oppressors by telling how hard the world is. The apostle takes up their case, and gives us material to answer those who blame God for it.

Many, I suspect, gather from Romans viii only that the lower animals alive at the Lord's coming, and those who come after, will lead a happy life for the time allotted them. What disciples of Jesus, to find such a gloss consolation for the moans of a universe! For all the creatures who through ages of misery have groaned and died, these mild Christians find it enough that they are dead and so out of it: 'their sufferings are over; they had not to live on for ever in oppression.' That is some consolation for those gone, for rest is better than ceaseless toil. But what of the heedless God these Christians are content to worship? Is he merciful? Loving? How shall he die to escape the remorse of authorship of so much misery? Our pity turns from the dead creature to the live creator who could know himself the maker of so many extinguished hearts, whose friend was not he but Death. Blessed be the name of the Father of Jesus, there is no such creator!

But there are the living who suffer too: is there no comfort for them but that they will die? And what of those yet to come, daily born into evil things? Will the thought that they will soon die suffice the child who laments his dead bird or rabbit and would fain love the father in heaven who keeps on making the creatures? Would those Christians have me believe in a God who makes creatures only to be prey to other creatures, or to spend a few hours or years helpless, speechless and without appeal in merciless hands, then pass into nothingness? I will not; in the name of Jesus, I will not. Had he not known something better, would he have said what he did about the Father and the sparrows?

What many call their beliefs are but prejudices they have picked up; why should such believers spare a thought for their paltry fellow-inhabitants of the planet? And not a few, indignant if their belief in God is questioned, yet greatly fear imagining him better than he is: is it he or themselves they dread injuring by expecting too much of him? 'You see the plain facts,' they say; 'what can be done for the poor things, unless you take the absurd notion that they too have a life beyond the grave?'

Why should that notion seem absurd? The teachers of the nation have, I think through unbelief, wronged the animals deeply by their silence about the popular presumption that they have no hereafter, as if the Preserver of man and beast never thought of keeping one beast alive beyond a certain time; heartless men might then argue that he did not care how they wronged the animals. Their immortality is no new faith with me, but as old as my childhood.

Do you believe in immortality for yourself? If not, I have no argument with you. If you do, why not for the animals? Were immortality no greater a thing for them than it seems to some who profess to expect it, I should scarcely care to insist on their share. But if the thought is precious to you, is it essential to your enjoyment that nothing less than yourself should share it? Would God, had he been of like heart with you, have given immortality to creatures so much less than himself as we? If they are not worth making immortal, how were they worth calling out of no-being? You would have him go on for ever creating new things with one hand and annihilating those he made with the other, unless you prefer an earth without animals. If it were harder for God to keep the former alive than to send forth new ones, his creatures would be no better than a child's toys, made and destroyed as he goes. For what purpose is the maker of the sparrow present at its death, if he does not care whether it dies comforted or lost in the abyss? If his presence is no good to the sparrow, what good will it be to you when your hour comes? Believe that the heart of the universe is tenderer, more loving, more just than yours or mine, and not by a little only.

If you did not believe you would outlive death, I could not blame you for thinking all was over with the sparrow; but to believe in immortality for yourself and not for the sparrow is hard-hearted and selfish. If it would make you happy to think the sparrow lives on too, I would gladly help you to hope it.

I know no reason why I should not look for the animals to rise again in the sense in which I hope to rise myself: to reappear clothed in another and better form of life. If the Father will raise his children, why not also those he has taught his little ones to love? Love is the one bond of the universe, the heart of God, the life of his children; if animals can be loved they are loveable, and if they can love, yet more so. Love is eternal; how then should its object perish? If God gave us the creatures that a new phase of love might be born in us toward another kind of life from the same fountain, why should the new life perish any more than the new love? Can you imagine that, hereafter, if one of God's little ones asked him to give again an old earthly love, a kitten or pony or squirrel or dog, the Father would say no? What a child may ask for, the Father will keep ready.

