# Unspoken Sermons: A Modern Paraphrase

*Unspoken Sermons, 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.*

## First Series

*These Ears of Corn. gathered and rubbed in my hands upon broken Sabbaths, I offer first to my Wife, and then to my other Friends.*

### THE CHILD IN THE MIDST

*The passage:* Jesus came to Capernaum and asked the disciples in the house what they had argued about on the road. They kept silent, for they had argued about which of them was greatest. He sat down, called the twelve, and said that whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all. Then he set a child among them, took him in his arms, and said that whoever receives one such child in his name receives him, and whoever receives him receives the one who sent him.

Mark's account is the fuller, but Matthew's record enriches it and makes its lesson plainer.

"Unless you are converted and become like little children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this little child is greatest there. Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me. But whoever makes one of these little believers stumble would be better drowned in the sea with a millstone round his neck."

These passages record a lesson against ambition and rivalry. But I write not to set out that lesson but for a truth about God in which his great argument reaches its height.

He took a little child, possibly Peter's, since Mark says this was at Capernaum, "in the house." Peter's very faults were those of a childish nature, so we might expect his child to have the childlike face and bearing the lesson needs.

There are children who are not childlike. One of the saddest and commonest sights is the face of a child so full of worldly wisdom that both the human childishness and the divine childlikeness are gone. For the *childlike* is the divine, and the very word leads me on my way. But I must first remove a difficulty that turns us toward one of the grandest truths yet away from the truth the Lord had in view here.

The difficulty is this. Would the *Son of man* pick out the beautiful child and leave the common one unnoticed? Even publicans do as much. Does a mother's heart not cling closest to the deformed of her little ones? And shall Christ, as we believe him, choose by the look of the eye? Would he turn from the child born in sin and taught iniquity, whose pinched face shows hunger, daring and love of praise combined into the cunning of avaricious age, and take up the child of honest parents like Peter and his wife, who could not help looking better? That would not be he who came to seek and to save the lost. Let the man who loves his brother say which child, in his highest moments of love to God, he would clasp to his bosom of refuge, when he is nearest to that ideal humanity in which *a man* shall be a hiding-place from the wind. Would it not be the evil-faced child, because that child needed it most? Yes; in God's name, yes. Who that has read of the lost sheep or the found prodigal will deny it is the divine way? It will often *appear* otherwise, since the childlike child is easier to save and may *come* first. But heaven rejoices most over the sheep that wandered farthest, perhaps born on the wild hillside and never in the fold. For such a prodigal the elder brother in heaven prays: "Lord, think about my poor brother more than about me, for I know thee, and am at rest in thee. I am with thee always."

Why then do I say the child was probably Peter's, and certainly looked childlike because it was? Because no amount of evil *is* the child. No evil, in face, habits or heart, can make a child cease to be a child or destroy the divine idea of childhood that moved in God when he made that child in his image. God speaks of the essential, judges by the real, and is God of the undying.

I grant this heartily. If the Lord's aim had been to teach love of neighbour, the ugliest child might have served best. Whoever receives any child, most plainly a repulsive one, because it is God's offspring and his own brother, receives the Father; whoever gives a cup of cold water to a little one refreshes the Father's heart. Any human being, especially a wretched outcast, would do as well as a child to show that love. So something more is intended: the lesson lies not in the *humanity* but in the *childhood* of the child.

If the disciples could have seen that the essential childhood was meant, not a blurred and half-obliterated one, even a selfish child might have served, though no better than a childlike one. But the child was used as a sign of the truth in his childhood, so that the eyes as well as the ears might carry it to the heart. What mattered then was not that he be beautiful but that he be childlike: the qualities that wake in us the love peculiar to childhood, which is just the perception of the childhood, had at least to glimmer from the face of the *chosen type*. Would an unchildlike child, such as we sometimes see, in purple and lace in a great house or in dirt and rags in a squalid close, have suited the Lord when he said his listeners must become like this child, and the lesson was the divine nature of childlikeness? Beside his words "this little child," "one of such children," "these little ones that believe in me," such a child would have been ludicrous but for the horror of it. Even the pity a good heart would feel for him would have turned it from the lesson.

Let me show more fully that the lesson lay in the childhood, not the humanity. The disciples had been disputing who should be greatest, and the Lord wanted to show them that such a dispute has nothing to do with his kingdom. So he set a child before them as a specimen of his subjects. It was in virtue of his childhood, not his humanity, that the child represented a subject, and what he showed was the nature of the kingdom, not its scope. They could enter only by becoming little children, by humbling themselves; ruling is excluded where childlikeness is the one essential quality. The question was no longer who should rule but who should serve: not who should look down from the conquered heights of authority, even sacred authority, but who should look up, honouring humanity and ministering to it, until humanity is persuaded of its own honour as a temple of the living God. That lesson lay in the child's *childhood*.

But now to my chief aim, for this lesson sprang from a yet higher truth. Nothing is required of man that is not first in God; we must be perfect because God is perfect. The child is set before us in the gospel to reveal God to all souls, that they may be saved by knowing him and becoming like him. He shares the blessing of this passage who, in giving the cup of water or the embrace, meets the essential childhood and embraces the *childish* humanity of the child, not he who embraces it out of love to humanity, or even love to God as its Father. Seeing the childhood as divine is what shows the disciple how vain is the strife for place in the great kingdom.

For it is *in my name*. That means *as representing me*, and so *as being like me*; the Lord could not have anyone received in his name who could not more or less represent him. And since he had just told the disciples to become like this child, telling them to receive *such* a child in his name must imply something common to them all, in which the child, Jesus and the disciples meet. What can that be but spiritual childhood? *In my name* does not mean *because I will it*. A bare declaration of his will would find ten thousand to obey, even to suffering, for one able to receive so vital a truth about his character; but he wants obedience to the *truth*, the Light of the World, truth beheld and known. The full meaning, which alone makes the passage a whole, is a revelation from resemblance, from fitness to represent and so reveal. He who receives a child in Jesus' name perceives where Jesus and the child are one: he must see not only the *ideal* child, the loveliness of true childhood, in the child he receives, but that the child is like Jesus, or rather that the Lord is like the child, and is embraced by every heart childlike enough to embrace a child for his childness. I do not say only those conscious of this share the blessing. But a lofty knowledge of blessedness belongs to embracing a child as the visible likeness of the Lord; for the blessing is the God-known truth itself, that the Lord has the heart of a child, and the man who perceives it knows he is blessed because it is true.

But the argument about *in my name* is incomplete until we follow our Lord's words to their higher stage: whoever receives me receives him who sent me. The link between the first and second is probably the same as between the second and third. I do not say it must be; I aim not at logical certainty but at showing the idea I am approaching. If once my reader beholds it and cannot receive it, logic would do little for him, and he can easily suggest other connections, though none so symmetrical. How does he who receives the Son receive the Father? Because the Son is as the Father; whoever perceives the essential in Christ has the essence of the Father, and is one with it by recognition and worship. And I think the first link is the same: he who sees the essential in this child, the pure childhood, sees the essence of Christ, grace and truth, in a word, childlikeness. The child is not therefore perfect as Christ is, but it is the same in kind, and so, manifest in the child, it reveals what is in Jesus.

Then to receive a child in the name of Jesus is to receive Jesus; to receive Jesus is to receive God; therefore to receive the child is to receive God himself.

I can show that this was in our Lord's heart as he spoke from another golden thread in the shining web of his words.

What is the kingdom of Christ? A rule of love, truth and service, in which the king is the chief servant. The kings of the earth hold dominion, but it shall not be so among his followers; the Son of Man came to minister; his Father works, and so he works. The great Workman is the great King, labouring for his own, so whoever would be greatest there and nearest the King must be servant of all. It is *like king like subject*: no rule of force, of one kind over another, but of *kind*, of *nature*, of *God*. If we must become children to enter it, the spirit of children must pervade it from lowly subject to lowliest king. Luke adds that he who is least among them will be great; Matthew, that whoever humbles himself like this child is greatest. Hence the sign between king and subject: the subject kneels to earthly kings, but the heavenly king takes his subject in his arms.

To glance back: to receive the child because God receives it, or for its humanity, is one thing; to receive it because it is like God, or for its childhood, is another. The first does little against ambition; alone, it might only widen its scope by admitting all men to the arena. The second strikes at the root of emulation: the moment even service is done for honour and not for service's sake, the doer is outside the kingdom. And the childhood we receive in Christ's name is humanity; childhood is humanity's deepest, divine heart, so in the child we receive all humanity. The lesson, though about childhood, returns upon our race, which we receive with wider arms and a deeper heart. Nothing is lost, and there is no heartlessness in insisting the child was lovable and childlike.

If heaven holds a picture of that teaching, we shall see a dim childhood shining from the faces of the disciples around the Son of God with a child in his arms: dim in the men, trustfully clear in the child, triumphant in the Lord, with all his wisdom and truth upholding that radiant serenity of faith in his Father. Truly, O Lord, this childhood is life. When thy tenderness has made the world great, all men, children like thee, will smile in the face of the great God.

Now to the highest point: whoever receives him receives the one who sent him. To receive a child in God's name is to receive God himself. How? As he alone can be received, by knowing him as he is; to know him is to have him in us. So let us receive this revelation in the Lord's own words.

God is represented in Jesus because he is like Jesus; Jesus is represented in the child because he is like the child. Therefore God is represented in the child because he is like the child. God is childlike. To see this truly is to receive God in the child.

Having reached this point, I have done with argument. If the Lord meant this, and it is true, whoever can receive it will, and whoever has ears will hear; the truth carries its own conviction.

Still, the word of one who has seen this truth may help the dawn of a like perception in those who face the east, for men may see dimly and want to see more. So let us brood a little over the idea, and see whether it commends itself to that spirit which, one with the human spirit where it dwells, searches the deep things of God. The true heart may at first be shocked, as Peter was when he said, "That be far from thee, Lord," but after a season it will receive the truth and rejoice.

Let me ask, then: do you believe in the Incarnation? If so, was Jesus ever less divine than God? I answer for you: never; lower, but never less divine. Was he not a child, then? You say, "Yes, but not like other children." But did he not look like them? If he looked like them and was not like them, it was a masquerade. I say he was a child, whatever more he might be. God is man, and infinitely more. Our Lord became flesh but did not *become* man; he took the form of man because he was man already. And he was, is, and ever shall be divinely childlike; he could never have been a child if he were ever to cease being one, for in him the transient found nothing. Childhood belongs to the divine nature. Obedience is as divine as Will, and Service as divine as Rule, for both are a doing of the truth, and the love in them is the same. Fatherhood and Sonship are one, save that Fatherhood looks down lovingly and Sonship looks up lovingly. Love is all, and God is all in all. He is ever seeking to get down to us, to be the divine man to us, and we are ever saying, "That be far from thee, Lord!" In our unbelief we guard a divine dignity he is too grand to think about. More pleasing to God, it needs little daring to say, is the audacity of Job, who flings open the door of the presence-chamber and, like a troubled, perhaps angry, but faithful child, cries to one whose perfect Fatherhood he has yet to learn: "Am I a sea or a whale, that thou settest a watch over me?"

Let us dare to climb the height of divine truth to which the Lord's words lead.

Does it not lead us here: that God's devotion to his creatures is perfect, that he thinks not of himself but of them, and wants nothing for himself but finds his blessedness in the outgoing of blessedness?

Ah, it is a terrible glory---must it also be a lonely one? We will come near with our human answer, giving ourselves up in the faith of Jesus. He gives himself to us; shall we not give ourselves to him, and to one another, whom he loves?

For when is the child the ideal child to us? Is it not when he gently takes his father by the beard and turns that face up to his brothers and sisters to kiss, when even the lovely selfishness of seeking love has gone and the heart is absorbed in loving?

In this, then, God is like the child: he is simply and altogether our friend and father, more than friend, father and mother, our infinite, love-perfect God. Grander and stronger than human imagination can conceive in poet-thinking or kingly action, he is more delicate than human tenderness can conceive in husband or wife, more homely than the human heart can conceive in father or mother. He has not two thoughts about us. All with him is simplicity of purpose and end: that we should be as he is, think his thoughts, and have his blessedness. It is so plain that everyone shall see it. He is utterly true and good to us, and nothing shall withstand his will.

How terribly the theologians have misrepresented God by the measure of the low and showy human qualities rather than the lofty and simple! Nearly all picture him as a great King on a grand throne, thinking how grand he is, making it the business of his being and the end of his universe to keep up his glory, and wielding the bolts of a Jupiter against those who take his name in vain. They would not admit it, but follow out what they say and it comes to this. Brothers, have you found our king? There he is, kissing little children and saying they are like God; at table with a fisherman's head on his bosom, heavy at heart that even the beloved disciple cannot yet understand him well. The simplest peasant who loves his children and his sheep is a true type of our God beside that monstrosity of a monarch.

The God who is ever uttering himself in the changing profusion of nature; who takes millions of years to form a soul that will understand him and be blessed; who is never in haste; who welcomes the simplest thought of truth or beauty as the return on seed sown in the old fallows of eternity, and rejoices in a faltering moment's answer to the age-long cry of his wisdom in the streets; the God of music, painting and building, the Lord of Hosts, the God of mountains and oceans; whose laws go out from one unseen point of wisdom and return without the loss of an atom; the God of history working in time toward christianity: this God is the God of little children, and he alone can be perfectly, abandonedly simple and devoted. The deepest, purest love of a woman has its wellspring in him. Our longings can no more exhaust the Godhead's treasures than our imagination can measure them. No thought, joy or hope of any of his creatures passes unseen; and while one remains unsatisfied, he is not Lord over all.

Therefore, with angels and archangels, with the spirits of the just made perfect, with the little children of the kingdom, with the Lord himself, and for all who do not know him, we praise his name in itself, saying *Our Father*. We do not draw back because we are unworthy, hard-hearted or careless of good. It is his childlikeness that makes him our God and Father; the perfection of his relation to us swallows up all our imperfections, for our childhood is born of his fatherhood. That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in utter dearth of feeling and desire, without a glow or an aspiration, weighed down with low thoughts, failures, neglects and forgetfulness, and say, "Thou art my refuge, because thou art my home."

Such a faith does not lead to presumption. The man who can pray this prayer knows better than anyone that God is not mocked, that he is not a man who changes his mind, that tears and entreaties will not move him to break one of his laws, and that giving a man what is out of harmony with truth and right because he asked would be to damn him, to cast him into the outer darkness. He knows the childlike, imperturbable God will let no man out of that prison till he has paid the uttermost farthing.

And if he forgets this, the God he belongs to does not forget it, or him. Life is not a series of chances with a few providences sprinkled between to prop up a failing belief, but one providence of God, and before long life itself will remind him, perhaps in agony of soul. When he prays for comfort the answer may be dismay, terror and the Father's countenance turned aside, for love itself, for love's sake, turns its face from what is not lovely; and he will read on the dark wall of his imprisoned conscience the words, awful and glorious, *Our God is a consuming fire*.

### THE CONSUMING FIRE

*The passage:* Our God is a consuming fire.

Nothing is inexorable but love. Love that yields to prayer is imperfect and poor, and what yields is its alloy, not love. If at the voice of entreaty love conquers displeasure, that is love asserting itself, not giving up its claims. Love does not grant a boon unwillingly, still less answer a prayer to the hurt of the one who prays. Love is one, and changeless.

For love loves unto purity. It always has in view the absolute loveliness of what it beholds. Where that is incomplete, love spends itself to make the beloved more lovely, that it may love more; it strives for perfection so that itself may be perfected in the object. As love first created humanity, so human love, in proportion to its divinity, goes on creating the beautiful for its outpouring. Nothing is eternal but what loves and can be loved, and love climbs ever toward the consummation when such shall be the universe.

Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love's kind, must be destroyed.

And our God is a consuming fire.

If this is hard to understand, it is as simple, absolute truth is hard to understand. It may take centuries of ages of strife and aspiration before a man sees a truth; once he does, it is so plain he wonders how he lived without it. He did not understand sooner only because he did not see; to see a truth, to know it, to understand it and to love it are all one. Many a motion toward it, misery for want of it, cry of conscience against neglecting it and dim longing for it as an unknown need comes first, before the night of dreams yields to the sun of truth. But once beheld, it is for ever. To see one divine fact is to stand face to face with essential eternal life.

For this vision of truth God has worked for ages of ages. For this simple condition, this apex of life, where a man wonders like a child that he cannot make others see as he sees, the whole labour of God's science, history and poetry---from the time the earth gathered itself into a lonely drop of fire from the red rim of the driving sun-wheel to the time Alexander John Scott worshipped him from its face---has been evolving truth upon truth, in lovely vision and torturing law, never lying, never repenting. For this his patience will labour while any soul's child-heart is not yet born; for this the divine destruction has gone forth, that his life might be our life, and in us too might dwell that same consuming fire which is essential love.

Let us look at the apostle's words crowned with this lovely terror: "Our God is a consuming fire."

The apostle says we receive a kingdom that cannot be moved, so let us have grace to serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear, for our God is a consuming fire. The kingdom is immovable because it is of the eternal world, of being and truth. We are to serve the Consuming Fire with divine fear: not the fear that cringes and craves, but the bowing of all thoughts, delights and loves before him who is the life of them all and will have them pure. He will shake heaven and earth (verse 27) that only the unshakeable may remain; he is a consuming fire that only what cannot be consumed may stand forth eternal. His nature is so terribly pure that, like fire, it destroys all that is not pure, and so demands such purity in our worship. The fire will not burn us if we do not worship thus; it will burn us until we do, and go on burning within us after all foreign to it has yielded, no longer with pain, but as the highest consciousness of life, the presence of God. When evil, which alone is consumable, has passed from the dwellers in that kingdom, man's nature will look God's in the face and his fear will be pure; a holy fear springs from knowing the nature, not from a sense of the power. Since what cannot be consumed is one within itself, in such a soul fear of God will be one with the homeliest love, and make a man flee not from him but from himself, to him, in terror lest he wrong God or his neighbour. The first words after this, on how to serve God acceptably, are "Let brotherly love continue." To love our brother is to worship the Consuming Fire.

The symbol of *the consuming fire* seems to have been suggested to the writer by the fire on the mountain of the old law, part of God's revelation to the Israelites. It was not the first such revelation: the symbol of God's presence, before which Moses had to put off his shoes, was a fire that *did not consume the bush in which it burned*. Both were revelations of terror. But the same symbol in a New Testament writer should mean more, not than it meant before, but than it was before used to express, for it could not express more than they could perceive. What could a nation of slaves, with the rust of chains eaten into their souls, who would have gone back to bondage rather than miss the food they liked best, see in that fire but terror and destruction? They had no state of mind to think of purification by fire, and if they had, the suffering would soon have overwhelmed the thought. Nor would they have listened to any teaching not supported by terror. Fear was what they were fit for; they had no worship for any being they did not have to fear.

Was this show on Sinai, then, a device to move obedience such as bad nurses use with children, a hint of vague and false horror? Was it not a true revelation of God?

If it was not a true revelation it was none: either the story is false or the display was a political trick of Moses. Those who can read Moses' mind will hardly believe the latter, and those who understand the scope of the revelation see no reason for the former. That a thing would be politic as deception does not exclude another source; some believe so little in an ordered world that fitness itself is for them a reason for unbelief.

At all events, if God showed them these things, he showed them what was true, a revelation of himself. He puts on a face, not a mask. He will not speak out of flaming fire if there is nothing in him for it to reveal, nor terrify even brutish children with a lie.

It was a revelation, but a partial one; a true symbol, not a final vision.

No revelation can be other than partial. If a man must be told all the truth for a true revelation, then farewell to revelation, and to sonship; what other than a partial revelation can the highest spiritual condition receive of the infinite God? But it is not untrue for being partial. For a lower receiver a more partial revelation may be truer than a fuller one, which might reveal nothing to him. Only a revelation that precluded growth, chaining the man to its incompleteness, would be false. The true revelation rouses the desire to know more by the truth of its incompleteness.