That there are difficulties in believing thus I grant; impossibilities, I deny. The first is perhaps the many forms of life we cannot desire to see again. But while we would gladly keep the perfected forms of the higher animals, we may hope that those of many other kinds are as transitory as their bodies, belonging only to a stage of development. All animal forms tend to higher: why should not the individual, as well as the race, pass through stages of ascent? If I have myself gone through each of the typical forms of lower life on my way to the human (made probable by antenatal history), I see no reason why each of the lower animals should not pass upward through a succession of bettering embodiments. This theory needs another to complement it: that men and women who will not strive toward the great human-divine idea are sent back down to the stage of fish or insect or reptile beyond which their moral nature has refused to advance. Some men *appear* never to have approached the development of the more human of the lower animals. Let those take care who look contemptuously on animals, lest in misusing one they misuse some ancestor of their own, sent back as the one mercy for him to far past forms and another chance of passing the self-made barrier. The suggestion may seem ridiculous, but what if it should be true? I do not care to argue it. What I press is this: if we believe in the progress of creation as hitherto manifested, and in the marvellous changes of form in every individual of certain classes, why should there be difficulty in hoping that old lives may reappear in new forms? The typical soul reappears in a higher type; why not the individual soul in a higher form?

Multitudes count it safest to hold to a dull scheme of things: can it be because, like David in Browning's *Saul*, they dread worsting the Giver by inventing better gifts than his? That we do not know is the best reason for hoping to the full extent God has made possible. If we go wrong, it will be in the direction of the right, and easier to correct than the result of refusing to imagine and leaving traditional prepossessions to rule our hearts, with no claim but the poverty of their expectation from the paternal riches. Those who hope little cannot grow much; to them the very glory of God must be a small thing. In the nature of divine things, the commonplace must be false. The stupid, self-satisfied soul, which cannot know its stupidity and will not trouble to understand or imagine, is the farthest behind of all the backward children in God's nursery.

I know no cause of reasonable difficulty in the continued existence of the lower animals except the present nature of some of them. But what Christian will dare say that God does not care about them, whom he knows as we cannot? Great or small, they are his; great are all his results, small all his beginnings. That we must send many of his creatures out of this phase of life because of their hurtfulness in this phase of ours is no stumbling-block to me. The long combat of the race with such creatures, and man's repeated victory, has had an essential share in developing humanity, which is making man capable of knowing God; and when their part to that end is done, changed conditions may speedily bring about that the wolf shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard lie down with the kid.

I would now lead my companion closer to the idea that burned in the apostle's heart when he wrote Romans viii. How far ahead he is, in his hope for the creation, of the footsore and halting brigade of Christians now crossing the world! He knew Christ, and so could look into the Father's will.

*For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God*!

At the head of one of his poems Henry Vaughan has this Latin version of the verse, which I do not know whether he found or made; it is closer to the sense than ours:

'Etenim res creatae exerto capite observantes expectant revelationem filiorum Dei.'---'For the things created, watching with head thrust out, await the revelation of the sons of God.'

Why?

Because God has subjected the creation to vanity in the hope that it shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. The creation eagerly watches for this double deliverance, from corruption and from the subjection to vanity that follows it.

God meets the bondage of corruption with subjection to vanity. Corruption is the breaking up of the essential idea, the falling away from the original life-causing thought; it is met by the suffering it causes, and that suffering is for redemption. The life in the corrupting thing makes suffering possible; the live part, not the corrupted part, suffers; the redeemable, not the doomed, is subjected to vanity. A race in which evil is at work needs this as its one hope against the supremacy of corruption; and the whole encircling, helping creation must, for man's sake and its own, share the subjection with its hope of deliverance.

Corruption brings in vanity, empty aching gaps in vitality. This aching, which most people regard as evil, is the unpleasant cure of evil. It takes all shapes of suffering, of body, mind, heart and spirit, and is altogether beneficent: without it, what hope would there be for the rich and powerful, set on their own way, or for the self-indulgent, conceited, greedy and miserly? The more things men seek, the more they are subject to vanity, whose forms may all be summed in the word disappointment. He who would not house with disappointment must seek the incorruptible, the true, breaking the bondage of havings and shows, rumours, praises and selfish pleasures, and coming out of the false into the real, out of darkness into light. To bring men to this, the gulf of the inane yawns before them; aghast, they cry, 'Vanity of vanities!' and beyond the abyss begin to espy the eternal world of truth.

Note 'the hope that the creation itself also,' as something besides God's men and women, 'shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption, into the liberty of the glory of the children of God.' The creation is to share their deliverance, liberty and glory. Deliverance from corruption must include escape from its very home and goal, death, in all its kinds and degrees. When you say there is no more death for the children of God, remember that the creature's deliverance is into their liberty. Dead, in bondage to corruption, how can they share it?