Here was a nation at its lowest: could it receive anything but a partial revelation of fear? How could the Hebrews not be terrified at what opposed all they knew of themselves, who thought it good to honour a golden calf? Such as they were, they did well to be afraid. Acknowledging a terror *above* them, flaming on an unknown height, was better than worshipping the idol below. Fear is nobler than sensuality and better than no God or a god made with hands, and in it lay hidden the sense of the infinite. The worship of fear is true though very low, not acceptable to God in itself yet precious even to him, for he regards men not as they merely are but as they are growing, or can grow, toward the image after which he made them. A thousand stages, each almost valueless alone, are of inestimable worth as gradations of an infinite progress; a condition that in decline would show a devil may in growth show a saint. So the revelation, neither final nor complete, but calling forth the best they could give and making higher revelation possible, may have been a true one.

But this very revelation of fire is true in a higher sense to the rejoicing saint as to the trembling sinner; the saint sees farther into its meaning. The symbol needed not to be superseded, only unfolded. While men take part *with* their sins, feeling that without them they would not be themselves, how can they understand that the lightning word is a Saviour, piercing to the dividing between the man and the evil, slaying the sin and giving life to the sinner? Is it comfort to be told that God loves them so that he will burn them clean? To them the cleansing can only be torture; they do not want to be clean, and cannot bear to be tortured. Can they, or can we wish them to, do other than fear God, even with the fear of the wicked, until they learn to love him with the love of the holy? To them Sinai is crowned with signs of vengeance. And is not God ready to do to them as they fear, though with another feeling and a different end than they can suppose? He is against sin; so far as they and sin are one he is against their desires, aims, fears and hopes, and so is altogether and always *for them*. That thunder, lightning and tempest, that blackness torn with the trumpet, that visible horror billowed with the voice of words, was a faint image for slaves' senses of what God feels against vileness and selfishness, meant to leave the stupid people, fearing somewhat to do as they would, a little room for grace to grow in them, until they saw that evil, not fire, is the fearful thing, and would gladly rush up into the trumpet-blast of Sinai to escape the flutes around the golden calf. Had they understood this, they would have needed no Sinai. It was a true, and of necessity a partial revelation: partial in order to be true.

Even Moses, the man of God, was not ready for the revelation in store, though from love to his people he prayed God to blot him out of his book of life. If that means he offered himself as a sacrifice *instead* of them, it shows why he could not be glorified with the vision of the Redeemer: he thought to appease God, not seeing that God is as tender as himself, the Reconciler and Redeemer, who cares for no atonement but the sacrifice of the heart. Nor could he see that it was the kindest thing God could do to tell him that he who had sinned should suffer. But I doubt that was what he meant. It seems rather a divine despair: he would not survive the children of his people, and cared nothing for a love that would save him alone and send those calf-worshipping thousands to the dust. Either way, how much could Moses have understood had he seen the face and not the back of the form that passed the cleft of the rock amid the thunderous vapours of Sinai? Suppose it had turned on him: the face of him who was more man than any man, through which the divine emotion would in ages to come show itself to men; the face of him who bore and was yet to bear their griefs and sorrows, who now bears ours; the face of the Son of God, who, instead of accepting a creature's sacrifice to satisfy his justice or support his dignity, gave himself utterly to them and so to the Father by doing his lovely will, and suffered unto death not that men might not suffer but that their suffering might be like his and lead them to his perfection. Would Moses have lived? Would he not have died, not of splendour or sorrow (terror was not there) but of the sight of the incomprehensible? Or if mystery had not slain him, would he not have gone about dazed, with no business left in the world, God being to him altogether unknown? A full revelation would be not only no revelation but the destruction of all revelation.

"Then may it not hurt to say that God is Love, all love and nothing other? It is not enough to answer that it is true; too much revelation may hurt by dazzling and blinding."

There is a great difference between a mystery of God that no man understands and one laid hold of, even by one man. The latter is already a revelation, and passing through his mind it will be presented, perhaps so *feebly*, that it will not hurt his fellows. Let God conceal as he will (though I believe he is ever destroying concealment, wanting to reveal everything), the light any man has received is not to be hid under a bushel. In sowing the seed God will not withhold his hand for thorns and stony places and waysides; even a bird may carry the matter, the good seed may overcome the thorns, and what withers on stony ground may leave a deeper soil for the next seed. Besides, only those with ears to hear can receive the doctrine. The selfish man could not believe it, and would misinterpret it if he could. The loving soul, oppressed by wrong teaching or partial truth claiming to be the whole, will hear, understand and rejoice.

When we say God is Love, do we teach men their fear of him is groundless? No. As much as they fear will come upon them, possibly far more. But beyond their fear is a divine fate they cannot withstand, for it works along with the human individuality that the divine individuality created in them. The wrath will consume what they *call* themselves, so that the selves God made appear, with tenfold consciousness of being, bringing all that made the blessedness of the life they tried to live without God. They will know that now first they are fully themselves. The avaricious, weary, selfish, suspicious old man will have passed away; the ever young self will remain. What they *thought* themselves will have vanished; what they *felt* themselves, though they misjudged it, will remain, glorified in repentant hope. What is immortal in God remains in man; the death in them is consumed.

It is the law of Nature, that is, of God, that all that is destructible shall be destroyed. When what is immortal buries itself in the destructible, hearing only from without and nothing from the eternal doors within, it cannot know its own immortality. The destructible must be burned out of it before it can *partake* of eternal life; when the fire of eternal life possesses a man, the destructible is gone and he is pure. Many a man's work must be burned that he may be saved "so as by fire." The lordships and Rabbi-hoods of the world go away in smoke, and the man who acquiesces is saved, for the fire has destroyed the destructible, the vantage point of the deathly, which would destroy body and soul in hell. If he still clings to what can be burned, the burning goes deeper till it reaches the roots of the falsehood that enslaves him, possibly by looking like the truth.

The man who loves God and is not yet pure courts the burning of God, and it is not always torture; the fire sometimes shows itself only as light, yet still purifies. The consuming fire is the original, active form of Purity, which is Love, the creative energy of God. Without purity there is no creation and no persistence: what is not pure is corruptible, and corruption cannot inherit incorruption.

The man whose deeds are evil fears the burning, but it will not come the less for his fearing or denying it. Escape is hopeless, for Love is inexorable. Our God is a consuming fire. He shall not come out till he has paid the uttermost farthing.

If the man resists the burning of God, a terrible doom awaits him, and its day will come: he who hates the fire of God shall be cast into the outer darkness. What sick dismay will seize him! However little a man cares about God, he does not exist without him; God is here, upholding, warming, delighting and teaching him, and giving him himself though he knows it not. But when God withdraws as far as that can be without the man's ceasing to be, and the man feels himself abandoned, hanging in ceaseless vertigo on the verge of the gulf of his being, without support, refuge, aim or end (for the soul has no weapons to destroy herself), with no inbreathing of joy and nothing to make life good, then he will listen in agony for the faintest sound of life from the closed door. If the moan of suffering humanity ever reaches that outcast of darkness, he will be ready to rush into the very heart of the Consuming Fire to know life once more, to change this terror of sick negation for that region of painful hope. Imagination cannot mislead us into too much horror of being without God, that one living death. Is not this to be worse than worst Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts Imagine howling?

But with this divine difference: the outer darkness is only the most dreadful form of the consuming fire, the fire without light, the darkness visible, the black flame. God has withdrawn but not lost his hold; his face is turned away but his hand is still on the man. His heart has ceased to beat into the man's, but he keeps him alive by his fire, which goes on searching and burning in him as in the highest saint not yet pure as he is pure.

But at length, O God, wilt thou not cast Death and Hell into the lake of Fire---even into thine own consuming self? Death shall then die everlastingly,

| And Hell itself will pass away,
|  And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.

Then indeed wilt thou be all in all. For then our poor brothers and sisters, every one, will have been burnt clean and brought home---O God, we trust in thee, the Consuming Fire. If their moans, myriads of ages away, would turn heaven for us into hell, shall a man be more merciful than God? Shall mercy alone of all his glories not be infinite? Shall a brother love a brother more than the Father loves a son, more than the Brother Christ loves his brother? Would he not die yet again to save one brother more?

As for us, we will now come to thee, our Consuming Fire. Thou wilt not burn us more than we can bear, but thou wilt burn us. And though thou seem to slay us, yet will we trust in thee even for what thou hast not spoken, if by any means at length we may attain the blessedness of those *who have not seen and yet have believed*.

### THE HIGHER FAITH

*The passage:* Jesus told Thomas that he had believed because he had seen, and that those who have not seen and yet have believed are blessed.

The aspiring child is often checked by the dull disciple, who has learned his lessons so imperfectly he never got beyond his school-books, and perceives the principle of none of his fragmentary rules. The child comes with his heart full: some outburst of feeling, spark of hope, or wide imagination that draws nature and humanity into religion---for to the child the Father's doings fill all space, and he has not learned to divide God from nature, Providence from grace, love from benevolence. The dull disciple answers: "God has said nothing about that in his word, so we have no right to believe anything about it. It is not revealed." He cannot suspect that what is hidden from him may be revealed to the babe; with the authority of years and ignorance he forbids the child, for he believes in no revelation but the Bible, in which all revelation lies buried, to be exhumed and reassembled into a rigid skeleton of metaphysical and legal contrivance for letting God's love have its way unchecked by the other perfections of his being.

But the man who would live through the whole divine form of his being, not confined to one broken corner and leaving the rest to demons, will meet a thousand questions the Bible never mentions. Has he nothing to do with them? "Leave them," says the dull disciple. "I cannot," says the man; "the peace of mind without which I cannot act depends on the answers, and my conduct must match them." "Leave them till God chooses to explain." "No. Questions imply answers. He has put the questions in my heart and holds the answers in his. I will wait, but not till I have knocked; I will be patient, but not till I have asked; I will seek until I find. He has something for me. My prayer shall go up to the God of my life."

Sad indeed if the Bible had told us *everything* God meant us to believe. But the Bible is wronged here: it nowhere claims to be *the* Word, *the* Way, *the* Truth. It leads us to Jesus, the ever unfolding Revelation of God. All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hid in Christ, not in the Bible except as it leads to him. They are hid in him, are they not, that they may be revealed to us when we need them, his holding them the mediatorial step toward their unfolding in us? Is he not the Truth to men, the High Priest who answers all the troubled questions of their dim humanity? For his heart contains of good, wise, just, the perfect shape.

Didymus answers, "What we know not now, we shall know hereafter." Questions that come here must be inquired into here, and if not answered here, then there, till they are. More is hid in Christ than we shall ever learn; but those who begin to inquire first will soonest be gladdened with revelation, and he will be best pleased with them, for his disciples' slowness troubled him of old. To say we must wait for the other world to know the mind of him who came to this world to give himself to us seems to me the foolishness of a worldly and lazy spirit. The Son of God *is* the Teacher of men, giving them his Spirit, which is to a man the mind of Christ and manifests the deep things of God. The great heresy of the Church today is unbelief in this Spirit: most of the Church does not believe the Spirit has a revelation for every man individually, as different from the Bible's as food becoming brain and nerve is from bread and meat. Filled with the mind of Christ, we would know the Bible had done its work and passed away for us, that the Word of God might abide. The Bible's one use is to make us look at Jesus, that through him we may know his Father and our Father, his God and our God. Till then, let us hold it dear as the moon of our darkness, by which we travel toward the east, not as the sun from which her light comes, toward which we haste, so that walking in the sun himself we need no more the mirror of his absent brightness.

This doctrine of the Spirit is not my end now, though without it all religion would be vain, St Paul's and Socrates' alike. I want to show that a man will please God better by believing some things not told him than by confining his faith to what is expressly said---said to arouse in us the truth-seeing faculty, the spiritual desire, the prayer for the good things God gives to those who ask.

"But is this not dangerous? Will a man not be taught to believe, even to pray for, what he likes best? Will he not grow arrogant in his confidence?"

If the Spirit strives with our spirit and God teaches men, we may leave those dreaded results to him. A man of the Lord's company is safer with him than those who secure their safety by hanging on the outskirts and daring nothing. If he is not taught of God in what he hopes for, God will let him know, giving something other than he prays for. If he can pray for anything not good, the answer will come in the flames of the consuming fire, which will soon bring him to some of his spiritual senses; better to be so sharply tutored than to go at a snail's pace. And as for arrogance, I have seen nothing breed it faster or more offensively than the worship of the letter.

To whom should a man whom God has made look for what he likes best, but God? If we have seen that God is our Father, as the Lord taught, let us go on to understand that he is far more: his nearness is beyond the highest idea of father, and fatherhood is but a step toward the Godhood for those who can receive it. What a man likes best *may* be God's will, the voice of the Spirit striving *with* his spirit; and if it is not, there is the consuming fire. The danger is not in asking God for what is not good, nor in hoping to receive it, but in not asking him, in not having him of our council. Nor will not daring to inquire his will spare us from acting in matters we call unrevealed; and for such a disposition of mind the book itself is unlikely to hold much revelation.

The whole matter may safely be left to God.

But I doubt if a man *can* ask anything bad of God. One who has begun to pray is child enough to know bad from good when it comes so near, and dares not pray for *that*. If you point to David praying such fearful prayers against his enemies, read them by the man and his history: when his greatest enemy was delivered into his hands, this man of burning eastern heart contented himself with cutting off the skirt of his garment instead of taking an eastern's vengeance. What he craved was justice and right, though his prayers took a wild form of words; God heard him and gave him what contented him. In a good man, "revenge is," as Lord Bacon says, "a kind of wild justice," and easily satisfied. The heart's desire upon such a one's enemies is best met when hate is changed into love and compassion.

But it is about hopes rather than prayers that I wish to write.

What should I think of my child if he limited his faith in me, and hope from me, to the few promises he had heard me utter! The faith that limits itself to God's promises shares that paltry character: good enough for a Pagan, but for a Christian miserable and wretched. Those who rest in it would be more comfortable with God's bond than his word, which they regard not as the outcome of his character but as a pledge of his honour. They try to believe the truth of his word but do not understand the truth of his Being; they trust his oath, but in *himself* they do not believe, for they know him not. Little wonder they distrust those swellings of the heart that are his drawings of the man toward him, as sun and moon heave the ocean heavenward. Brother, sister, if this is your faith, you must not stop there. Come out of this bondage of the law to which you give the name of grace, for little gracious is in it. You will yet know the dignity of your high calling and the love of God that passes knowledge. He is not afraid of your presumptuous approach; you are afraid to come near him. He is not watching over his dignity; you fear being sent away as the disciples would have sent away the children. You think so much about your souls and fear so much to lose your life that you dare not draw near the Life of life, lest it consume you.

Our God, we will trust thee. Shall we not find thee equal to our faith? One day we shall laugh at ourselves for expecting so little; thy giving will not be limited by our hoping.

O thou of little faith! "In everything"---I quote one who knew his master Christ and in his strength opposed apostles to their faces because they believed only a little in God: only for themselves, not their fellows; for the chosen few, for whom they had God's ancient *word*, not for the multitude of nations, the millions of hearts God had made to search after him. "In everything," says St Paul, "by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God." For this *everything* nothing is too small: that it troubles us is enough, for there is some principle in it worth God's notice, since he made us so that it troubles us. And nothing can be too great. When the Son of man comes and finds too much faith on the earth, may God in his mercy slay us. Meantime we will hope and trust.

Do you count it great faith to believe what God has said? To me it is little faith, and, alone, worthy of reproach. To believe what he has not said is faith indeed, and blessed, for it comes of believing in HIM. Can you not believe in God himself? Is it not so hard to believe what he has said that even that is almost beyond you, because you are not sure he said it? If you believed in God it would be easy to believe the word; you would not ask whether he had *said* it, but know he meant it.

Let us dare something, then, and not always be unbelieving children. The Lord, not forbidding those who insist on seeing before they believe, blesses those who have not seen and yet believed, who trust him more than that. Blessed are those to whom a wonder is not a fable, a mystery not a mockery, a glory not an unreality, who are content to ask, "Is it like Him?" A dull-hearted, unchildlike people is always putting God in mind of his promises. The promises are good to reveal what God is; if they think them good as binding God, let them have it so, for the hardness of their hearts. They prefer the Word to the Spirit; it is theirs.

Even such people will leave us, some if not all, to "the uncovenanted mercies of God." We desire no less and hope for no better: the mercies beyond our height, depth and reach. We know in whom we have believed, and look for what has not entered the heart of man to conceive. Shall God's thoughts be surpassed by man's, his giving by man's asking, his creation by man's imagination? No. Though we climb to the height of our Alpine desires and ascend the spear-pointed Himmalays of our aspirations, still we shall find the depth of God's sapphire above us, the heavens higher than the earth, and his thoughts and ways higher than ours.

Ah Lord! be thou in all our being, not in the Sundays of our time alone, nor the chambers of our hearts alone. We dare not think that some things are not for thy beholding, some questions not to be asked of thee. Are we not utterly thine? What a man speaks not to his fellow, we speak to thee. Our very passions we hold up to thee, saying, "Behold, Lord! Think about us; for thus thou hast made us." We would not escape our history by fleeing into the wilderness, hiding our heads in the sands of forgetfulness, the repentance that comes of pain or the lethargy of hopelessness. We take it as our very life in our hand and flee with it to thee. Triumphant is the answer thou holdest for every doubt; perhaps we could not yet understand it even if thou spoke it "with most miraculous organ." But thou shalt at least find faith on the earth, O Lord, if thou comest to look now: the faith of ignorant but hoping children, who know they do not know and believe that thou knowest.

And our brothers and sisters who cleave to what they call thy word, thinking to please thee so, are in thy holy safe hands, who hast taught us that whoever speaks against the Son of man will be forgiven, though not he who blasphemes against the Holy Ghost.

### IT SHALL NOT BE FORGIVEN

*The passage:* Whoever speaks a word against the Son of man will be forgiven; whoever blasphemes against the Holy Ghost will not be.

Whatever belongs to thought and feeling is expressed in words only imperfectly: thought and feeling are infinite, and human speech, though far-reaching and delicate, embodies them only approximately and suggestively. Spirit and Truth are like Una and the Red Cross Knight; Speech is the dwarf lagging behind with the lady's "bag of needments."

Our Lord did not set out to construct a system of truth in intellectual forms. He spoke The Truth, in its relation to him at the moment, out of a region of realities that can only be suggested in intellect and speech. His words invade our darkness in flashes of life, stinging us with light to will our awakening and cry for the light he gives, not in lightning words only but in indwelling presence and power.

How does the truth fare, then, with those who, lacking glow and insight, build intellectual systems on the words of our Lord or his disciples? A child would understand Plato better than they understand St Paul. The meaning in those great hearts is too great for theirs; the sense they find must be small enough to pass their narrow doors. Without sympathy to interpret them, words can mean almost anything the hearer likes. How will a man bent at best on saving his own soul understand the apostle who was ready to be banished from Christ so that his brethren might enter? To men who are not simple, simple words are the most inexplicable riddles.

If we must search for what our Lord means, we must equally refuse any interpretation that seems unlike or unworthy of him. He himself asks why we do not judge for ourselves what is right. Through ignorance or misunderstanding we may refuse the verbal form of a true interpretation, but not its spirit and truth, since we could not have seen those without being able to recognize them as Christ's mind. Prejudice or misapprehension may make us refuse the true reading, but we are still bound to refuse and wait for more light. To accept as his will what contradicts what we already worship in him is to bring discord into the harmony meant to unite and heal our hearts.

"Is it for us," says the objector, who by some sleight of will believes in the word apart from its meaning, "to judge the character of our Lord?" I answer that he requires this very thing of us: that we do him no injustice. He would dwell with us if we opened our chambers to him. How shall we receive him if, avoiding judgment, we hang some daub of authority or tradition on our walls as his likeness? Judging unrighteously by it while flattering ourselves that we do not judge, we may shut our doors on the Master himself as an impostor because he is unlike the picture in our oratory. And if we do not judge, humbly and lovingly, who will judge for us? Better to refuse even the truth for a time than to take into our creed what our heart cannot receive, and bring hesitation into our prayers, a jar into our praises, misery into our love. If it is the truth, we shall one day see it differently and love it as lovely, for all truth is lovely. "Not to the unregenerate mind," you say. But at least to the mind that can love Christ Jesus; let us follow that part of us and trust its judgments, hoping for its growth in the light of the Lord, who is that Spirit. Better, I say again, to refuse the right *form* than by accepting it in misapprehension to refuse the truth in it. Which is liker the sin against the Holy Ghost? To mistake the Son of man's meaning may fill a man with sadness. But to care so little for him as to receive as his what the noblest part of us rejects as low, selfish or wrong is far more like the unforgivable sin, for it is a sin against the truth itself, not merely its embodiment in him.

Words depend for their full meaning on their speaker. An utterance may seem commonplace until you learn it came from one you know to be always thinking, feeling and acting; knowing the mind behind it, you know the scale to read it by. So God's words cannot mean just what man's do. "Can we not understand them, then?" We can---*more* than men's words. Whatever a good word means from a good man, it means infinitely more from God, and the thought it expresses rises higher in us as we grow able to understand him, that is, as we become like him.

I am less anxious to show what the sin against the Holy Ghost is than what the nonforgiveness means, though I think we can understand both. I cannot admit that anything in the Bible is too mysterious to look into, for the Bible is a *revelation*, an unveiling. Into much of it I can see only a little way, but that way is the way of life, for the depth of its mystery is God. And even if the duty were doubtful, it would be reason enough to inquire into passages like this that they often torture minds, chiefly those of holy women and children. I knew a child who believed she had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost because she had misused a pin at her toilette. Do not rebuke me for bringing a child's diseased fancy into a weighty theological matter: "Despise not one of these little ones." Would the theologians were as near the truth as children. *Diseased fancy!* The child knew, *and knew that she knew*, she was doing wrong because she had been forbidden; *her fear had rational ground*. How would Jesus have received the darling's confession? *He* would not have told her she was silly and not to mind. Might he not have said, "I do not condemn thee: go and sin no more"?

To reach the position needed for our end, I will ask what divine forgiveness means, and to do that I will first ask what human forgiveness means; for if the Incarnation means anything, we must climb through the Human to the Divine.

Going back to the Greek or English word for a primary idea is of little use: the one means *a sending away*, the other *a giving away*. It is enough to look at the feelings associated with what is called *forgiveness*.

A man will say: "*I* forgive, but I cannot forget. Let the fellow never come in my sight again." This reaches only to remitting the penalties the wronged believes he can claim.

*But there is no sending away of the wrong itself from between them*.

Another will say: "He has done a mean thing, but he has the worst of it himself in being capable of it. I despise him too much to want revenge. I forgive him. I don't care."

Here again the wrong is not sent away from between them; there is no *remission* of the sin.

A third: "I suppose I must forgive him; if I do not, God will not forgive me."

This man is a *little* nearer, since he recognizes a ground of sympathy, though only that of common sin.

One more will say: "He has wronged me grievously. It is dreadful to me, and more dreadful to him, that he did it. He has hurt me, but nearly killed himself. I will spare him further injury from it as far as I can. I cannot yet feel the same toward him, but I will try to make him acknowledge the wrong and so put it away from him; then perhaps I can feel as before. For this I will show him every kindness I can, not forcing it on him but seizing fit opportunities---not to magnify myself through bounty, I hope, but because I love him so much I want to love him more by reconciling him to his true self. I would destroy this deed that has come between us; I send it away, and would have him destroy it too, by abjuring it utterly."

Which comes nearest to the divine idea of forgiveness---nearest, though with the gulf between, as the heavens are higher than the earth?

For the Divine creates the Human and exceeds it in creative power. It is the divine forgiveness that, originating itself, creates ours, and so can do far more: take up all our wrongs, small and great, with their rightful griefs and sorrows, and carry them away from between God and us.

Christ is God's Forgiveness.

Before drawing nearer to this great sight, let us look at human forgiveness in a more definite case, between father and son. God is so much more to us and nearer than any father, yet fatherhood is the last height of the human stair from which our understanding can see him afar and our hearts first know he is nigh, even in them.

Wrongdoing has various kinds and degrees, needing various kinds and degrees of forgiveness. A child's outburst of anger scarcely needs forgiveness: the parent need only influence him toward self-restraint and rouse his will against it, and no wall is built between them. But suppose the father found in him a habit of sly cruelty to his younger brothers or the animals; how differently he would feel! Could his forgiveness be the same? Would the different evil not require a different *form* of forgiveness---the kind of punishment fittest to restrain, and finally root out, the wickedness? Could any other kind be true love? Passing by the offence might spring from poor human kindness, never from divine love, and would not be *remission*. Forgiveness can never be indifference. Forgiveness is love toward the unlovely.

Look closer at how a father might feel. One child the father would clasp to his bosom the moment the fault was committed, knowing that love in its natural working would destroy the fault and the child would soon be weeping. His hatred of the sin would burst out in pitying tenderness toward a child so wretched as to have done it, and so destroy it. Such a fault interrupts no sweet affections; the child is forgiven at once. But another child, treated on the same principle, would be quite different. If he were guilty of baseness, meanness, selfishness, deceit, or gloating over the evil he brought on others, the father might *say* to himself, "I cannot forgive him. This is beyond forgiveness"---and go on saying it while striving all the time to let forgiveness find its way and lift him from the gulf. His love might even grow greater because of the wandering and loss, for love is most divine when it loves by *needs* and not *merits*. But the forgiveness would still be in the making, drawing nigh to the sinner. Only when his opening heart received the divine flood of destroying affection, and his own affection burst out to meet it and sweep the evil away, could it be finished, and the son be said to *be* forgiven.

God forgives us every day, sending our sins with their fogs and darkness from between him and us. Witness his sun and rain, the filling of hearts with food and gladness: he loves those who love him not. When some sin has clouded our whole horizon and hidden him, he, forgiving us before we are forgiven and that we may be, sweeps a path for his forgiveness to reach our hearts, that by causing repentance it may destroy the wrong and make us able to forgive ourselves. Some are too proud to do that until God's forgiveness has drowned their pride in tears and made their heart again like a little child's.

Seen as the perfecting of a work ever going on, the contact of God's heart and ours despite and in destruction of the wrong between, forgiveness is always behind God's love. His love is the prime mover, ever seeking to perfect forgiveness, which needs the human condition for its completion. God loves where he cannot yet forgive---where forgiveness in the full sense is impossible because no contact of hearts is possible, the wrong between not having begun to yield to the besom of his holy destruction.

Some things between the Father and his children, as between a father and child, may in a sense be made comparatively light of---not in themselves, for away they must go---since, though evils or sins, they leave room for God's Spirit to dwell in the heart, forgiving and cleansing. When a man's evil is fading and he is growing better and better, forgiveness is coming into him more and more, perfect in God's will and having its perfect work in the man. When he has cast away his sin with his whole nature, there is no room left for forgiveness, since God dwells in him and he in God. With Nathan's "Thou art the man," God's forgiveness laid hold of David; his heart was humbled to the dust, and waking from his moral lethargy he found he was still with God: "When I awake, I am still with thee."

But two sins, not of individual deed but of spiritual condition, *cannot be forgiven*---that is, they cannot be excused, passed by or made little of even by God's tenderness, because they let no forgiveness into the soul, allow no good influence to work beside them, and shut God out altogether. The man guilty of them can receive none of the renewing, saving influences of God's forgiveness. God is outside him in every sense except his creating relation, by which, thanks be to God, he still keeps hold of him against the man's will. One of these sins is against man, the other against God.

The first is unforgivingness to our neighbour: shutting him out of our mercies and love, and so from the universe as far as we are part of it. It is murder, and may be infinitely worse than killing a man, which can be a moment's passion where this is the heart's choice. To hate, and brood on the feeling that in our microcosm kills the image of the hated, is the worst, *spiritual* murder. We listen to our hurt pride or hurt affection (only the latter, without the former, thinks no evil) to the injury of the evil-doer, quenching the relations of life between us and closing the passages of return. This is to shut out God, the Life. How can we receive the forgiving presence while we shut our brother out of our share of the final restoration, and refuse to let God be All in all? If God appeared and said "I forgive you" while we were unforgiving to our neighbour, his forgiveness would do us no good: it would not touch us while we were uncured of our unforgivingness, and would even hurt us, for we would think ourselves safe while disease ate out our heart. Tenfold forgiveness lies in the words "If ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your heavenly Father forgive your trespasses." They are kindness indeed. God holds the unforgiving man with his hand but turns his face away; if, wishing to see his Father's face, the man turns his own toward his brother, the face of God turns and seeks his, for then he may look on God and not die. With our forgiveness to our neighbour flows in the consciousness of God's forgiveness to us; even trying to forgive makes us able to believe God can forgive us. No man who will not forgive can believe God is willing, even wanting, to forgive him, or that the dove of God's peace hovers over a chaotic heart, fain to alight but finding no rest for the sole of its foot. For God to say to such a man "I cannot forgive you" is love as well as necessity. If God said "I forgive you" to a man who hated his brother, and (impossibly) the voice reached him, he would hear "You may go on hating. I do not mind. You have had great provocation and are justified." God does take the provocation into account; but the more provocation and excuse, the more reason, if possible, that the hater be delivered from the hell of his hate and God's child made the loving child he meant. The man would think God loved the sinner but forgave the sin, which God never does. Every sin meets its due fate: inexorable expulsion from the paradise of God's Humanity. God loves the sinner so much that he can forgive him no other way than by banishing the demon that possesses him and lifting him out of the mire of his iniquity.

No one supposes that a man who has once refused to forgive his brother is condemned to endless unforgivingness. The meaning is that while he stays in that mood God cannot be with him as friend: not that God will not be his friend, but a friendship all on God's side must take forms the man cannot recognize as friendship. Forgiveness, as I said, is not love merely but love *conveyed as love* to the erring, establishing peace toward God and forgiveness toward our neighbour.

To return to our text: does the refusal of forgiveness in it condemn a man to irrecoverable impenitence? Strange righteousness, to decree that because a man has done wrong so often that he *is* wrong, he shall remain wrong for ever! Do not tell me the condemnation is only negative, leaving him to the consequences of his own will or withdrawing the Spirit he despised. God will not shelter behind such jugglery of logic; he is neither schoolman nor theologian but our Father in heaven, and he knows this would be the very unforgivingness for which he refuses to forgive man. The only tenable ground for such a doctrine is that God *cannot* do more: that Satan has overcome, and Jesus, among his brothers and sisters in God's image, has been weaker than the adversary. What shall I say to a doctrine of devils which holds that even if a man did repent, God would not or could not forgive him?

Let us look at "*the* unpardonable sin," as this mystery is called, and see what we can understand of it.

All sin is unpardonable: no compromise is possible; we shall not come out until clean, having paid the uttermost farthing. But the special unpardonableness of these two sins lies in shutting God out from his *genial*, especially spiritual, influence on the man. Perhaps I said this too strongly of the first: perhaps God's love may have some part even in the man who will not forgive his brother, though it must decrease and die away if he continues so; perhaps resentment might for a while leave room for some divine influence, though one or the other must soon yield. But the man who denies truth, who consciously resists duty, who says there is no truth or that the truth he sees is not true, who calls the good of Satan or the bad of God while knowing which is which, denies and shuts out the Spirit and cannot be forgiven. Without the Spirit no forgiveness can enter the man to cast out the satan, and without the Spirit to witness with his spirit he could not know himself forgiven even if God appeared and said so. Full forgiveness is when a man feels God forgiving him, and that cannot be while he opposes the very essence of God's will.

As far as we can see, those this was spoken of resisted the truth with some perception that it was the truth: men not led astray by passion, nor wholly blinded by prejudice, nor moved to condemn one form of truth by love of another, but so set, from selfishness and love of influence, against one they saw to be good that they denied the goodness of what they knew was good, to put him down, because he spoke against them and was ruining their authority with the people by declaring them no better than they knew themselves to be. Is this not to be Satan, to be in hell, damned? Was this *condition* not unpardonable? How could God's pardon reach the essential humanity within through such a mass of falsehood? Crying as it was for forgiveness, these men had almost separated their humanity from themselves and sided with the powers of darkness. Forgiveness while they were such was impossible; they must come out of it, else there was no word of God for them. But the very word that told them of their unpardonable state was the form the voice of mercy could take in calling them to repent. They must hear and be afraid. I dare not think they refused the truth knowing all it was; but I think they refused it knowing it was true, moved not by wild passion but by cold self-love, envy, avarice and ambition, setting their whole natures knowingly against the light. The sin against the Holy Ghost must be of this nature. "This is the condemnation"---not the sins men have committed but the condition of mind in which they choose to remain---that light has come into the world and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. In this sin I see no single act alone, though it must find expression in many, but a wilful condition of mind,

| As far removed from God and light of heaven,
| As from the centre thrice to the utmost pole.

For this there could be no excuse that even a little light might work beside it: light could find no entrance, for light was just what such a mind was set against, almost because it was what it was. The condition was utterly bad.

But can a man really fall into such a spiritual condition?

That is my chief difficulty. But I think it may be, as wiser people than I have thought. I find it hard to believe, yet I think it must be so. But I do not believe it is a fixed, final condition, any more than that of the man who does not forgive his neighbour. If it is a worse offence, is it too bad for God's forgiveness?

But can God do anything more with such a man? How is he ever to get out of this condition? If God's Spirit is shut out of his heart, how is he to become better?

The Spirit of God is known by witnessing with our spirit. But may there not be other powers and means of the Spirit preparing for this highest office? God who made us can never be far from any man who draws breath; he must be in him, if not in his heart. May not some terrible convulsion from the centre of his being, some earthquake from the hidden gulfs of his nature, so shake such a man that the still small voice that follows tempest and earthquake may be faintly heard through all the deafness of his death? May there not be a fire even such a man can feel? Who shall set bounds to the consuming of our God's fire, and the purifying in it?

The only argument I can think of that would weigh with me against this is that a man who had so sinned, once brought to acknowledge it, would feel a revulsion so terrible that life would never be endurable again, and the kindest thing God could do would be to put him out of being, since it had been better for him never to have been born. But he who could make such a man repent could make him so sorrowful, lowly and glad he had repented that he would wish to live for ever to repent and worship the glory he now saw. When a man gives up self, past sins no longer oppress him. It is enough for the good of life that God lives, that the All-perfect exists and we can behold him.

"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," said the Divine, excusing his murderers not after it was over but while dying by their hands. Then Jesus had already forgiven them. The Father must have heard, for he and the Son are one; and when he succeeded in answering the prayer, his forgiveness in the murderers' hearts broke out in sorrow, repentance and faith. A dreadful sin, but easy for our Lord to forgive. All that excuse for the misled populace---Lord Christ be thanked; that was like thee! But must we believe that Judas, who repented to agony, so that his high-prized life and self became worthless in his eyes and met no mercy from his own hand, could find none from such a God? I think that when Judas fled from his hanged and fallen body he fled to the tender help of Jesus and found it---I say not how. He was now in a more hopeful condition than ever before, for he had never repented. I believe Jesus loved Judas even while he kissed him with the traitor's kiss, and was his Saviour still. If any remind me of the words "It had been good for that man if he had not been born," I have not forgotten them, though I offer only a conjectural explanation: Judas had got none of the good of the world he was born into. He lived an evil life out of harmony with the world and its God, and its love was lost on him. Brought to the very Son of God and living with him as friend, he loved him less, not more, than himself. So it had all been useless, and was all to try over again, in some other way, perhaps inferior, in some other world, in a lower school; he had to be sent down the scale of creation, which is ever ascending toward its Maker. But I will not, cannot believe, O my Lord, that thou wouldst not forgive thy enemy when he repented and did thee right, or that thy holy death was powerless to reach Judas. Have we not heard of those taught of thee who could easily forgive their betrayers in thy name? And if thou forgivest, will thy forgiveness not find its way at last in redemption and purification?

The clause before my text says: "He that denieth me before men shall be denied before the angels of God." Does that mean "You are mine but not my sort; you denied me; away to the outer darkness"? No. Whoever speaks against the Son of man shall be forgiven, for he may be only the truth revealed *without* him; but he must be ashamed before the universe of the loving God, and may need the fire that burns and does not consume.

But he who speaks against the Spirit of Truth, the Son of God revealed *within* him, is beyond that Spirit's teaching now. How can he be forgiven? Forgiveness would touch him no more than a wall of stone. Let him know what it is to be without the God he denied. Away with him to the Outer Darkness! Perhaps *that* will make him repent.

My friends, I offer this only as a contribution to understanding our Lord's words. If we ask him, he will lead us into all truth. Let us not fear to think, for he will not take it ill.

But what I have said must be at least part of the truth.

No discovery in his words can tell us more than *we* have discovered and seen to be true; the best of his disciples can only help us see for ourselves. Beyond our discoveries lie depths within depths of truth we cannot understand yet shall ever go on understanding. Even now we sometimes glimpse regions from which we receive no word to bring away.

That some things have become so much simpler to us, and great truths have come out of what once looked common, is ground for hope that this will go on through the ages. Our advance from ignorance measures only a small part of the distance between our childishness and his manhood, our love and his, our dimness and his vision. To him may we all come ere long, all children, more children than ever, to receive from his hand the *white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it*.

### THE NEW NAME

*The passage:* To the one who overcomes, Christ will give a white stone with a new name written on it, which no one knows except the one who receives it.

Whether or not the Book of the Revelation was written by the author of the Gospel according to St John, the two share at least one element: mysticism.

I use *mysticism* for a way of embodying truth common, in various degrees, to almost all the New Testament writers. Defining it would take an essay; I offer one suggestion. A mystical mind has seen that truth is best expressed through the symbolism of nature and the customs that arise from human needs, and pursues its thought about truth so embodied by working with the symbols themselves in logical forms. This is the highest way of conveying the deepest truth, and the Lord often used it, as in the whole passage ending, "If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is the darkness!"

The mysticism of St John's Gospel is of the simplest and therefore noblest kind. No dweller on this planet can imagine a purer, loftier method of embodying truth. Other worlds may have higher modes, or may not; of all ours, these forms best illustrate the highest. John's own mysticism apparently let him report our Lord's words with sufficient accuracy; they seem to me always recognizably different from those of any other New Testament writer, chiefly in the simplicity of their poetical mysticism.

The mysticism of the Revelation is more complicated, more gorgeous, less poetic, and occasionally, I think, arbitrary or near it; it *reminds* one of Swedenborg. Setting aside historical and literary criticism, on which I have no right even to an opinion, I suggest that this difference of tone may be just what we should expect when the recorder of a mystical teacher's sayings goes on to embody his own thoughts and inspirations: when the revelation flows no longer from the Master's lips but through the disciple's own heart, soul and brain. Surely not even the most idolatrous Bible-worshipper will assert that the Spirit of God could speak as freely by the lips of the wind-swayed, rebukable Peter, or of the Thomas who could believe his own eyes but neither his brethren's word nor his Master's nature, as by the lips of Him who was blind and deaf to everything but the will of him that sent him.

Truth is truth, whether from Jesus or Balaam. But in its deepest sense *the truth* is a condition of heart, soul, mind and strength toward God and our fellow, not an utterance or even a *right* form of words; so truth in words is in a sense the person speaking. Many utterances of truth in the Revelation carry the conviction that the writer was no mere "trumpet of a prophecy" but spoke what he knew and testified to what he had seen.

In this passage about the gift of the white stone I think we find the essence of religion.

What the writer had in mind about the white stone matters comparatively little. I take it to belong more to the arbitrary and fanciful than to true mystical imagery, though fancy, glorified, serves the mystic's imagination. I doubt he attached any essential meaning to it. I will not allow that he meant so poor a thing as a voting pebble, white because the receiver is chosen; the word also means a jewel, and a mystical writer is likelier to refer to nature than to a political custom. Different minds will take his meaning differently; *I* think he sees purity in its whiteness and indestructibility in its substance. But I care chiefly for the stone as the vehicle of the name, the form in which it passes from God to the man, and what that involves. If my reader will not accept this as St John's meaning, I hope to set it forth so that he sees it true in itself, and I will leave the interpretation to its fate.