If such are the apostle's words, does he or does he not hold the immortality of the animals? If you say he means only that creatures alive at the Lord's coming will be freed from corrupt man's tyranny, I refer you to what I have said of the poverty of that reading, which accepts the failure of justice and love toward all who have passed away or must yet pass away before that coming. For the man whose heart aches to adore a faithful creator, what comfort is in such news? Is God enough to care for those who happen to live at one time but not for those at another? Shall we not rather believe that the vessels of less honour, the misused, the maltreated, shall be filled full with creative wine at last? Shall not the children have little dogs under the Father's table, with plenty of crumbs let fall? If there was such provision for the sparrows of our Lord's sojourn, and he will bring yet better when he comes again, how should the dead sparrows and their sorrows be passed over by him with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning? Would the deliverance of the creatures into the groaned-for liberty have been worth mentioning if their share in the glory of the sons of God were to die away within a few years? But the gifts of God are without repentance.

How St Paul longs for and loves liberty! Only he is a true lover of liberty who will die to give it to his neighbour, and Paul loved liberty more than his own. How different his notion of it is from the dull modern fancies of heaven in the popular hymn-books! The new heaven and new earth will at least be a heaven and an earth. What would the newest earth be to the old children without its animals? Barer than the heavens emptied of the constellations called by their names. If the earth must have animals, why not the old ones, already dear? The sons of God are not a new race but the old race glorified; so why a new race of animals, and not the old ones glorified?

The apostle says they are to share the liberty of the sons of God: will it not be a liberty like ours, always ready to be offered on the altar of love? How sweet the animals' service will be, thus offered, and how sweet to minister to them in their turns of need! For doubtless they will then flee to us for help, as now they flee from us in dread of our tyranny. What lovelier feature in the new earth than the old animals glorified with us in our common home, the house of our father, each kind an unfailing pleasure to the other? Ah, what horses! Ah, what dogs! The whole redeemed creation goes to make up St Paul's heaven. He had learned of him who would leave no one out, who made the excuse for his murderers that they did not know what they were doing.

Is not the prophecy on the groaning creation to be fulfilled in the new heavens and new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness, which involves its existence beyond this world, and so immortality? Would it not be more like the king eternal, immortal, invisible, to create nothing that could die, and slay nothing but evil? 'For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living; for all live unto him.'

But what is this liberty of the children of God, for which the whole creation waits? The children themselves await it; when they have it, their house and retinue, the creation, whose fate hangs on theirs, will share it.

All liberty consists in realizing the ideal harmony between the creative will and the created life, in the creature's active being corresponding to the creator's idea, which is his substantial soul. The creature's liberty is what obedience to the law of his existence effects for him. A soul that moves counter to the will of its prime cause finds the universe its prison. But Paul is not at the moment thinking of the metaphysical notion of liberty or its religious realization; he has in thought the birth of the soul's consciousness of freedom.

Paul adds that not only the creation groans: we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the spirit, groan within ourselves, waiting for the redemption of our body. We are not free until our body is redeemed; then all the creation will be free with us, for he regards the creation as part of our embodiment. The whole creation waits for the manifestation of the sons of God, which is the redemption of their body, an idea extending to their whole material envelopment. For this as for them the bonds of corruption must fall away; it must be what it was created for, a vital temple perfected by the unbroken indwelling of its divinity.

The liberty here intended is not that essential liberty, freedom from sin, but the completing of the redemption of the spirit by the redemption of the body. Evil has constantly worked to turn our house of the body into a prison, more opaque, heavy and insensible, filled with aches and pains. The freest soul, the purest of lovers, would not feel absolutely at large while chained to a dying body, and the more hampered that the body was his own. So the making of the body a perfected, responsive house-alive is essential to Paul's notion of deliverance: the new man must have a new body with a new heaven and earth. Paul never thinks of himself as released from body; he desires a perfect one, a heaven-made house in place of the earth-made one, suited only to this lower stage of life, unsafe from the first and now much dilapidated in the Master's service. He wants a spiritual body that will not thwart but second the spirit; I presume such a body as the Lord died with, changed by the interpenetrating of the creative indwelling will into the body with which he rose. A body like his is, I imagine, necessary to bring us into true contact with the creation, of which there must be multitudinous phases we cannot now be aware of.

The way good and indifferent people alike blame their bodies and look to death rather than to God-aided struggle to set them at liberty seems to me low and cowardly: the master fleeing from the slave, despising and fearing him at once. We must hold the supremacy over our bodies, but not despise body; it is a divine thing. Body and soul are in the image of God, and the lord of life was last seen in the glorified body of his death, which I believe he still wears. But we shall do better without these bodies that suffer and grow old, which may be, as some think, only the husks of our real bodies. Helpful as they have been, we are not in altogether helpful company while our houses have stains that friendly death alone, it may be, can wash out, and sores that only the builder's hand, rebuilding in nobler material, can banish.