I say in brief that the giving of the white stone with the new name is the communication to the man of what God thinks about him. It is the divine judgment, the solemn holy doom of the righteous man, the "Come, thou blessed," spoken to the individual.

To see this we must first understand what a name is, in its perfect idea. Since the mystical energy of a holy mind here speaks of God as giving something, we must understand that the essential thing is meant, not any of its accidents or imitations.

*An ordinary name in this world has nothing* essential in it. It is a label by which one man and a scrap of his history are told from another. The only significant names are those that popular judgment, prejudice or humour bestows, for ridicule or honour, on a few of the many, each founded on some external characteristic: a predominant peculiarity of temper, some excellence or the reverse, something done well or ill, or singularly enough, to mark him off from other men. As far as they go these are real names, for they express individuality in some poor measure.

The true name expresses the character, nature, being and *meaning* of the person who bears it: his own symbol, his soul's picture, the sign that belongs to him alone. Who can give a man this? God alone, for no one else sees what the man is, or could express the sum and harmony of it in a name-word. To whom is it given? To him that overcometh, when he has overcome. Does God then not know what a man will become? As surely as he sees the oak he put there lying in the heart of the acorn. Why does he wait till the man has overcome before settling his name? He does not wait; he knows it from the first. But as repentance comes because God pardons, yet the man becomes aware of the pardon only in the repentance, so God gives the stone with the name only when the man has become his name, for then first can he understand what it signifies. The blossom determines the name; God foresees it from the first because he made it so; but the tree of the soul, before it blossoms, cannot understand what blossom it will bear, or know what the word meant that named its own unarrived completeness. The name cannot be given until the man *is* the name.

God's name for a man must be the expression, in a mystical word of the language all overcomers understand, of his own idea of the man: the being he had in thought when he began to make the child and kept in thought through the long process of creation. To tell the name is to seal the success: to say, "In thee also I am well pleased."

But we are still in the region of symbol. Even if such a form were actually observed between God and the overcomer, it would be a symbol still, only an acted one. We must look deeper, and shall soon find that the mystic symbol centres on the personal, individual relation of every man to his God. That every man has affairs, and his first affairs, with God stands to the reason of anyone who attaches any meaning to the words Maker, Father, God. Were we children of a day, given one holiday by someone, there would be something to think, feel and do because we knew it; our nature would suit our fate, and we could worship and die. But that would be the praise of the dead, not the living, for death would be the deepest and lasting thing; we would have come out of nothingness, not out of God, who could be only our Maker, not our Father, our Origin. But God cannot be the God of the dead; he must be the God of the living, since knowing that we died would freeze the heart of worship, and we could not say Our God. To him who offers this God of the living his own self in sacrifice, who has brought his individual life back to its source and knows he is *one* of God's children, *this* one of the Father's making, God gives the white stone. To him who climbs the stair of all his God-born efforts and God-given victories to the height of his being---to look face to face on his ideal self in the Father's bosom, God's *him*, realized through the Father's love in the Elder Brother's devotion---God gives the new name written.

But I leave this, because what follows intensifies this individuality. The name is one "which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it." So each man has not only an individual but a peculiar relation to God: made after his own fashion and no one else's, he will receive, when perfected, a new name no one else can understand. So he can worship and understand God as no one else can; another may understand God more or better, but none as he does. God give me grace to be humble before thee, my brother, that I drag not my simulacrum of thee before the judgment-seat of the unjust judge, but look to thyself for the revelation of God thou alone canst give. As the fir-tree lifts itself with a far different need from the palm, each man lifts a different humanity to the common Father, and to each God gives a different response. With every man he has a secret, the secret of the new name. In every man is an inner chamber of peculiar life that only God can enter. I do not say it is *the innermost chamber*, but no brother, nay, no sister, can come into it.

It follows that there is also a chamber (O God, humble and accept my speech) in God himself, which none can enter but the one, individual, peculiar man, and out of which he must bring revelation and strength for his brethren. This is what he was made for: to reveal the secret things of the Father.

By his creation each man is isolated with God; by his peculiar making each can say "*my* God," and come to him alone and speak with him face to face as with a friend. There is no *massing* of men with God; gathered men are a spiritual *body*, not a *mass*, for in a body every part is individual and so fit to be part of it.

See what significance the symbolism now takes on. Each of us is a distinct flower or tree in God's garden, precious for his own sake to the one who is even now making us, watered, shone upon and filled with life for the sake of the flower, the completed being that will at last blossom out of him to the great gardener's glory and pleasure. Each has within him a secret of the Divinity and is growing toward its revelation to himself, and so toward receiving the divine according to his measure. Each moment he is true to his true self, some new shine of the white stone breaks on his inward eye and some fresh channel opens for the coming glory of the flower, the conscious offering of his whole being in beauty to the Maker. Each man is of worth in God's sight; life and action, thought and intent, are sacred. And what an end lies before us: a consciousness of our own ideal being flashed into us from God's thought! For this our paltry self-consciousness, self-admiration and self-worship may well give way; to know what he thinks of us will pale out all our thoughts about ourselves. St Paul had drawn near to this when he who began the race with a bitter cry for deliverance from the body of his death could say he no longer judged his own self.

"But is there not the worst of all dangers in such teaching, spiritual pride?" Must we refuse the spirit for fear of the pride, when there is no deliverance from pride except the spirit? Pride springs from supposed success in the high aim; with attainment comes humility. And here there is no room for ambition, the desire to be above one's neighbour, for no comparison is possible: no one knows what the white stone contains but the man who receives it. There is room for endless aspiration toward the unseen ideal, but none for ambition, which would only be higher than others where aspiration would be high. Relative worth is not only unknown but, to the children of the kingdom, unknowable; each esteems the other better than himself. How shall the glowing rose rejoice against the snowdrop rising with hanging head from the snow? Both are God's thoughts, dear to him, needed for the completeness of his earth and the revelation of himself. "God has cared to make me for himself," says the victor with the white stone, "and has called me what I like best, for my name must be what I would have it, seeing it is myself. What matter whether I am a grass of the field or an eagle of the air, a stone for his temple or a Boanerges to wield his thunder? I am his idea, his making, perfect in my kind and in his sight, full of him, revealing him, alone with him. Let him call me what he will; the name shall be precious as my life."

He will no longer worry what his neighbour thinks of him; it is enough that God thinks about him. To be something to God---is that not praise enough? To be a thing God cares for and would have complete for himself, because it is worth caring for---is that not life enough?

Nor will he thus be isolated from his fellows, for what we say of one we say of all, and it is as *one* that a man has claims among them. Each will feel the awe of his neighbour's dark and silent speech with God, regard him as a prophet, and look to him for what the Lord has spoken. Each, like a high priest returning from his Holy of Holies, will bring some gospel of truth that his neighbours will understand. Each will see in the other a marvel of revelation, a son or daughter of the Most High come forth to reveal him afresh. In God each will draw nigh to each.

Yes, there will be danger, as everywhere; but he gives more grace. And if the man who has striven up the heights should fall from them into the deeps, is there not the consuming fire of God, which burns and does not destroy?

To anyone who has not already had some speech with God, or at least felt some aspiration toward the fount of his being, all this must seem foolishness. So be it.

But, Lord, help them and us, and make our being grow into thy likeness. If through ages of strife and growth, yet let us at last see thy face and receive the white stone from thy hand. To that end give us day by day our daily bread, fill us with the words that proceed out of thy mouth, and help us lay up *treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt*.

### THE HEART WITH THE TREASURE

*The passage:* Do not store up treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and thieves break in and steal. Store up treasures in heaven, where nothing destroys them and no thief can reach them. For wherever your treasure is, your heart will be there too.

To understand our Lord's words is the business of life, because it is the main road to understanding The Word himself. To receive him is to receive the Father and so to have Life in ourselves; and that original Life, higher, deeper and simpler than any other, is the business of life.

The Word is that by which we live, namely Jesus himself, and his words show something of him in shadow and suggestion. Any utterance worthy of being called *a truth* is food for human beings; how much more The Word, who gives no abstract laws of our being but the living relation of soul and body, heart and will, strength and joy, beauty and light, to Him who gave birth to them all. The Son came to *be*, before our eyes and in our hearts, what he made us for, so that we might see *the truth* in him and cry out for the living God, who in the highest sense is The Truth: not as understood but as understanding, living, being, doing and creating the truth. "I am the truth," said our Lord, and only those who are in some measure like him in being the truth can understand the Word. Let us try.

No doubt the Saviour would sometimes have spoken differently had he come to Englishmen instead of Jews. But his lessons would have been the same, for even when asked about a passing matter, he stated the great human principle in it, and that does not change as circumstances change. With the added experience of Christian ages, we should find his words easier to understand than his first hearers did.

What is the force of his *For*: "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also"? Its meaning is not obvious on the surface; it must be sought, because it is deep and simple. But it is so complete, and works so directly on the conscience through its poetry, that once understood there is nothing more to say and everything to do.

"Why not lay up treasures on earth?"

"Because there the moth and rust and the thief come."

"So we would lose them!"

"Yes."

"Does the Lord then mean the *reason* is that such treasures are transitory and corruptible?"

"No. He adds a *For*: 'For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.'"

"Of course the heart will be where the treasure is; but what has that to do with it?"

This: what is with the treasure must fare as the treasure fares. The heart that haunts a treasure-house where moth and rust corrupt will suffer the same ravages and be rusted and moth-eaten itself.

Many a man and woman, fair and flourishing to look at, goes about with a rusty, moth-eaten heart inside that form of strength or beauty.

"But this is only a figure." True. But is the reality less than the figure, or more? Do *the rust and the moth* mean more than disease, and *the heart* more than the heart? It means a deeper heart: your own self, not your body; the self that suffers not pain but misery, whose end is not comfort but blessedness, even ecstasy; the inmost chamber where the divine fountain of your being springs. God regards that heart, though you may never have known it was there, even when its writhing under moth and rust sends a dull pain to the outer heart. If God sees it corroded by cares and riddled by the worms of ambition and greed, that is your heart, for God sees things as they are. One day you will be forced to feel your heart as God sees it, and to know that the cankered thing within you is the centre of your being.

Nor does the lesson apply only to worshippers of Mammon, who give their best energies to accumulating wealth. It applies equally to anyone who worships the transitory: who seeks the praise of men more than the praise of God, who would make a show by wealth, taste, intellect, power, art or any kind of genius, and so gather golden opinions to be treasured in an earthly storehouse.

Nor only to these, but to those whose pleasures are more plainly transitory still, the pleasures of the senses in every direction, lawful or unlawful, if the joy of being is centred in them. The hurt is not that such pleasures are false, like the deceptions of magic; they are real pleasures. Nor is it that they pass and leave a fierce disappointment; that is so much the better. The hurt is that the immortal, the infinite, made in the image of the everlasting God, is housed with the fading and corrupting and clings to them as its good, until it is infected with their diseases. These are more terrible in it in proportion to its higher kind: what is mere decay in the one becomes moral vileness in the other, and what fits the one for the dunghill casts the other into outer darkness. It creeps into a burrow in the earth, and its budded wings wither and drop away, when it should have roamed the open plains and high table-lands, spreading young wings to the sun and strengthening them in further flights until they could bear the God-born into the presence of its Father in Heaven. Therein lies the hurt.

The man whose heart is sound because it haunts the treasure-house of heaven may be *tempted of the devil*, but he will first be *led up of the Spirit into the wilderness*.

### THE TEMPTATION IN THE WILDERNESS

*The passage:* The Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After forty days of fasting he was hungry, and the tempter said, "If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become bread." Jesus answered that it is written, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." The devil set him on the temple's pinnacle and told him to throw himself down, since it is written that angels will bear him up. Jesus answered that it is also written, "You shall not tempt the Lord your God." Then the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world from a high mountain and offered them if Jesus would fall down and worship him. Jesus said, "Get away, Satan! It is written: You shall worship the Lord your God, and serve him only." Then the devil left him, and angels came and ministered to him.

This narrative must have one of two origins: either invention, like many tales told of our Lord in the early centuries of Christianity, or our Lord himself, since by the story no one was present at his Temptation but the wild beasts.

As to invention, the story bears no sign of it. A man who could see what is embodied here would not have dared to invent such an embodiment. If you doubt this, compare it with the best of the stories resting only on the apocryphal gospels, such as the grand account of the Descent into Hell in the Gospel according to Nicodemus.

| If it have not this origin, there is but the other that it can have---
| Our Lord himself. To this I will return presently.

Let us approach from another side. Think how much God must know that we do not. Think what an abyss of truth our Lord was, from whose divine darkness, through that countenance, voice and tender hands, broke every holy radiance of human meaning, and in whose understanding, imagination and heart lay all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Must he not have known and rejoiced in things no human words could tell? His human form was a veil over the face of the truth, which by dimming the glory revealed it in part; what could be conveyed had to be conveyed so, and an infinite More lay behind. And even of what could be partly revealed, could he speak to his Father and to his disciples in the same words? What he said to God on the mountain-tops may have been as far beyond his disciples as God's voice from heaven was to the crowd, who heard only thunder.

No attempt is made to convey even the substance of the battle of those forty days. A conflict that for forty days absorbed all the human needs of *The Man* in the cares of the Godhead could not be put into forms we understand; in itself it could not be intelligible to us. Only at the end of the forty days does the divine event begin to dawn from the depths of eternal thought, becoming human enough to be spoken in human forms, though still only as a dark saying for those who have ears to hear and a heart to understand. The mystery is not left behind, and the speech cannot yet be clear.

Just as the approaching event comes within human ken, dimly seen from afar by his God-upheld intelligence, his humanity seizes on the Master and he is hungry. Hunger is the first sign that he has come back to us and that the strife is nearing its human result. On what a sea of endless life our poor necessities float, not the poorest of them separate from the divine! Coming out of the storms of divine thought and feeling into the shallows by the human shore, bearing the treasures won in the strife, our Lord is at once hungry; and from this moment the temptation is human and we can in some measure understand it.

But could it even then have been conveyed in intellectual forms, to those who had only vague, error-mingled notions of him? No. His inward experiences could be conveyed only in a parable, the form he chose for far plainer things; it is the first form in which truth can be embodied, and the fullest. Would he who takes the passage as simple narrative believe what it then plainly says: that a visible demon came to our Lord and, himself prince of worldly wisdom, thought that quoting Scripture like the priests would persuade a good man to tempt God, and promised power to make him abandon every claim on the human race by worshipping one he knew to be the adversary of Truth, Humanity and God? How could Satan be so foolish? Or if he could, how could such a temptation tempt our Lord, and how would victory over it be a victory for the race?

Told as a parable, it is as full of meaning as it would be bare as narrative.

Our Lord told them this parable, then, and so conveyed more of the truth about his temptation than any other form could. Yet I do not think we have it exactly as he told it. A man hears only what he can hear and in retelling tells only what he laid hold of; his effort to reproduce the impression is open to countless altering influences. That does not make the reproduction false. The mighty life-bearing worlds, needing abysses of space for their courses, dwindle to the eye into seeds of light sown on a blue plain, and the thunder of their adoration is faint in our ears; yet they are lovely, uttering speech and teaching knowledge. So this story may not be just as the Lord told it, and yet hold in its mirror as much truth as we can receive, with scope for a lifetime's discovery. The modifying influence of human channels may be essential to God's way of revealing; we learn the laws of the heavens only by first seeing the stars from afar.

Now arises the question on whose answer the whole elucidation depends: *How could the Son of God be tempted?*

If anyone says he was not moved by those temptations, then they were no temptations to him and he was not tempted; his victory meant no more than that of a man who, tempted to bear false witness against his neighbour, refrains from robbing him. It would mean nothing for human need, struggle and hope, and we would have to reject the whole as crude invention, a mere stage-show, a lie for the sake of a fancied truth, a doing of evil that good might come, and not to be received as a divine message however many fragments of truth its mud might hold.

But if these were real temptations, am I not in a greater difficulty? How could the Son of God be tempted with evil, which to him must appear in its true colours of discord and deformity? And how then could he be the Son of a Father who cannot be tempted with evil?

The answer is the centre and essential germ of the whole interpretation: he was not tempted with Evil but with Good, with inferior forms of good pressing in while the higher forms held aloof, biding their time, which is God's time. I do not believe the Son of God could be tempted with evil, but I believe he could be tempted with good, to yield to which would have been evil in him, ruin to the universe. But does not all evil come from good?

Yes, but it has come *from* it; it is no longer good. A good corrupted is no longer a good, and such could not tempt our Lord. Revenge may originate in a sense of justice, but it is revenge, not justice, an evil thing, for it would be fearfully unjust. The Lord could not have felt tempted to take vengeance on his enemies, but he might have felt tempted to destroy the wicked from the face of the earth, not to destroy them for ever; to that I do not think he could have felt tempted.

But the matter itself will illustrate what I mean. Let us look at the individual temptations in the parable.

The idea behind St Matthew's arrangement seems to me superior to St Luke's. In the two accounts the closes, each profoundly significant, are remarkably different.

Now let us follow St Matthew, and see how the devil tempted him *to* evil, but not *with* evil.

First, he was hungry, and the devil said, *Make bread of this stone*.

The Lord had been fasting forty days, a fast impossible except in intense mental absorption. Let no one glorify it by calling it miraculous. Such fasts are on record of holy men; and as the Lord was more of a man than his brethren, he could be withdrawn farther into his spiritual humanity from his physical nature, whose workings would be that much slower, so that his fast could outlast any other. This, I believe, was all, and it is the simplest and so the divinest way to see the fast. At the end, then, it was not hunger alone that made food tempting but the exhaustion of the whole system, which, acting on a mind already worn out by its own tension, must have so deadened it (speaking from the experience of his brethren) that for the time it could see or feel nothing of the spiritual and could only *believe in* the unfelt, the unseen. What a temptation! There is no sin in wishing to eat or in honestly procuring food. It rises even to an awful duty when a man knows that eating will restore the lost vision of the eternal and make him capable of hope as well as faith, gladness as well as confidence. Why then should he not eat, using the power in him? Because that power was his not to take care of himself but to work the work of him who sent him, and not even to honour his Father except as his Father chose, who is more honoured by common wonders than by miracles. It was God's business to take care of him, and his to do what the Father told him. To make that stone bread would take the care out of the Father's hands and turn the divinest thing in the universe into the merest commonplace of self-preservation.

In nothing was he to be beyond his brethren, save in faith. He had no refuge, any more than they, but the Father's love and care; any other, miraculous power or what you will, would be hell to him. God is refuge. God is life. "Was he not to eat when it came in his way? And did not the bread come in his way when his power met what could be changed into it?"

Regard that word *changed*; the whole matter lies in it. Changed from what God had made it, into what he did not make it, because the Son was hungry and the Father would not feed him with convenient food! The Father did not give him a stone when he asked for bread; Satan brought the stone and told him to provide for himself. The Father said, That is a stone; the Son would not say, That is a loaf. No creative *fiat* shall contradict another; Father and Son are of one mind. The Lord could hunger, could starve, but would not change into another thing what his Father had made one thing. \[Footnote: There was no such change in feeding the multitudes; the fish and bread were fish and bread before. I think this significant for the true nature of a miracle: in these miracles, and I think in all, there was only a hastening of appearances, the doing in a day of what may ordinarily take a thousand years, for with God time is not what it is with us. Hastening a process does not interfere with cause and effect or make it more miraculous. The wonder of the growing corn is to me greater than the feeding of the thousands; it is easier to understand creative power going forth at once than through the countless, lovely, seemingly forsaken wonders of the corn-field. To the merely scientific man this is nonsense; the time will come, I think, when he will see in it a higher reason and loftier science, however incorrectly indicated here.\]

The answer he gave the devil shows the root at once: "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." Yes, even by the word that made that stone that stone. It is life to him to leave a stone what the Father made a stone; it would be death to alter one word that He had spoken.

"Man shall not live by bread alone." There are other ways to live. A man will live by the word of God: by what God says to him and means between Him and him, by the truths of being only the Father can reveal to his child, by the communion of love between them. Without bread he will die, as men say, but will not find that he dies; he will find only that the tent which hid the stars is gone and he can see the heavens, or that the earthly house melts away and he has a palace-home about him, another and loftier word of God clothing upon him. So the man lives by the word of God even in refusing bread God does not give him; instead of dying he rises into a higher life of the same kind.

I have been speaking of the consciousness of existence, not of that higher spiritual life on which all other life depends, and which cannot exist for a moment except from the heart of God. A man who tries to live by bread and not by the word from that heart may think he lives, but he begins to die or is dead. Our Lord says in effect, "I can do without the life that comes of bread; without the life that comes of my Father's word I die indeed." So he does not think twice. That God's will be done is all his care; that done, all will be right with him, whether he thinks of himself or not. The Father does not forget the child so busy trusting him that he does not even pray for himself.

In the higher aspect of this first temptation, that a man cannot feel the things he believes except under conditions of physical well-being that depend on food, the answer is the same: a man lives not by his feelings any more than by bread, but by the Truth, the Word, the Will, the uttered Being of God.

I am ashamed to be forced to write what is only milk for babes. What I must say is that by *the Word of God* I do not mean *The Bible*. The Bible is *a* Word of God, the chief of his written words, because it tells us of The Word, the Christ; but everything God has done and given man to know is a word of his, a will of his, and as such a necessity to man: receiving it is his life. Since God's utterances are a whole, the smallest is essential. But by *the word* of the God who is God because he *speaks* to men, I must understand in the deepest sense every revelation of Himself in the heart and consciousness of man, so that the man knows God is there, nay, here. Even Christ is not The Word of God in the deepest sense *to a man* until he is this Revelation to him, until the Spirit that is the meaning in the Word has come to him, until the speech is not a sound as of thunder but the voice of words; for a word is more than an utterance, it is a sound to be understood. No word is fully a Word *of* God until it is a Word *to* man, until he recognizes God in it; that is what it is spoken for. God's words, like the sands and stars, cannot be numbered, but the end of each is to reveal God. Nor can a man know any of them is God's word except as it comes thus to him. It is *to* him that it may be *in* him, and till it is *in* him he cannot *know* it was *to* him. God must be God *in* man before man can know that he is God, or that he has rightly received any word of his. \[Footnote: No doubt the humble spirit will receive the testimony of everyone he reveres and look in the direction indicated for a word from the Father; but till he receives it in his heart he cannot know what the word spoken of is.\]

If we live by any will of God, any truth in him, we live by it tenfold when it becomes a word to us; his will becomes ours, and so we live by God. But once the word is understood, a man must live by faith in what God is, not by his feelings even about God. When he can no longer *feel* the truth he does not therefore die. He lives because God is true, and knows he lives because, having once understood the word, he knows God is truth. He believes in the God of former vision, and lives by that word when all is dark.

The Enemy's second attempt: "If God is to be so trusted, try him. I would like to see the result. Show yourself his darling. Here is the word for it: angels will have charge of you; not a stone shall hurt you. Take him at his word. Throw yourself down and strike the conviction into me that you are the Son of God. For you know you do not look like what you say you are."

Again the Lord meets him with a written word, not as a logical proof to confute Satan, but as giving even Satan the reason for his conduct. Satan quotes Scripture as verbal authority; our Lord answers with a Scripture by whose truth he regulates his conduct.

This answer holds the same principle as the first: to the Son of God the will of God is Life. It was a temptation to show the powers of the world that he was the Son of God, above the laws of Nature as the Eternal Son, and so stop the raging of the heathen. It would be but to show them the truth. But he was the *Son*: what was his *Father's* will? That was not the divine way of convincing the world of sin, righteousness and judgment. If the Father told him to cast himself down, the pinnacle would point bare to the sky; if the devil threw him down, let God send angels or, if better, let him be dashed to pieces. He will never forestall the divine will. The Father shall order what comes next; the Son will obey. In the path of his work he will turn aside for no stone, and there let angels bear him if need be; but he will not choose the path because there is a stone in it. He will not choose at all. He will go where the Spirit leads.

This throws light on our Lord's saying that with faith and no doubt we could tell a mountain to be cast into the sea and it would be done. Good people, John Bunyan among them, have been tempted to tempt the Lord their God on the strength of it, as Satan did with the Psalm; happily the assurance they called faith generally failed them in time. Faith is that which, knowing the Lord's will, goes and does it, or, not knowing it, stands and waits, content in ignorance as in knowledge because God wills, neither pressing into the hidden future nor careless of knowledge that opens the path of action. Its noblest exercise is to act without certainty of the result when the duty is certain, or even when a course seems very probably duty. \[Footnote: In the latter case a man may be mistaken and his work burned, but by that very fire he will be saved. Nothing saves a man more than the burning of his work, except doing work that can stand the fire.\] To put God to the question in any way other than "What wilt thou have me to do?" is an attempt to compel God to declare himself or hasten his work. This probably was the sin of Judas. It is presumption like making a stone into bread: forcing God to act where he has created no need, or making a case in which he will seem to have forfeited his word if he does not act. The man acts in God's face to see what he will do, instead of from within by the divine will. Man's first business is "What does God want me to do?" not "What will God do if I do so and so?" To tempt a human parent so would be impertinence; to tempt God so is the same vice at its highest, the fruit of a state of mind worse than all the so-called cardinal sins, spiritual pride, which attributes God's love not to man's being and need but to some excellence in the individual that makes the Father love him better than his fellows and smile at his faults. Not thus did the Son of God regard his relation to his Father. The faith that removes mountains is confidence in God that comes from seeking nothing but his will. A man so faithful would die of hunger sooner than say to the stone, *Be bread*, and take the scoffs of the unbelieving without reply sooner than say to the mountain, *Be thou cast into the sea*, even if he knew it would be torn up at the word, unless he first knew God would have it so.

And so I come to how this could be a real temptation to the Son of Man. It would be good to confound his adversaries and force on them the conviction that he was the God-supported messenger he declared himself. Why should he have Adversaries a moment longer, standing between him and the willing hearts that would believe if they could? The answer was plain to our Lord and is plain now: it was not the way of the Father's will. It would not fit the gradual development of life and history by which the Father breeds free, God-loving wills. It would be violent and theatrical, poor in nature and result, not God-like. His history as Son of Man shall be The Man's history; shall it begin with an exception? Yet it might well tempt one who longed to do all he could for men. He was the Son of God: why should the sons of God not know it?

This temptation was an epitome and type of those to come, against which for forty days he had been making himself strong, revolving truth beyond our reach. We shall understand it better by looking at his life. As he refused to make stones bread, he never worked a miracle to help himself; as he refused to cast himself from the temple to convince Satan, he steadily refused the sign the human Satans demanded, though they offered conviction as a bribe. How easy it seems it would have been to confound them and strengthen his followers! But such conviction would stand in the way of a better conviction in his disciples and do his adversaries only harm. Neither could truly be convinced by a show; it could only prove his power. It might prove the presence of a God, but would it prove that God, or bring him nearer to those who could not see him in the face of his Son? To say *Thou art God* without knowing what the *Thou* means is of no use; God is a name only unless we know *God*. Our Lord did not care to be acknowledged so.

On the same principle he would not do, where unbelief prevailed, the very miracles that partly revealed his character to those who had faith. He often avoided cities and crowds and declined mighty works because of unbelief. Apart from the loving help they gave the distressed, revealing him as Redeemer from evil, I doubt he would have worked a single miracle, or expected much from them for onlookers. A mere marvel is soon forgotten, and long before that many have begun to doubt the senses that brought it. Inward sight alone convinces of truth, never signs and wonders, which can convey only a probability that he who shows them knows what he speaks of. The vision of the truth itself, beyond signs and wonders, is the power of God, is salvation. This vision was in the Lord's face and form to the pure in heart, but not in his signs to those who sought them. Yet it is easy to see how the temptation might for a moment work on a mind that longed to begin its labours with the credentials of its truth. How the true heart longs to be received by its brethren and known in its truth! But no. The truth must show itself in God's time, in and by the labour. The kingdom must come in God's holy human way: not by a stroke of grandeur but by years of love, centuries of seeming bafflement, aeons of labour. The Lord *will* be bound by the changeless laws which are the harmony of the Father's being and utterance. He will *be*, not seem; he will be, and thereby, not therefore, seem. Yet even on him the idea of asserting the truth in holy power must have dawned in grandeur. The thought was good; to yield to it would have been the loss of the world, nay, worse: the God of obedience fallen from his throne, and all is blackness.

But let us not forget that the whole is a faint parable, faint beside the grandeur of the reality, as the ring and the shoes are poor types (yet how dear!) of the Father's absolute love for his prodigal children.

Now the third temptation. The first was to help himself in his need; the second, perhaps, to assert the Father; the third, to deliver his brethren.

To deliver them in the way of men, still from the outside. Indeed the whole Temptation may be seen as the contest of the seen and the unseen, the outer and inner, the likely and the true, the show and the reality. And as in the others, the evil in this last lay in its being a temptation to save his brethren instead of doing the Will of his Father.

Could it be other than a temptation to think he might lay a righteous grasp on the reins of government, leap into the chariot of power and ride forth conquering and to conquer? Glad visions rose before him: the prisoner breaking jubilant from the cell of injustice; the widow lifting her bowed head before the devouring Pharisee; weeping children shouting at the sound of the chariot wheels, before which oppression and wrong withered, and behind which the fir-tree sprang instead of the thorn, the myrtle instead of the brier. What glowing dreams of holy vengeance and human blessedness, all from his hand, would crowd such a brain, not like the castles in the air of an aspiring youth, who builds at random because he cannot make them real, but consistent and grand because he knew them within his reach. Could he not mould the people at his will, and, transfigured in snowy garments, call aloud in Jerusalem, "Behold your King"? His nation's fierce warriors would start at the sound, and the nation would rush to a grand, holy war (not a crusade; we should not have had *that* word) against the tyrants of the race who trod on their brethren and would not let them even look to the heavens. Ah! but when were his garments white as snow? Not when he looked to such a conquest, but when, on a mount like this, he spoke of the decease he should *accomplish* at Jerusalem! Why should this be "the sad end of the war"? "You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve." Not even your own visions of love and truth, O Saviour of the world, shall guide you to your goal, but the will of your Father in heaven.

But how would he, thus conquering, be a servant of Satan? How would this be a falling down and worshipping (acknowledging the worth of) the lord of misrule and its pain?

I will not inquire whether such an enterprise could be accomplished without the worship of Satan, without the trickery, double-dealing, tact, flattery and finesse of every ambitious leader and self-serving conqueror; on any supposition of our Lord leading his country's armies these are impossible, and such a career cannot be imagined for him. But I ask whether to know better and not do so well is not serving Satan; whether to lead men on in God's name toward the best when the end is not the best is not serving Satan; whether to flatter their pride by making them conquerors of their nation's enemies instead of their own evils is not serving Satan. To desert the mission of the God who knew men could not be set free that way, and sent him to be a man, a true man, the one man among them, so that his life might become theirs and they be as free in prison or on the cross as on a hillside or a throne; to give men over instead to the lie that anything other than spirit and truth is the worship of the Father, anything other than love the fulfilling of the law, anything other than the offering of their best selves the service of God, anything other than obedient harmony with the primal love, truth and law, freedom: would that not have been to fall down and worship the devil? Not all the sovereignty of God, as the theologians call it, delegated to the Son, could have wrought the kingdom of heaven in one corner of the earth. Nothing but the Son's obedience unto death, the absolute *doing* of God's will because it was the truth, could redeem the prisoner, the widow, the orphan; and it would redeem them by redeeming also the conquest-ridden conqueror, the stripe-giving jailer, the unjust judge, the devouring Pharisee himself with his insatiable moth-eaten heart. The earth should be free because Love was stronger than Death. So fierceness and wrong and hypocrisy and God-service should play out their weary play. He would not pluck the branches of the tree but lay the axe to its root. It would take time, but the tree would be dead at last and cast into the lake of fire; his Father had time to spare. It would take courage, strength, self-denial and endurance; his Father could give him all. It would cost pain of body and mind, agony and torture; he was ready to take it on himself. It would cost him many hopeless sights: tears he must not wipe, sighs he must not turn to laughter, the dead he must let lie, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing comfort, his brothers and sisters crying like children over broken toys while he does not mend them; he must go on to the grave and they not know that thus he was setting all things right for them. His work must be one with, and complete, God's Creation and History. The disappointment and sorrow and fear he could and would bear. The will of God should be done. Man should be free, not merely man as he thinks of himself, but man as God thinks of him: the divine idea set free in the divine bosom, the man on earth seeing his angel face to face, growing into the likeness of the divine thought, free not in his own fancy but in the absolute divine fact of being. The great, beautiful and perfect will of God *must* be done.

"Away, Satan! For it is written: You shall worship the Lord your God, and serve him only."

When Peter tried to stop him as he set his face steadily to meet death at Jerusalem, he gave Peter the same kind of answer, calling him Satan too.

"Then the devil left him, and angels came and ministered to him."

So says St Matthew. They brought him the food he had waited for, walking in the strength of the word. He would have died if it had not come now.

"And when the devil had ended all the temptation, he departed from him for a season," says St Luke.

Then Satan ventured once more. When?

Was it then, in the agony of the last faint, when the Lord cried out, "Why hast thou forsaken me?" when, having done the great work and laid it aside clean and pure as the linen cloth ready to enfold him, another cloud than that on the mount overshadowed his soul, and out of it came a voiceless persuasion that after all was done God did not care for his work or for him?

Even in those words the adversary was foiled, and for ever. For when he seemed to be forsaken, his cry was still, *My God! my God!*

### THE ELOI

*The passage:* "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

I would not dare approach this most awful utterance ever shaped by human breath, if I did not feel that, holding both germ and blossom of final devotion, it holds the deepest practical lesson the heart has to learn. The Lord, the Revealer, hides nothing that can be revealed, and does not warn off the foot that treads in naked humility on the ground of his terrible conflict with Evil, when the smoke of battle rose between him and his Father and, for one terrible moment before he broke the bonds of life and went weary and triumphant to his Father's arms, hid God from his Son's eyes. He lets us meditate the one thought that slew him at last, when he fled to the Father to know that he loved him: Satan had come once more with a last temptation, to tell him that though he had done his part, God had forgotten his; that though he had lived by the word of God's mouth, that mouth had nothing more to say to him; that though he had refused to tempt God, God had left him to be tempted beyond bearing; that though he had worshipped none other, God did not care. The Lord hides nothing of his sacred sufferings, for truth is light and would be light in men's minds. Let us draw near and kiss those feet that bear for ever the scars of our victory; in them we clasp the safety of our suffering, sinning brotherhood.

We should approach the sufferings of our Lord with the holiest fear, and not think they were less because he was more. The more delicate the nature, the more alive to all that is lovely, true and right, the more it feels the antagonism of pain and the inroad of death on life, that breach in the harmony of things whose sound is torture. He felt more than man could feel, and was worn out sooner. His sufferings were awful when they began to invade the region about the will, when the struggle to keep consciously trusting God sank into darkness, and the Will of The Man put forth its last effort in that cry after the vanishing Father: *My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?* Never before had he been unable to see God beside him. Yet never was God nearer, for never was Jesus more divine. He could not see or feel him near, and still it is "*My* God" he cries.

So the Will of Jesus, just when his faith seems about to yield, finally triumphs. With no *feeling* to support it and no beatific vision to absorb it, it stands naked and tortured in his soul as he stood scourged before Pilate, and, pure and simple and surrounded by fire, declares for God. The sacrifice ascends in the cry *My God*. It came not out of happiness, peace, hope or even suffering; it was a cry *in* desolation, but out of Faith, the last voice of Truth, speaking when it can only cry. The horror of that moment is unfathomable; it was blackness of darkness. Yet he would believe and hold fast: God was his God still. In the cry came the Victory, and all was soon over. Of the peace that followed, the peace of a perfect soul, large as the universe, pure as light, ardent as life, victorious for God and his brethren, he alone can know the breadth and length and depth and height.

Without this last trial, the Master's temptations would not have filled the human cup; there would be a region we must pass through where we might call on our Captain-Brother and find no voice or hearing; he would have avoided the fatal spot! The desert temptations came to a young, strong man with his road before him and God around him, and drew their force from the exuberance of his conscious faith. "Dare and do, for God is with you," said the devil. "I know it, and therefore I will wait," returned the king of his brothers. Now, after three years of divine action, with his course run, his frame tortured until the ruling brain falls whirling down the gulf of fainting, and friends fled, the enemy comes again: "Despair and die, for God is not with you. Death, not Life, is your refuge. He never was with you. He was the God of Abraham, and Abraham is dead. Whom do you make yourself?" "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" the Master cries. For God was his God still, though he had forsaken him: forsaken *his vision* that his faith might glow out triumphant; forsaken *himself*? no; come nearer than ever, even as (with a deeper import) the Lord withdrew from his friends' bodily eyes to dwell in their profoundest being.

I do not think our Lord's deepest trial was in the garden, when he prayed that the cup might pass and then that the Father's will be done. For that will was then present with him, and he lived and acted in it. Now the foreseen horror has come; he drinks the dread cup and the Will has vanished from his eyes. Were it visible in his suffering, his will could bow with tearful gladness under its grandeur. But now his will is left alone to drink the cup of The Will in torture. In the sickness of this agony it rises perfect at last, unsupported, a naked consciousness of misery hung in the waste darkness of the universe, and declares for God in defiance of pain, death, apathy, self, negation and the blackness around it, calling aloud on the vanished God.

This is the Faith of the Son of God: God withdrew, as it were, so that the Son's perfect Will might go forth to find the Father's Will.

Is it possible that even then he thought of the lost sheep who could not believe God was their Father, and cried for them the word they might say, knowing for them that *God* means *Father* and more, and knowing now as never before the fearfulness of being without God and without hope? I dare not answer.

But what has this Alpine apex of faith to do with creatures who call themselves Christians, creeping in the valleys, hardly aware of the mountains above except to stumble over the pebbles washed down by glacier streams? I will tell you. We remain creeping Christians because we look at ourselves and not at Christ, gazing at the marks of our own soiled feet instead of up at the snows of purity where Christ's soul climbed. Each of us, putting his foot in the Master's footprint and so defacing it, turns to see how far his neighbour's matches what he still calls the Master's, though it is only his own. Or, having committed a petty fault, such as only a petty creature could, we mourn the defilement to ourselves and the shame before friends, children or servants, instead of hurrying to confess and make amends to our fellow and then, forgetting our paltry self and its disgrace, lifting our eyes to the glory that alone will quicken the true man in us and kill the peddling creature we wrongly call our *self*. The true self is that which can look Jesus in the face and say *My Lord*.

When the inward sun shines and the wind of thought stirs glad feelings among the flowers of fancy, it is easy to look up and say *My God*. It is easy, when outward failure has braced the mental nerves to fresh effort, to turn to God and trust him, since honest exertion gives an ability as well as a right to trust. It is easy in pain, short of certain bounds, to hope in God for deliverance or pray for strength. But what is to be done when all feeling is gone, when a man does not know whether he believes or loves, when art, poetry and religion are nothing to him, so swallowed up is he in pain, depression, disappointment or temptation? It seems to him then that God does not care for him, and certainly he does not care for God. If still humble, he thinks he is so bad that God cannot care for him, and believes for the time that God loves us only because and while we love him, rather than always, because he is our God and we live only by his love. Or he does not believe in a God at all, which is better.

So long as we have nothing to do with God except in the sunshine of the mind, when we feel him near, we are poor creatures, willed upon, not willing: flowering reeds, perhaps, pleasant to behold, but blown by the wind; not bad, but poor.