When the sons are free and their bodies redeemed, they will lift the lower creation with them into their liberty. Paul seems to believe that perfection in their kind awaits the humbler inhabitants of our world too, immediately after the sons of God are manifested: for our sakes and their own they were made subject to vanity, and for our sakes and their own they shall be raised higher with us.

Has the question no interest for you? It would, had you the heart you must one day have, big enough to love any life God has created. Had the Lord cared as little for what was lower than himself as you do, you would not now be looking for any redemption.

I have omitted the word *adoption*, used in both English versions; it is no translation of the Greek word it stands for. Paul uses it to mean the same as 'the redemption of the body,' which at once puts the usual interpretation in question. A falser translation was never made, given the importance of the thing signified and the substitution of an idea not only untrue but mischievous. What Paul means has nothing to do with adoption; Galatians iv makes clear what he intends. His unusual word means the father's recognition, when the child comes of age, of the child's relation to him, by giving him his fitting place of dignity in the house; here the deliverance of the body is the great Father's act of recognition, completing, crowning and declaring the man's freedom. It means the manifestation of the grown-up sons of God, the showing as sons of those who have always been his children, brought out before the universe in such attire and attendance that to look at them is to see what they are, the sons of the house, those to whom their elder brother applied the words 'I said ye are Gods.'

If the sons groan, looking to be lifted up, and the other inhabitants of their world groan with them, shall they not be lifted up too? Have they not a faithful creator? He must be a selfish man who does not desire it.

It appears, then, that in the apostle's expectation the new heavens and new earth of the sons of God are to be inhabited also by blessed animals, inferior but risen, and I think yet to rise in continuous development.

Here let me say again, more strongly, something I have already said:

When the apostle speaks of the whole creation, could he have dismissed the animals to regard trees and flowers as bearing their part in the groaning of the burdened world? Or, forgetting animals, trees and flowers, could he have meant only the bulk of the earth, its mountains, valleys, plains, seas and rivers? If so, the portion that least can feel or know is, to the apostle of love, immeasurably more important than the portion that loves and moans and cries. And he would then attribute the suffering faculty of the excluded, far more sentient portion to the less sentient, and build on it the vision of its redemption! His rhapsody of hope would be a puff-ball of falsest rhetoric, special pleading for nothing.

Much would I like to know what animals the apostle saw on his travels or around his home, and their conditions. They were often suffering creatures, and Paul, growing hourly in likeness to his maker and theirs, overflowed with sympathy. Perhaps as he wrote he felt a throb of pity for the beasts he had to kill at Ephesus.

If the Lord said little about animals, could he have done more for them than tell men his father cared for them? He has thereby wakened in men's hearts a seed his father planted; it grows slowly but has borne a little precious fruit. His friend St Francis helped him, and many are trying; whoever sows the seed of that seed helps the Son. Our behaviour to the animals and our words about them are seed, good or bad, in our children's hearts. No one can tell to what the animals might grow, even on the old earth, if dealt with according to their true position in regard to us. They are in a real and divine sense our kindred. I call them our poor relations to suggest that poor relations are often ill used. We should try to develop every true relation. He who is prejudiced against a relative because he is poor is himself an ill-bred relative, and ill-breeding is an excluding fault with the court of the high countries, where poverty is welcome and vulgarity inadmissible.

Those who love certain animals selfishly, pampering them as so many mothers do their children that they may be loved in return, betray them to their enemies. They love favourites, not animals, and help make the world dislike animals; theirs are the dogs that growl and snap inhospitably. A dog-parliament would condemn such dogs to be discreetly bitten and their mistresses avoided. If animals are meant to grow, she is the enemy of any animal whose development she stunts by unwise indulgence; that animal is not in the fair way to enter whatever heaven animals have. The education of the lower lies at the door of the higher, and in true education is truest kindness.

But what shall I say of those who torture animals for any end? I hardly dare trust myself to express my judgment of their conduct.

'We are investigators; we are not doing it for our own sakes, but for the sake of others, our fellow-men.'

The higher your motive, the greater the blame of your unrighteousness. Must we congratulate you on a love for your fellows that inspires you to wrong the weaker, who have no helper against you? Would we call worthy a man who robbed another too feeble to protect himself, for his friend's sake? No real good can grow in the soil of injustice.