And how do we generally act then? Do we sit mourning the loss of our feelings, or make frantic efforts to rouse them? Or, ten times worse, relapse into temporary atheism and yield to the temptation? Or, being heartless, stay careless, conscious only of evil thoughts and low feelings but too lazy to rouse ourselves against them? We know we must be rid of them some day, but meantime, never mind; we do not *feel* them bad, or anything else good; we are asleep and know it, and cannot be troubled to wake.

God does not, by instant gift of his Spirit, make us always feel right, desire good and aspire after him. So either he will not or he cannot. If he will not, it must be because it would not be well. If he cannot, he would not if he could; else a better condition than God's is conceivable to God's own mind, one in which he could save his creatures better than he can. The truth is this: he wants to make us in his own image, *choosing the good* and *refusing* the evil. How could he do that if he were *always* moving us from within, as he does at divine intervals, towards holiness? God gives us room *to be*; he "stands away from us" that we may act from ourselves and exercise the pure will for good. I do not mean that we can do anything of ourselves without God. If we choose the right at last, it is all God's doing, and only the more his for being ours, in a far more marvellous way than if he had kept us so full of holy impulses that we never had to choose. For to this point he has been educating and leading us, that we may choose him and his will and so be tenfold more his children, of his own best making, in the freedom of a will found our own first in its loving sacrifice to him, than in the most ecstatic worship flowing from divine impulse without this *willing* sacrifice. God made our individuality as well as, and a greater marvel than, our dependence: made our *apartness* from himself, that freedom might bind us dearer to him with a new and inscrutable marvel of love. The Godhead is still the making root of our individuality, and the freer the man, the stronger his bond to the one who made his freedom. He made our wills and is striving to make them free, for only in the perfection of our individuality and the freedom of our wills can we be altogether his children. This is full of mystery, but can we not see enough in it to be very glad and peaceful?

Only in an act that declares for the Truth, for God, in spite of impulse or weakness, does the will spring into absolute freedom and true life.

See, then, what lies within our reach whenever we are lapt in the folds of night. The highest condition of the human will is attainable. I do not say the highest condition of the Human Being, which surely lies in the Beatific Vision, the sight of God; but the highest condition of the Human Will, as distinct, not separated, from God, is when, not seeing God or seeming to grasp him at all, it yet holds him fast. It cannot continue so, for the man would die not finding God; but with the will thus asserting itself he has passed from death into life, and the vision is near. Then first, free in asserting its freedom, the individual will is one with the Will of God; the child is restored to the father; the brotherhood of the race rises from the dust; and our Lord's prayer is answered, "I in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one." Let us then arise in God-born strength whenever we feel the darkness closing, or find it closed around us, and say, "I am of the Light and not of the Darkness."

Troubled soul, you are not bound to feel, but you are bound to arise. God loves you whether you feel or not. You cannot love when you will, but you are bound to fight the hatred in you to the last. Do not try to feel good when you are not good, but cry to Him who is good. He does not change because you change. He has an especial tenderness for you because you are in the dark, and his heart is glad when you arise and say, "I will go to my Father." For he sees you through all the gloom through which you cannot see him. Will his will. Say to him: "My God, I am very dull and low and hard; but you are wise and high and tender, and you are my God. I am your child. Forsake me not." Then fold the arms of your faith and wait quietly until light goes up in your darkness. Fold the arms of your Faith, but not of your Action: think of something you ought to do, and do it, if it be only sweeping a room, preparing a meal, or visiting a friend. Heed not your feelings: do your work.

As God lives by his own will, and we in him, so he has given us power to will in ourselves. How much better we should fare if, finding our heads bowed away from the good and no inclination to seek the source of our life, we still *willed* upwards toward God, rousing the life he has given us from his own heart to call on him who can fill the emptiest heart, rouse the deadest conscience, quicken the dullest feeling and strengthen the feeblest will!

Then, if ever the time should come, as perhaps it must for each of us, when all sense of well-being has vanished, the earth is a sterile promontory and the heavens a dull and pestilent congregation of vapours, neither man nor woman delights us, God himself is but a name and Jesus an old story, and a Death far worse than "that phantom of grisly bone" grips our hearts and, having slain love, hope and faith, forces existence on us only in agony, then, even then, we shall be able to cry out with our Lord, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Nor shall we die then, I think, without taking up his last words as well: "*Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.*"

### THE HANDS OF THE FATHER

*The passage:* "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit."

Neither St Matthew nor St Mark records any words of our Lord after the *Eloi*. With St Luke they tell of a loud cry and the giving up of the ghost; St Luke alone puts between them "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit," and he omits the Eloi. St John records neither, nor the loud cry; only that after the vinegar Jesus said "*It is finished*," bowed his head and gave up the ghost.

Will the Lord ever tell us why he cried so? Relief at the touch of death? Victory? Gladness that he had endured to the end? Or did the Father look on him in answer to his *My God*, and the blessedness make him cry aloud because he could not smile? Or was it the last wrench of pain before repose? Perhaps all in one. No books or words of thinking men could express as much as lay unspoken in that cry. Now he had made his Father Lord not by the might of making and loving alone, but by right of devotion and deed of love. Now inward sonship and glad sacrifice should be born in men's hearts, for the divine obedience was perfected by suffering. He had been among his brethren what he would have them be, doing for them what he would have them do for God and each other. God was henceforth inside and beneath them as well as around and above, suffering with and for them, giving them all he had, his very life-being, what he best loved and best was. And the mighty story ends with a cry.

So the cry meant *It is finished* and *Father, into your hands I commend my spirit*. Every highest human act gives back to God what he first gave us: "You gave me this; here is your gift; I send my spirit home." Every act of worship holds up to God what he has made us: "Look, Lord, feel with me in this bounty of yours, my being. I am your child and can thank you only by lifting up the overflow of your life and crying, It is yours; it is mine. I am yours, and therefore I am mine." The vast operations of the spiritual and physical worlds alike are a turning again to the source.

Commending his spirit at the close of his life only summed up what our Lord had done all his life. He had offered himself all the years, and so had lived the divine life. Every morning when he went out before day, every evening when he lingered on the night-lapt mountain after his friends had gone, he offered himself to his Father in loving words, high thoughts and speechless feelings; and between times he did the same in deed, toward his fellows, in loving word, helping thought and healing action. The way to worship God while daylight lasts is to work; the only "divine service" is helping our fellows.

I do not offer this commending of our spirits as a duty, which would turn our highest privilege into a burden. I want to show it is the simplest, blessedest thing in the human world.

The Human Being may say: "Am I going to sleep, to be helpless and thoughtless, perhaps weak of will and scant of conscience in my dreams? Father, into your hands I commend my spirit; I give myself back to you; refresh me, make me over again. Am I going into the day's turmoil, with its temptations to be less honourable, faithful, kind or diligent than the Ideal Man would have me? Father, into your hands. Am I about to do a good deed? Of all times then, Father, into your hands, lest the enemy have me now. Am I about to do a hard duty, refusing a friend's request or urging a neighbour's conscience? Father, into your hands. Am I in pain, with illness shutting out the glad visions of a healthy brain and bringing troubled, untrue ones? Take my spirit, Lord, and see that it has no more to bear than it can bear. Am I going to die? You know from your Son's cry how terrible that is, and if it does not come to me as terribly as to him, think how poor I am to bear it beside him. I do not know what the struggle means, for of the thousands who pass through it daily not one enlightens his neighbour left behind; but shall I not long with agony for one breath of your air, and not receive it? Shall I not be torn asunder with dying? I will question no more: Father, into your hands I commend my spirit. It is your business, not mine. You will know every shade of my suffering and care for me with your perfect fatherhood, which makes my sonship and wraps it round. As a child I could bear great pain with my father's arm about me; how much nearer to my soul can your hands come, with a comfort I have never imagined, for how shall my imagination overtake your swift heart? I care not for the pain so long as my spirit is strong, and into your hands I commend that spirit. If your love, which is better than life, receives it, surely your tenderness will make it great."

So may the Human Being speak to himself.

Think, brothers and sisters: we walk in the air of an eternal fatherhood. Every uplifting of the heart is a looking up to The Father, and graciousness and truth are around, above, beneath and *in* us. When we are least worthy, most tempted, hardest and unkindest, let us still commend our spirits into his hands; where else dare we send them? How an earthly father would love a child who crept into his room with an angry, troubled face and sat at his feet, saying, "I feel so naughty, papa, and I want to get good"! Would he say, "Go away, be good, and then come to me"? Shall we think God would send us away if we came so, or be displeased we came, even angry as Jonah? If we, being evil, know how to give good gifts to our children, will God not give us his Spirit when we ask? Will no heavenly dew fall cool on the hot anger, no raindrop on the dry selfishness, no sunlight on the cloudy hopelessness? Bread at least will be given, not a stone; water, not vinegar mingled with gall.

Nor is there anything we can ask for ourselves that we may not ask for another. We may commend any brother or sister to the common fatherhood, and there will be moments when, filled with the Lord's spirit, nothing will ease our hearts of their love but commending all our brothers and sisters to the one Father. We shall never know the rest in the Father's hands, the rest of the Holy Sepulchre, which the Lord knew when the agony of death was over and he entered the regions where there is only life, and so all that is not music is silence (for all noise comes of the conflict of Life and Death), until the fatherhood is revealed to us in the love of the brothers. He cannot be our father except as he is theirs, and if we do not see him as their father we cannot know him as ours. We shall never know him aright until we rejoice for our race that he is *the* Father. If we do not love our brother whom we have seen, how can we love God whom we have not seen? To rest at last even in those hands into which the Lord commended his spirit, we must already have learned to love our neighbour as ourselves.

### LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR

*The passage:* You shall love your neighbour as yourself.

Our Lord quotes God's words to Moses in Leviticus: do not avenge or hold a grudge against your people, but love your neighbour as yourself. He never thought of being original; the older the saying, the better, if it utters the truth he wants to utter. In him it becomes fact: the *Word* was made *flesh*, and his words are no more words but spirit and life.

St Paul twice quotes these words, and St James once, always presenting love as the fulfilling of the law.

Is the converse true: is the fulfilling of the law love? Paul says love works no ill to its neighbour, so love is the fulfilling of the law. But does *working no ill* make love? Love will fulfil the law; the law will not fulfil love. A man who keeps the law is a lover of his neighbour, but he keeps the law because he loves, not the reverse. No heart will be content with the law for love.

"But at least the law can fulfil itself, though it does not reach love."

I do not believe it. The law cannot be kept toward a neighbour unless he is loved. It is infinite, reaching to such delicacies of action that the man who tries hardest is most aware of defeat. We are made for love, not law. Love is law because it is infinitely more: of a higher region, and the creator of law. Without love not one *shall-not* would have been spoken. Once spoken, they appear as justice, even in lower forms like prudence and self-preservation, but love spoke them first. Without love, what sense of justice could we have? Each would be full of his own wants, tearing things to himself. I do not say *conscious* love breeds justice, but without love in our nature justice would never be born; a sense only of *our own* rights is not justice. Even poor, withered forms of love, far below justice now, are of speechless worth, for they will grow into what will supersede justice because it will necessitate it.

Of what use then is the law? To lead us to Christ, the Truth: to waken a sense of what our deepest nature, God's presence *in* us, requires, and to show us by failure that our purest effort of will cannot lift us even to abstaining from wrong to our neighbour. Who that does not love his neighbour can be sure never to bear false witness against him by word, look, tone, gesture or silence? Who can judge his neighbour aright but the one whose love makes him refuse to judge? So we are told to love, not judge: love is the only justice we are capable of, and perfected it comprises all justice. To refuse our neighbour love is the greatest wrong we can do him, but of that afterwards. To fulfil even the commonest law we must rise to a region above law, which is spirit and life and makes the law: to keep the law toward our neighbour we must love him. We are made not for law but for grace, or faith, another much-misused word; made on too large a scale for any pure relation to mere justice, if that exists, for it is an abstract idea that will not stay abstracted. The law comes to make us long for the divine condition in which love is all, for God is Love.

The fulfilling of the law is the practical form love takes, and neglecting it proves lovelessness; it is how a man's *will* must at once begin to be love. But the story of the good Samaritan shows that what our Lord meant by love of neighbour is not fulfilling the law toward him but the condition of being that results in fulfilling the law and more. "Who is my neighbour?" said the lawyer. The Lord taught him that everyone to whom he could be or for whom he could do anything was his neighbour; each of the race who comes within touch of one tentacle of our nature is. Which prohibition of the law does the tale illustrate? None. The love that is more than law, and makes breach of it impossible, lives in this endless story, coming out in active kindness, in recognition of kin, of *kind*, of nighness, of *neighbourhood*, in tenderness and loving-kindness: the Samaritan heart akin to the Jewish, Samaritan hands neighbours to Jewish wounds.

You shall love your neighbour as yourself.

So direct and complete is this parable that one is almost ashamed to say more. If a man in the company had put our question, "But I may keep the law and yet not love my neighbour," would the Lord not have answered, "Keep the law in the spirit, in the truth of action, and you will soon find, Jew, that you love your Samaritan"? Yet he wants us to follow our questions when they rise. He will not check us with a scornful word of heavenly wisdom; he knows even his words will not fit every question of the willing soul, and his spirit will reply to what remains. Not every man finds his neighbour in need of help, and he would gladly hasten the slow results of opportunity by true thinking. So we should be ready for further teaching from the Spirit who is the Lord.

"But how," says a man who is willing to recognize universal neighbourhood but cannot even fulfil the bare law toward the woman he loves best, "am I to rise into that empyrean of love?" Trying at once to love his neighbour, he finds the empyrean no more reachable in itself than the law was. As he could not keep the law without first rising into love of neighbour, so he cannot love his neighbour without first rising higher still. The whole system of the universe works on this law, the driving of things upward toward the centre. No immediate exercise of will can make a man love his neighbour. Only the man fulfilled of God, from whom he came and by whom he is, can love as himself the neighbour who also came from God. The mystery of individuality and the relation that follows is deep as the beginnings of humanity, and can be solved only by one who has practically solved the holy necessities of his origin. In God alone can man meet man; in him alone the converging lines of existence touch and do not cross. When the life of Christ, the Head, courses through the atom that the man is of the slowly revivifying body, then the love of the brothers is there as conscious life. From Christ through the neighbours comes the life that makes him part of the body.

It *is* possible to love our neighbour as ourselves. Our Lord *never* spoke hyperbolically, though many unconsciously treat his words so, to persuade themselves they believe them. We may see it is possible before we attain it, for our perception of truth is always ahead of our condition; no man can see it perfectly until he is it, but we must see it that we may be it. A man who knows he does not yet love his neighbour as himself may believe in such a condition, and see that nothing else is the goal of human perfection or the end to which the universe is speeding, propelled by the Father's will. Let him labour on and not faint at the thought that God's day is a thousand years: his millennium is also one day, this day, for we have him, The Love, in us, working even now the far end.

Though only when a man loves God with all his heart will he love his neighbour as himself, there are mingled processes along the way. Suppose a man who believes our Lord meant what he said sets out to obey. He thinks of his neighbours generally and tries to feel love for them, and at once they sort themselves into classes. With some there is no difficulty, since he already loves them: not because they *are* but because by friendly qualities, by showing themselves lovable, that is, loving, they have moved his feelings as wind moves water, without any action of his own. He feels this is nothing much to the point, though he would be farther from the goal if he had none such to love. He recalls the Lord's words, "If you love those who love you, what reward have you?" and fixes on someone of a second class. This man is no enemy (we have not reached that class yet) but dull, uninteresting, unlovable in a negative way. With all his effort the goal is as far off as ever.

Naturally, in his failure, the question arises, "Is it my duty to love him who is unlovable?" Certainly not, if he is unlovable. But that begs the question.

So the man falls back on the primary foundation of things and asks, "How, then, is the man to be loved by me? Why should I love my neighbour as myself?"

We must not answer "Because the Lord says so." It is because the Lord says so that the man is looking for help to obey; no man can love his neighbour merely because the Lord says so. The Lord says so because it is right, necessary and natural, and the man wants to feel it so. Though the Lord would be pleased with a man for doing a thing because he said it, he would show his pleasure by making him ever more dissatisfied until he knew why, for no one can obey a command in the deepest sense until he sees its reasonableness. I do not say the man should put off obeying until he sees it; that is outside my present supposition. It is beautiful to obey the rightful source of a command, more beautiful to worship the radiant source of our light, and for the sake of obedient vision the Lord commands us. Then our heart meets his: we see God.

Let me represent as a conversation what might pass in the man's mind on the two sides of the question. "Why should I love my neighbour?"

"He is the same as I, and therefore I ought to love him."

"Why? I am I. He is he."

"He has the same thoughts, feelings, hopes, sorrows and joys as I."

"Yes, but why should I love him for that? He must mind his; I can only deal with mine."

"He has the same consciousness as I. As things look to me, so they look to him."

"Yes, but I cannot get into his consciousness, nor he into mine. I feel myself, not him. My life flows through my veins, not his. The world shines into my consciousness, not his. I wish I could love him but do not see why. I am an individual; he is an individual. My self must be closer to me than he can be; two bodies keep me apart from his self. I am isolated with myself."

Here lies the mistake. The thinker supposes a duality in himself that does not exist, and so judges individuality a separation. On the contrary, it is the sole possibility and very bond of love; *otherness* is the essential ground of affection. But in spiritual things such a unity is presupposed that wherever something that ought to be there does not exist, its empty place looks like a separating gulf. The negative looks positive, and where a man does not love, not-loving seems rational. No one loves because he sees why, but because he loves; no human reason can be given for the highest necessity of divinely created existence, since reasons run from above downwards. A man must just feel this necessity, and then questioning is over; it justifies itself. He who has not felt it has nothing to argue about, only a phantom he made in a vain effort to understand. Love cannot be argued about in its absence, for nothing near enough resembles it to admit treatment by the algebra of reason or imagination, and the very talking raises a mist between the mind and the vision. But let a man once love, and all the difficulties that seemed opposed to love become so many arguments for loving.

Let a man find another fallen among thieves and be a neighbour to him, pouring oil and wine into his wounds, binding them, setting him on his own beast and paying at the inn; let him do it merely from duty, with his Jewish superiority undiminished. Such is the virtue of obeying an eternal truth even in poor measure, of putting into actuality what he has not seen in theory, of doing the truth without believing it, that even if the truth gives no glimmer after the deed he will be ages nearer it than before, for he will go on loving that Samaritan neighbour a little more than his Jewish dignity justifies, and will not question the reasonableness of it. How much more, if he is a man who would love his neighbour if he could, will the higher condition be found, unsought, in the action! For man is a whole, and as soon as he *unites himself* by obedient action, the truth in him shines from the new whole. His action is his response to his maker's design, his own part in creating himself, his yielding to the All in all, to whose harmonious life his whole being then lies open. When will begins to aspire it soon finds that action must precede feeling, so that the man may know the foundation of feeling itself.

For those who recognize no authority as ground for tentative action, a doubt, a suspicion of truth ought to be ground enough for putting it to the test.

The whole system of divine education about the relation of man and man aims at a man's loving his neighbour as himself. It cannot be learned by itself or shown by argument, any more than the difference between right and wrong can be defined in other terms. "But that difference," it may be objected, "is self-evident to every mind, whereas loving one's neighbour is *not* seen as a primary truth; most who hope for eternal blessedness through him who taught it do not really believe it, but think the paramount obligation is to take care of oneself even at risk of forgetting one's neighbour."

But the race has got as far as recognizing right and wrong, so most men are born able to distinguish them. It has not lived long enough for its latest offspring to be born perceiving the truth of love to the neighbour. The individual sees it only after long submission to the education of life; and once seen, it is believed.

The whole constitution of human society exists to teach the two truths by which man lives, Love to God and Love to Man. Of the parental relation, which belongs to the first truth, I say only that we come into the world as we do to look up to the love over us and see in it a symbol, poor yet the best we can have, of the divine love. \[Footnote: It might be put more deeply by saying that God made human affairs after his own thoughts, so they are the best teachers of love to him and to our neighbour; that is nobler and truer than seeing them as a scheme invented by the divine intellect.\] Thousands more would find it easy to love God if they had not such miserable types of him in self-seeking, impulse-driven, purposeless, faithless beings as their only father and mother, to whom their children are no dearer than her litter to the unthinking dam. What I want to speak of, concerning the second great commandment, is brotherhood and sisterhood. Why am I given a brother of the same father and mother, to see his helpless infancy, grow up on the same nurture, share sunsets, bed and games, quarrel and vow revenge and endless enmity, and then, unable to resist the brotherhood within, go arm in arm and forget it within the hour? Is it not that Love may grow lord of all between us, so that I feel toward him what has no words, a love in which the divine self rushes out in utter self-forgetfulness to live in contemplating the brother, stronger than death, glad, proud and satisfied? If love stops there it is ruined and the brotherhood lost: he who does not love his brother for deeper reasons than common parentage will cease to love him at all. Love that does not keep enlarging its borders, spreading, including and deepening, will shrivel and die. I have had my mother's sons that I may learn universal brotherhood. Between me and the most wretched liar who ever died for a murder he would not confess there is a bond infinitely closer than one father and mother: that we are sons and daughters of God, born from his heart, the outcoming offspring of his love, a bond closer than all other bonds in one. No man ever loved his own child aright who did not love him for his humanity, his divinity, forgetting his origin from himself. My mother's son is my brother by this greater bond too, but if I recognize it at all I recognize it for my race. The greater excludes not the less, thank God; it makes the weaker bonds stronger and truer, and does not forbid that, where all are brothers, some should be those of our bosom. My brother according to the flesh is my first neighbour, so that while our hearts are tender we are very nigh whether we will or no, and may learn *brotherhood*; our love to each other is the throbbing of the great brotherhood's heart and could come only from the eternal Father, not our parents. My second neighbour is anyone I come in contact with, anyone with whom I have any human dealings: not only the man I dine with, the friend I share thoughts with, the man whose misery my compassion would lift, but the tailor, the printer, the cabman, the beggar to whom, for brotherhood's sake, I may have to refuse, even the man who condescends to me. With each there is a chance to do a neighbour's part, if only by speaking truly, acting justly and thinking kindly, and these deeds help toward the love born of righteousness. All true action clears the springs of right feeling and lets their waters rise. A man must not choose his neighbour but take the one God sends; in him, whoever he is, lies hidden or revealed a beautiful brother. The neighbour is just the man next to you at the moment, whom any business has brought you in contact with.

Thus love will spread in wider and stronger pulses until the whole race is sacredly lovely to the man. Drink-debased, vice-defeatured, pride-puffed, wealth-swollen, vanity-smeared, they will still be brothers, sisters, God-born neighbours; any rough-hewn semblance of humanity will in time move him to reverence and affection. Some find this harder, their first impulse being to repel rather than receive, but learn they may and must. Even they may grow until an unknown face awakens a yearning of affection that rises to pain because it has no expression, and they can only give the man to God and be still.

And now come in all the arguments out of which the man vainly tried to build a stair to the heights of love. "Ah brother, you have a soul like mine," he will say. "Out of your eyes you look, and sights, sounds and odours visit your soul as mine, with wonder and tender comforting. You too love the faces of your neighbours; you are oppressed with sorrows and uplifted with joys. Perhaps you do not know as well as I that gladness surrounds your grief, light your darkness, peace your tumult. I will love you. I cannot come very near you; I will love you the more. Perhaps you do not love your neighbour but think only how to get from him; how lonely you must be, shut in a poverty-stricken room with the bare walls of your selfishness and the hard couch of your dissatisfaction! I will love you the more. You shall not be alone with yourself. You are not me; you are another life, a second self; therefore I can, may, and will love you."

When the human face is to a man the human face divine, and his neighbour's hand a brother's hand, he will understand what St Paul meant in wishing himself accursed from Christ for his brethren. He will no longer understand those who, far from feeling love of neighbour essential to their being, expect to be freed from its law in the world to come, confining it for God's glory to the circle of their heaven and regarding hell from the battlements of safety: "Hark! their moans. But do not weep, for they are our neighbours no more." Paul would be wretched before God's throne if he thought one man beyond mercy, as much for God's glory as for the man's sake. And what of the man Christ Jesus? Who that loves his brother would not, upheld by Christ's love and a dim hope of help in the far-off time, rise from the company of the blessed and go down into despair to sit with the last, the only unredeemed, the Judas of his race, and be more blessed in the pains of hell than in the glories of heaven? Who, among the golden harps and white wings, knowing that one miserable brother from the old-world time when men were taught to love their neighbour as themselves was howling unheeded far below, would not feel he had no choice but to gird his loins and go down, awful as it was, into the smoke and darkness and fire, travelling the weary road to the far country to find his brother? Who, that had the mind of Christ and the love of the Father?

But it is a wild question. God is, and shall be, All in all. Father of our brothers and sisters, you will not be less glorious than we, taught of Christ, can think you. When you go into the wilderness to seek, you will not come home until you have found. It is because we do not hope for them in you, not knowing you or your love, that we are so hard and heartless to the brothers and sisters you have given us.

One word more: love of our neighbour is the only door out of the dungeon of self, where we mope and mow, striking sparks, rubbing phosphorescences from the walls and blowing our own breath in our own nostrils, instead of coming out to the sunlight of God and the sweet winds of the universe. A man thinks his consciousness is himself, but his life consists in the inbreathing of God and the consciousness of the universe of truth. To have, know and enjoy himself he calls life, whereas if he would forget himself his life in God and his neighbours would be tenfold. The region of man's life is spiritual; God, his friends, neighbours and brothers are the wide world in which alone his spirit has room. Himself is his dungeon. If he does not feel it now he will one day, as a living soul would feel being imprisoned in a dead body, wrapped in sevenfold cerements and buried in a stone-ribbed vault. His life is not in knowing that he lives but in loving all forms of life. He is made for the All, for God, who is the All, is his life; his delights, like those of the Ideal Wisdom, are with the sons of men, and his health is in the body of which the Son of Man is the head. The whole region of life is open to him; nay, he must live in it or perish.

Nor will a man thus lose the consciousness of well-being. Far deeper and more complete, God and his neighbour will flash it back on him, pure as life. No more will he agonize "with sick assay" to generate it in the light of his own decadence. He shall know the glory of his own being in the light of God and his brother.

But he may have begun to love his neighbour hoping soon to love him as himself, and yet start back affrighted at another word of our Lord, seeming a harder law, though it is no other, for without obeying it the former cannot be attained. He has not yet learned to love his neighbour as himself whose heart sinks at the word, *I say unto you, Love your enemies*.

### LOVE THINE ENEMY

*The passage:* You have heard it said, Love your neighbour and hate your enemy; but I say, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who abuse and persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven, who makes his sun rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust. If you love only those who love you, or greet only your brethren, what more do you do than the publicans? Be perfect, therefore, as your Father in heaven is perfect.

Is this not too much to expect? A man may come to do good to those who hate him, but when will he pray for those who abuse and persecute him? When he is a child of his Father in heaven. Then he will love his neighbour as himself even if the neighbour is his enemy; in the Leviticus passage our Lord and his apostles quote, neighbour and enemy are one: do not avenge or bear a grudge against your people, but love your neighbour as yourself, for I am the Lord.

See how gloriously Jesus interprets the earlier scripture: "I am the Lord" becomes "that you may be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect."

Is it reasonable to love our enemies? God does, so it is the highest reason. Is it reasonable to expect man to become capable of it? Yes, on one ground: the divine energy is at work in man to make his doing divine, as his nature is. For this our Lord prayed that all may be one, as the Father is in him and he in the Father, that they may be one in us. Nothing could be less likely to human judgment, yet he knows it will one day come.

Why should we love our enemies? The deepest reason cannot be put in words, for it lies in the absolute reality of their being, where they are of one nature with us, the divine nature; we see into it only as into a dark abyss. But we can sketch its form if we let our hearts' thoughts move over the face of the deep.

"Are our enemies men like ourselves?" Yes, but not by virtue of their enmity, their wrongs, cruelty, heartlessness, injustice or misrepresentation. *Humanum est errare* is a truism with a germ of truth: *errare* shows that there is a way so truly human that to leave it is to *wander*, and the wandering is not the humanity. The words *humane* and *humanity* point to a shadow of that loving-kindness which, perfected in the divine fashion, will include even our enemies. We do not call human sacrifice, torturing captives or cannibalism humanity; not by such deeds are they men. Their humanity lies deeper, in the divine essence in them, and that pure essential humanity, deeper than the region of hate and independent of it, is what we are to love. It originates the claim of neighbourhood; neighbourhood only decides the occasion for it. Is it in every enemy? Else there would be nothing to love. Then we *must* love it, come between us and it what may.

But how can we love someone cruel and unjust to us, who sears with contempt or cuts off with wrong every tendril we put out; who is mean, carping, uncertain, self-righteous, self-seeking and self-admiring; who can even sneer, the most inhuman of human faults, far worse in essence than murder?

These things cannot be loved; the best man hates them most, and the worst cannot love them. But are these the man? Is there not within each a divine element of brotherhood and sisterhood, something lovely and lovable, perhaps slowly dying under the heat of vile passions or the colder fear of selfishness, but there? Shall that divine something, which once awakened will loathe these unlovely things tenfold more than we do, have no recognition from us? The very presence of this fading humanity is what makes it possible for us to hate; had an animal hurt us we should only kill. We hate the man because we are prevented from loving him; we push over the verge of creation, *we damn*, because we cannot embrace, and embracing is the necessity of our deepest being. Instead of telling ourselves that there is our enchained brother, our disfigured sister, captive of the devil, whom our love would sooner free, we recoil into hate that fixes them there, sacrificing their lovable reality to the outer falsehood of Satan's incantations, murdering them to get rid of them. Yet within the most obnoxious lies that which, if it could show itself as it will one day, would compel our devotion. We are told to love not the unlovely but the brother or sister who is unlovely. Shall we leave our brother to his desolate fate? Shall we not say, "With my love at least you shall be compassed about, since you have not your own lovingness to wrap you; and when yours comes out to meet mine we shall be one in the indwelling God"?

Let no one say I speak only in a figure. I do; but many things we see most vividly are more truly expressed by a right figure than by clear logical outline. My figure means a truth.

If anyone says, "Don't make vague distinctions. There is the person; can you deny he is unlovely? How can you love him?" I answer: with the evil cast out he will be yet more the *person*, his real self. What you now dislike is separable from him, is not he; it makes him less himself, working death in him until he risks ceasing to be a person at all. In his right mind he will be a person indeed, and you could not go on hating him. Begin to love him now and help him into the loveliness that is his. His personality, though clouded and defiled, lies deeper than the wrong, and is injured, perhaps destroyed, only so far as the wrong has reached it.

Those who will not acknowledge the claim of love may acknowledge the claim of justice. Some would shrink from doing injustice to people they would equally shrink from loving. But if, as I believe, justice is impossible without love, much more can it not coexist with hate. The pure eye for another's claims goes only with a loving heart; the man who hates can hardly be delicate in doing justice to his neighbour's love, predilections and peculiarities. It is hard enough to be just to friends; how shall our enemies fare? Justice demands that we think rightly of our neighbour as surely as that we neither steal his goods nor bear false witness. Man is made not for justice from his fellow but for love, which is greater than justice and by including it supersedes it. *Mere* justice is a fiction of analysis; it exists between man and man only relative to human *law*. Justice, to be justice, must be much more than justice. Without love, the law of our condition, we can no more render justice than a man can walk a straight line in the dark. No man even indifferent to his brother can recognize his humanity's claims; the indifference is itself an injustice.

I have assumed the fault lies with the enemy, to build on the primary rocks. But each man must ask, "Is my neighbour really my enemy, or am I his, and so take him to be mine? Awful thought! If he is mine, am I not his? Am I not refusing to acknowledge the child of the kingdom in his bosom, and so killing it in mine?" Let us claim no more indulgence than we give him. Such honesty ends in severity at home and clemency abroad: we are accountable for the ill in ourselves and must kill it, and for the good in our neighbour and must cherish it. Only God can kill the bad in him; we cherish the good by being good to it across all the evil fog between our love and his good.

Nor should we forget that this fog is often misapprehension and mistake, giving rise to indignation, resentment and regret. Scarcely anything is just as it seems, but at the core is truth enough to dispel all falsehood and show life unspeakably divine. O brother, sister, across this weary fog, dim-lit by the faint torches of our truth-seeking, I call to the divine in you, which is mine, not to rebuke you or say "Why do you hate me?" but to say, "In God's name I love you." I will wait until the true self looks out of your eyes and knows the true self in me.

In the working of the Divine Love on the race, my enemy is doomed to become my friend. One flash of truth toward me would destroy my enmity; one hearty confession of wrong and our enmity passes away, and from each comes the brother who was inside the enemy all along. For this The Truth is at work. In faith, let us love the enemy now, accepting God's work in reversion, as it were, and clasp our brother fast against the wiles of the wicked enchantment that would persuade us he is some horrible thing, hateful and hating.

But what if *we* are in the wrong, and hate because we have injured? Then let us cry to God as from the throat of hell, as under a spiritual incubus, as possessed by an evil spirit, as one buried alive in the sepulchre of our evil consciousness, that he would pity us, the chief of sinners, and lift us from the fearful pit and miry clay. Nothing will help but the Spirit of the Father and the Brother casting out and revealing. It will be with tearing and foaming, a terrible cry and a lying as one dead, that such a demon goes out. But what a vision will then rise in the purified soul!

"Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect." "Love your enemies, and you shall be children of the Highest." It is the divine glory to forgive.

Yet, some say, a time will come when the Unchangeable will cease to forgive; when it will no more belong to his perfection to love his enemies; when he will look calmly, and have his children look calmly, at the rising smoke of the everlasting torments of our strong brothers, our beautiful sisters! Nay, alas, the brothers are weak now, the sisters ugly now!

O brother, believe it not. "O Christ!" the redeemed would cry, "where are you, our strong Jesus? Come, our grand brother. See the suffering brothers and tormented sisters down below! Come, Lord of Life, Monarch of Suffering, redeem them. For our part, we will go down into the burning and see whether we can carry through the howling flames a drop of water to cool their tongues."

Believe it not, my brother, lest it quench forgiveness in you and you go down with those brothers to the torment unforgiven; whence, were God not better than the phantom you call God, you should *never* come out, but whence you shall come out when you have paid the uttermost farthing, having learned of God in hell what you refused to learn on the gentle earth: what the sunshine and rain could not teach you, nor the seasons, nor morning and evening, nor the human face divine, nor the word near you in your heart and mouth, the story of Him who was mighty to save because he was perfect in love.

O Father, you are All-in-all, perfect beyond the longing of your children, and we are altogether yours. You will make us pure and loving and free. We shall stand fearless in your presence because perfect in your love, and your children will be of good cheer, infinite in love of each other and eternal in your love. Lord Jesus, give us the heart of a child, that we may arise from the grave of our dead selves and die no more, but see face to face *the God of the Living*.

### THE GOD OF THE LIVING

*The passage:* God is not a God of the dead but of the living, for to him all are alive.

It is a recurring perplexity in our Lord's teaching that he is too simple for us. While we puzzle over the design of Solomon's earring on some gold-plated temple door, he speaks of the foundations of Mount Zion, and of the earth beneath. If we suppose he was making a verbal argument against the Sadducees ("I *am* the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; therefore they *are*"), we will wonder that no Sadducee had the courage to answer: "God only meant to introduce himself to Moses as the God who had protected his fathers while they lived. They found me faithful; so will you."

But no such reply occurred even to the Sadducees of that day, for their eastern minds could see argument beyond logic. Shall God call himself the God of the dead, of those once alive whom he could not or would not keep alive? Is that Godhood? A changeless God over an ever-born, ever-perishing torrent of life, each atom of which cries *My God!* and passes straight into the Godless cold! "Trust me, for I looked after your fathers once. I will be good to you for seventy years or so, and when you are no more and the world goes on without you, I will still call myself your God." God does not change; once God, always God. If he has once told a man "I am your God," and that man has died the death of the Sadducee's creed, then we may say God is the God of the dead.

"But why should he not be the God of the dead in that sense, if while they lived here he was the faithful God of the living?" What Godlike relation can the ever-living, changeless God have to creatures who share nothing of his life, who have death at their core, who are not worth keeping alive? To let them die would be to change, to renounce his Godhood; and if they are not worth keeping alive, his creating is a poor thing, and he is less divine than even his dying creatures have imagined him. But our Lord says, "All live unto him." With him death is not. Your life, O Lord, sees our life; you think of us eternally more than we think of you. If you forgot us for a moment, death would be. The beloved pass from our sight, not from yours. What we call death is only a form in men's eyes; it looks final, and nothing beyond seems probable. But if God could see us before we were, and make us after his ideal, our passing from our friends' sight is no argument that he beholds us no longer. However great the change, it is not against reason to hope that God saw Abraham after Isaac ceased to see him, Isaac after Jacob ceased, and Jacob after some Sadducees doubted there ever was a Jacob. He remembers them, that is, carries them in his mind, and he of whom God thinks, lives. The Living One, whose Godhood lies in giving life, cannot name himself *Their God* after the dead; so they must be alive. If he remembers his loving thoughts of them, would he not have kept them alive if he could? And if he could not, how could he create them? Is it easier to call into life than to keep alive?

"But if they live to God, they are aware of God and conscious of their own being. Why then is a resurrection needed?"

For their relation to the other children of God in mutual revelation, and for a fresh revelation of God to all. But what is meant by the resurrection of the body? "With what body do they come?"

Surely we are not required to believe that the same body is raised. That is against science, common sense, and Scripture; St Paul puts it quite otherwise. It is childish to argue it. Who could wish his material body, which has died over and over since he was born and never stays made of the same matter for an hour, to be fixed as his changeless possession just as it is at death, and kept in worthless identity for ages? At death the body will be to a man's consciousness no more than an old garment thrown aside at night for a new and better one in the morning. To want to keep it argues a sensual materialism excusable only in pagans who, with only a thin, dreamy, funeral existence to hope for in their Elysian fields, might long for the thicker bodily life they had known above. A Christian might as well want all the hair ever cut from his head restored to his risen head.

Yet the Resurrection is a gladdening doctrine, like a silver trumpet, and as needful as breath to our longing souls. Let us know what it means, and we shall see how precious it is.

Let us first ask what this body is for. It is the means of revelation to us, the *camera* in which God's eternal shows are set forth. Through it we meet Nature and our fellow men and their revelations of God, and learn the lessons of passion, suffering, love, beauty, and science. Through it we are trained outward from ourselves and driven inward to find God in our deepest selves. There is glory and might in this vital evanescence, this ever-uptossed rainbow of tangible humanity, and it is no less God's making than the spirit it clothes.

We cannot yet have learned all we are meant to learn through the body. How much of even this world's teaching can the most diligent man exhaust before he must leave it? Is all that remains to be lost? Who that has loved this earth can doubt that the spiritual body St Paul speaks of will be a higher channel of such revelation? The meek, who have inherited the earth, see all matter radiant with spiritual meaning, and would not sigh over mere animal pleasure, would, I think, be least willing to be without a body, to be unclothed without being clothed upon. Who, after centuries of glory in heaven, would not rejoice to see the meek snowdrop once more? Whom, among the golden choirs, would an old sunset not move to a song the ancient dwellers on earth would hush their harps to hear?

All this revelation, however, would make only *a* body necessary, not *this* body, and would ill meet the fulness of the word *Resurrection*. We need a body not only to convey revelation to us but to reveal us to others. Our inward thoughts and feelings need garments that make the unseen world within us manifest to our brothers and sisters; otherwise each is left in human loneliness. If my body served this use before, the new body must be like the old: the same body, glorified as we are, with all that distinguished each of us more visible than ever. The accidental, nonessential, unrevealing, and incomplete will be gone; what made the body what it was to those who loved us will be there tenfold. Is this not the resurrection of the body, the same body though not the same dead matter? Every eye shall see the beloved, every heart cry, "My own again! More mine because more himself than ever I saw him!" On earth we say, "He is not himself today," or "She looks her own self," and that is when the heart is glad and the face radiant. For we carry a better likeness of our friends in our hearts than their faces, except at precious seasons, show us.