I cannot help suspecting that the desire to know has a greater share in the enormity than the desire to help. Alas for the science that sacrifices the law of righteousness merely to behold a law of sequence! The tree of knowledge will never prove to man the tree of life. No law says, Thou shalt know; a thousand laws cry, Thou shalt do right. The greed of knowing casts out righteousness, mercy and faith. Whatever benefit may be wrought for higher creatures, the injustice to the lower is not affected. Justice has no respect of persons, but the weaker surely most need it.

Labour is a law of the universe and death a law of this world at least, and neither is an evil; both are for the best good of those who labour and die. Torture is the law of no world but the hell of human invention. It is doubtless overruled for the good of the tortured, but it will one day burn a hell in the hearts of the torturers.

Torture can be inflicted only by the superior. The divine idea of a superior is one who requires duty and protects, helps and delivers: our relation to the animals is that of their superiors in the family, who may require labour but are just and protective. Can they know anything of the Father who neither love nor rule their inferiors but use them as a child his insensate toys, pulling them to pieces to know what is inside? These so-called men of science lust to know as if a man's life lay in knowing, as if ignorance were so vile that, for their hoard of facts, they do right in breaking with torture into the house of the innocent. They shall not thus find the way of understanding. He who loves knowledge most genuinely will most patiently wait until it can be had righteously.

Need I argue the injustice? Can a sentient creature come forth without rights, without claim to well-being or to consideration from the other creatures it finds present in space? If one answers, 'For aught I know, it may be so,' where then are your own rights? If another has none, yours must lie in your superior power; and will not a stronger than you one day come? May you not be in Naboth's place, with an Ahab getting up to possess your vineyard, or a rich man coming after your little ewe lamb? That the animals' rights are less than ours does not make them the less rights. They have little, and we have much; ought they therefore to have less and we more? Must we not rather be the more anxious that they have their little to the full? Every gain of injustice is a loss to the world, for life consists neither in length of days nor in ease of body. As to knowledge, let justice guide your search and you will know the sooner. Do the will of God, and you shall know God, and he will open your eyes to look into the heart of knowledge. Force your violent way and you gain knowledge only to miss truth: you may wound the heart of God, but you cannot rend it asunder to find the Truth enthroned there.

What man would he be who accepted the offer to be healed and kept alive by means that required the torture of certain animals? Would he feel himself a gentleman, walking the earth with his life upheld by the agonies of other lives?

'I hope, sir, your health is better than it has been?'

'Thank you, I am wonderfully restored; I have entered upon a fresh lease of life. My organism has been nourished with the agonies of several dogs and the pangs of a multitude of rabbits and guinea-pigs, and I am aware of a marvellous change for the better. They gave me their lives, and I gave them in return worse pains than mine. The bargain has proved quite satisfactory! They could not defend themselves, and had not a word to say. Poor fools! they were neither so wise nor so strong nor such lovers of comfort as I. Every animal for himself!'

There was a certain patriotic priest who thought it better to put a just man to death than that a whole nation should perish. Precious salvation that might be wrought by injustice! But the just man taught that the rich man and the beggar must one day change places.

'To set the life of a dog against the life of a human being!'

No, but the torture of a dog against the prolonged life of a being capable of torturing him. Priceless gain, the lengthening of such a life, to the man and his friends and his country!

That the animals do not suffer so much as we should under like inflictions, I hope true, and think true. But is toothache nothing because there are worse pains for head and face?

Not a few who now regard themselves as benefactors of mankind will one day be looked on with a disapprobation no argument will now convince them they deserve; and another day is coming when they themselves will sorrowfully condemn their own deeds, for they are not stones but men, and must repent. Let them, in the interests of humanity, give their own entrails to the knife, their own silver cord to be laid bare, their own golden bowl to be watched throbbing, and I will worship at their feet. But shall I admire their discoveries at the expense of the stranger, nay, no stranger, the poor brother within their gates?

Your conscience does not trouble you? Take heed that the light in you be not darkness. Will it suffice you in that hour to say, 'My burning desire to know how life wrought in him drove me through the gates and bars of his living house'? I doubt you will add, in your heart, 'and I did well.'

To those who expect a world to come, I say: let us take heed how we carry ourselves toward the creation that is to share the world to come with us.

To those whose hearts are sore for that creation, I say: the Lord is mindful of his own, and will save both man and beast.

THE END.