Who will dare call anything less than this a resurrection? Oh, how the letter kills! Some can believe the dirt of their bodies will rise as it went down to the grave, yet doubt whether they will know their friends. And they call *that* believing in the resurrection!

What! Shall a man love his neighbour as himself, and be content not to know him in heaven? Better to lose our own consciousness. What! Shall God be the God of earth's families, and the love he created in us for parents, brothers, sisters, wife and child go longing for ever, or, far worse, die out of our hearts? Shall God be God, and this be the end?

Ah, my friends! What will resurrection or life be to me, how shall I go on loving God as I learned to love him through you, if he cares so little for this human heart as to take from me the gracious visits of your faces and forms? True, I might gaze at Jesus now and then, but he would not be so good as I had thought. And how should I see him if I could not see you? God has not taken you from me to bury you in the abyss of his own being, where I could not follow and find you, lost myself in the same gulf. No, our God is a revealing God. He will raise you from the dead that I may behold you, looking out of the same eyes of eternal love and truth, holding out the same strong hands of brotherhood and sisterhood to me, who knew and loved you. I shall not care that the matter of the forms I loved long ago has gone to mingle with the workings of God's science on some far-off world, or that the muscle now sending the ichor through your veins is not made of the particles that once fed the brain, the eye, the arm, so long as it is yourselves before me, beloved, my own loving souls of old, with garments of revealing after their old lovely fashion. The new shall be dear as the old, because it reveals the old love. And in the changes that must come when the mortal puts on immortality, shall we not feel that the nobler our friends are, the more they are themselves? The more each one's idea is carried out in perfect beauty, the more they are like what we thought them in our most exalted moods, in rare moments of deepest communion, and through the veil of their imperfections when we loved them truest.

Lord, always give us this Resurrection, like your own in the body of your Transfiguration. Let us see, hear, and know, and be seen, heard, and known, as you do. Give us glorified bodies to reveal the glorified thoughts that will then inhabit us, when not only will you reveal God, but each of us will reveal you.

And for this, Lord Jesus, come, you the child, the obedient God, that we may be one with you, and with every man and woman you have made, in the Father.

## Second Series

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THESE ALSO AFTER EIGHTEEN YEARS TO MY WIFE
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CORAGGIO, BORDIGHERA
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*January 1885*

### THE WAY

*The passage:* If you want to be perfect.

For many deep reasons, not least the fragmentary records, whoever reads them without the candle of the Lord (the light of truth in his inward parts) will fall into a thousand errors and, worse, fail to see the life struggling there to reveal itself: the Son of Man's own thought, feeling, and intent, that by which he lived and which he poured out for us. Yet this life, his inner being shown through his outer life as far as the spiritual eye can see, is the one thing the reader has to do with.

Readers who do not *study* the Greek Testament should use the revised version for the incident I want to unfold. Had I not known and rejoiced in it before the revision, I would owe the revisers endless gratitude for the true reading of St Matthew's report of the youth who came to our Lord. Whoever does not welcome the change cannot see its preciousness.

In the revised version, St Matthew's opening of the conversation is very different from St Mark's and St Luke's. There is no need to reject either; they blend perfectly, and I rejoice to have both. Together they give a complete conversation, which I read thus; let my fellow students see how naturally these differing, not opposing, reports combine.

| \'Good Master,\' said the kneeling youth, and is interrupted by the
| Master:---

| \'Why callest thou me good?\' he returns. \'None is good save one, even
| God.\'

Not daring to reply to this, the youth leaves it and turns to his purpose in addressing the Lord.

"What good thing shall I do," he says, "to have eternal life?"

But again the Lord takes hold of the word *good*:

"Why do you ask me about what is good?" he replies. "There is One who is good. But if you want to enter into life, keep the commandments."

"Which?"

"You shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, honour your father and mother; and, you shall love your neighbour as yourself."

"I have kept all these. What do I still lack?"

"If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me."

Let us look at the story.

As Jesus went out of a house (St Mark x. 10 and 17), the young man ran to him, knelt in the way, and called him "Good Master."

The Lord's interruption reveals the whole attitude of his being. At every moment, as much as in Gethsemane or any hour men call a crisis, his whole thought and delight was in the will and being of his Father, the joy that made life life to him. Jesus needed no pause in action to send him home. His heart's home was the Father's heart, the mystery of his gladness, claiming every degree of delight from calm content to ecstasy. His life was hid in God. He saw every truth and grandeur of life as it was, undistorted by ambition or disappointment, and beheld and loved them from the Father's bosom. He did not come for himself, to establish his power over men, but that they might know the Father who was his life. That the Father should have all the sons of men, his children like himself, in his bosom was the one thought of his heart, whatever it cost him. He did not care to hear himself called good; he was there to let men see the goodness of the Father in whom he gloried, and for that he entered the weary dream of the world, where the glory was so dulled and clouded. "You call *me* good! You should know my Father!"

The Lord's greatness consisted in his Father being greater than he: he who calls into being is greater than he who is called. The Son is always the Son, not of himself but by the Father; he does not live by his own power, as the Father does. All that is his is the Father's, given to him, and his goodness is of the Father's goodness. So when the word *good* reaches the Son's ears, his heart lifts it at once to the Father of all. His words do not deny goodness in himself; but he was not its origin, nor did he care about it except to be good, which was a matter of course to him. He would spend life and death to make his Father's goodness known! The Son no more thought of his own goodness than an honest man thinks of his honesty. A good man seeing goodness thinks of his own evil; Jesus had none to think of, yet he thinks only of the Father's goodness. "Why do you call me good? None is good but one, God."

Checked thus, the youth turns to the question that brought him running: what good thing shall he do to have eternal life? Whatever he meant by that, it was something he needed and lacked, to be gained, he saw, on some path of good. But he thought to gain by a doing what he wanted as *a being*: he would have as a possession what must possess him.

The Lord cared neither for isolated truth nor for orphaned deed, but for truth in the inward parts, the good heart, the mother of good deeds. He cared for no speculation in morals or religion; he cared about good men, not notions of good things, nor even good actions except as the bodies in which the live actions of love and will in the soul take shape. Could one word from him have settled all philosophy's questions about the supreme good and absolute truth, I venture to say he would not have spoken it. But he would die to make men good and true, and his whole heart would answer the cry of the sad publican or despairing pharisee, "How am I to be good?"

When the Lord says, "Why do you ask me about what is good?", we must not stress *me*, as if he refused the question as he had declined the epithet. He was the proper person to ask; but the question was the wrong one: the good thing was a small matter, the good Being all in all. [In a footnote he says that, as it stands, the passage is hard to read without stressing *me*, which spoils the sense, and that "Why do you ask me concerning the good thing?" would be better.] "Why ask me about the good thing? There is one living good, in whom the good thing and all good is alive and ever at work. Ask not about the good thing but about the good Person, the origin of all good." We have to do not with this good thing and that, but with the power from which comes even our power to speak the word *good*, with him to whom no one can look without the need to be good waking in his heart. To think about him is to begin to be good. To do a good thing is to do a good thing; to know God is to be good. He cares less to make us do all things right than to make us hunger and thirst after a righteousness which, once ours, will leave us no need to ask what is good, for we shall refuse the evil and choose the good by a motion of the will that is at once necessity and choice. He refers the youth again to his Father.

Note that the youth's question is not about doing something he knows to be right; to that the Lord would allow no question, for the one thing he insists on is the *doing* of what we know we ought. But the youth is looking for some unknown good thing, and the Lord sends him back to doing what he knows.

A man must have something to do in the matter, and may well ask such a question. The Lord declines only its form, to help the youth to what he really needs. He has hinted that the answer lies in God himself, but the youth cannot yet receive that; so he starts farther back: "If you want to enter into life, keep the commandments." If the commandments had nothing to do with entering into life, why were they ever given? This is his task.

Then the road to eternal life is the keeping of the commandments! Had the Lord *not* said so, what man of common moral sense would dare say otherwise? What else can the way into life be but doing what the Lord of life tells the creatures he would have live for ever? It is the beginning of the way. A man who had kept all the commandments would not therefore have eternal life in him; yet without keeping them there is no entering into life. Keeping them is not life, but so much of the way to it, and closely and essentially related to it.

The Lord says nothing about the first table of the law. Why does he not tell this youth, as he told the lawyer, that to love God is everything?

He had given him a glimpse of the essence of his own life, but the youth was not ready for it. To love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind is to know God, and to know him *is* eternal life, the end of the whole saving matter and the eternal beginning of all things. But the youth was not capable of it. To begin with that would be like telling someone who asks how to reach the top of a mountain, "Just set your foot on that shining snow-clad peak, high there in the blue." It would have been to mock him, who could not yet see or believe that this was eternal life, or look at life even from afar. How many *Christians* can, and how many know or care that they cannot? So the Lord answers with something he can do: keep the commandments. And when he asks "Which?", he names only those about his neighbour, ending with the highest and hardest.

"But no one can perfectly keep a single commandment of the second table, any more than of the first."

Surely not, or why were they given? But does *keep* mean nothing unless qualified by *perfectly*? Is there no keeping but perfect keeping?

"None that God cares for."

There I think you utterly wrong. That nothing but perfect keeping will *satisfy* God I hold with all my heart; but that he cares for no other is one of the enemy's lies. What father is not pleased with his little one's first tottering step? What father would be satisfied with anything but the manly step of the full-grown son?

When the Lord names the commandments he means, the youth answers that he *has* observed them from his youth up. The Lord takes his word: he looked on him and loved him. Was he deceived, or did he believe the youth had kept them perfectly? There must be a keeping, anything but perfect, which is yet acceptable to the heart of him from whom nothing is hid. In that way the youth had kept them, and however he failed of perfection, he had not missed the end for which they were given. For the immediate end of the commandments was never that men should succeed in obeying them, but that, finding they could not do what yet must be done, and that the more they tried the more was required, they should be driven to the source of life and law, to seek from him such reinforcement of life as would make fulfilling the law possible, even natural. In the youth it had been wrought: his observance gave him no satisfaction, and he desired eternal life, of which the law says nothing; keeping the law had developed a hunger no law could fill. Must not the imperfection of his keeping, even in the lower sense in which he read the commandments, have helped reveal how far they were beyond him, and how their implicit demands rose into the infinitude of God's perfection?

Having kept the commandments, the youth was ready for a further lesson; the Lord, who came to seek and to save, would not leave him where he was. He saw him in sore need of perfection, which the commonplace Christian thinks he can best do without and the elect hunger after eternally. Perfection, the Father's perfection, is eternal life. "If you want to be perfect," said the Lord. What an honour, to be supposed desirous of it, and what an enormous demand! The one thing lacking was that he sell all he had, give it to the poor, and follow the Lord. Could this be all that lay between him and entering into life? God only knows what the victory of such obedience might at once have wrought in him. Much more would be needed before perfection, but the next step would have been the step into life: in the very act there would have been born in him that whose essence is eternal life, needing only process to grow into the glorious consciousness of oneness with The Life.

There was nothing like this in the law. Was it not hard? Hard to let earth go for heaven, to turn his back on Mammon and follow Jesus, to lose his rich friends? Let him call it hard who does not know the Lord, who has never thirsted after righteousness or longed for eternal life!

The youth had got so far, and so pleased the Master, that he would give him the highest favour: to be with him, to walk and rest with him and go from him only to plead with men as a mediator between God and men, doing for him what he did for his Father. He would set him free at once, a child of the kingdom, an heir of eternal life.

I do not suppose the youth was one whom ordinary people would call a lover of money, or covetous, or even wanting more. I imagine he was like most good men of property: he valued his possessions as a good. In another man he would have regarded such possession almost as a merit, valuing a man more who had *means* and less who had none, like most of my readers. They have no notion how entirely they will one day have to change their judgment, or have it changed for them. Well for them if they change it themselves!

From this false way of thinking, and the folly and unreality that go with it, the Lord would deliver the young man. As he was, he was a slave, for a man is in bondage to whatever he cannot part with that is less than himself. The Lord could have taken the possessions by his own will, but he wished to do it by the young man's will, which would be a victory for both. So the youth would enter freedom and life, delivered from mammon by the Lord's lovely will in him, one with his own, and escape the corruption that is in the world through lust, the desire or pleasure of *having*.

The young man would not.

Was the Lord then premature? Was the demand a test rather than a word of deliverance, a next step too high for the child? I do not believe it. It was the very next lesson for which he was ready; he could respond, give birth by obedience to the redeemed and redeeming will, and so be free. Do you say, "But he would not obey"? Then it was time, I answer, that he should refuse, and know what manner of spirit he was of, and meet the sad searchings of heart that must follow. A time comes to every man when he must obey, or refuse, *and know it*.

Shall I then be supposed to mean that the refusal was final, that he was lost, that the door of life was closed against him? Verily, I have not so learned Christ. That the lesson was not lost I see in this, that he went away sorrowful. Was such sorrow in an earnest youth likely to grow less or more? Many have looked on his face and turned back, or kept company with him for years and denied him; but their weakness does not measure God's patience. Perhaps this youth was never one of the Lord's while he was on earth, but perhaps when he saw that the Master himself cared nothing for the wealth he had told him to cast away, that instead of ascending his fathers' throne he let the people do with him what they would and left the world as poor as he had lived in it, then he became one of those who sold all they had and laid the money at the apostles' feet. Meanwhile his soul was heavy: by the gravity of his riches the world held him and would not let him rise. He counted his weight his strength, and it was his weakness. Moneyless in God's upper air he would have had power indeed. Money is the power of this world, a power for defeat and failure to him who holds it, a weakness to be overcome before a man can be strong; yet many decent people fancy it a power of the world to come! It is a little power, no mighty thing for redemption, and to those who have it the saddest obstruction. To make this youth capable of eternal life, the first thing clearly was to make a poor man of him, the more clearly because he went away sorrowful! He would doubtless gladly have devoted his wealth to the Master's service, and gone with him *as a rich man* to spend it for him; but to part with it to be free for his service, that he could not, *yet*!

And how would he go on with keeping the commandments? Would he not see his shortcomings and their requirements more plainly, and feel keeping them more imperative than ever, yet impossible without something he lacked? The commandments can never be kept while there is a strife to keep them: the man is overwhelmed by the weight of their broken pieces. It takes a clean heart to have pure hands, the power of a live soul to keep the law: a power of life, not struggle; the strength of love, not the effort of duty.

One day the truth of his conduct must dawn on him with absolute clearness, and bitter must be the discovery: he had refused eternal life, turned his back on The Life! Humbled and ashamed, yet with the consolation of repentance, he would return to the Master and bemoan his unteachableness. Some, like St Paul, can say, "I did wrong, but in ignorance; my heart was not right, and I did not know it"; the remorse of such must differ from that of one who, brought to where he could embrace the truth, turned from it and refused to be set free. To him will come a time, God only knows when, to see his deed *with the knowledge that he was dimly seeing it so even when he did it*. All those months, or days, or hours, or moments, he might have been following the Master, hearing his words, looking through his eyes into the very gulfs of Godhead!

The sum of the matter is this. He had begun early to climb the eternal stair, and had climbed by every keeping of the commandments. But because he was *well to do* (a phrase of unconscious irony) he felt well to be, quite, but for that lack of eternal life. His possessions gave him a standing and consequence, and value in his own eyes. He looked up to himself because of his *means*, forgetting that means are only tools, and poor ones. To part with his wealth would be to sink to the level of his inferiors! He could devote it, but he could not cast it from him, nor devote himself; he could not make himself naked as a little child and let his Father take him. How could a rich man believe he would be of more value without his money, that casting it away would make him one of God's Anakim, that God's battle could be better fought without such an aid? But the Master had repudiated money to do his Father's will, and the disciple must be as his master. Had he done as the Master told him, he would soon have understood. Obedience is the opener of eyes.

There is this danger to every good youth in keeping the commandments, that he will think of himself more highly than he ought. He may be right about the facts and wrong in his self-regard, thinking himself a fine fellow when he is only an ordinarily reasonable youth trying to do the first thing necessary to a man's name or honour. One who has begun to recognize duty is still only a tottering child on the path of life. He is on the path, and the Father's arms are stretched out to receive him; but he is not therefore a wonderful being or a model of wisdom, not the admirable creature his remaining folly would persuade him he is, in his worst moments, that is when he feels best; he is just one of God's poor creatures. What share this besetting sin of the *good young man* had in this one's failure we need not inquire; but he may well have thought the Master undervalued his work as well as his wealth, and was less than fair to him.

To return to the summing up:

The youth, climbing the stair of eternal life, had come to a landing where not a step more was visible. On the cloud-swathed platform he stands, looking in vain for further ascent. What he thought he wanted I cannot tell. I can hardly think his idea of eternal life was only the poor idea of living for ever that commonplace minds grasp at, its mere shadow, taken for granted by all devout Jews: when a man is one with God, what should he do but live for ever? Without oneness with God, continued existence would be to me all but the unsurpassable curse (the unsurpassable itself being a God other than the God I see in Jesus). Whatever his idea, it must have held, perhaps only in solution, all his notions of God and man and righteousness. While he stands alone and helpless, behold the Son of Man! It is God himself come to meet the climbing youth, take him by the hand, and lead him up his own stair, the only stair by which ascent can be made. He shows him the first step through the mist. His feet are heavy; they have golden shoes. To go up that stair he must throw aside his shoes and walk barefoot into eternal life. Rather than stride free-limbed up the everlasting stair to the Father's bosom, he will keep his precious shoes! It is better to drag them about on the earth than part with them for a world where they are useless!

But how miserable his golden vessels, embroidered garments, and stately house must have seemed when he went back to them from the Lord's face! Surely it was not long before, in shame and misery, he cast all from him, as Judas cast away the thirty pieces of silver, in the agony of everyone who wakes to find he has preferred money to the Master! For although no man can be saved without being freed from his possessions, it is only *hard*, not impossible, *for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God*.

### THE HARDNESS OF THE WAY

*The passage:* "Children, how hard it is!" (St. Mark x. 24.)

I suspect nearly every thoughtful young rich man feels the Lord treated this young man harshly. He asks why the rich should find it hard to enter the kingdom of heaven and fare differently from everyone else in the world to come, taking a fact of nature for an arbitrary decree born of some prejudice in God or some objection to his creatures' enjoyment. He fails to see that this is the law: they will fare like everyone else, when what they want is to fare as rich people. I can't imagine heaven's kingdom being easy for a rich man to enter: every earthly kingdom lets the rich in, and puts them first if they are rich enough. A rich man isn't bound to belong to Satan's kingdom, but he is especially welcome there, while heaven welcomes him just as it welcomes anyone.

I suspect too that many a rich man resents this story's claim on everything he has, and that many people, rich or not, can't believe the Lord really meant to take the poor fellow's money. To a man born rich, wealth seems natural and essential to well-being; a man who made his own feels it is his through labour by day and worry by night. Each feels entitled to what he holds, so it seems hard that this right should collide with the necessity of entering heaven's kingdom. Why can't he have the best of both worlds? He would compromise if he could, serving Mammon a little and God a lot, and gaining something of heaven at the least cost to the world. But he doesn't mean the best that comes from making the lower serve the higher, giving up this world's treasure for heaven's. What he wants of heaven isn't its best, and what he won't give up of the world is its worst.

I can easily picture an honest young man, brought up in Christian ways, reasoning like this. "Does this story apply to everyone? Must I give up everything if I become a Christian? That was easy then, and I'd have done it if the Saviour himself had asked. But wealth meant something different socially then; now I'd give up far more. Nor do I love money as he was in danger of doing; the Jews have always worshipped Mammon. I try to do good with mine. Besides, I'm a Christian already, so why ask the same of me as of a young Jew? If everyone with a conscience about money gave it all up, the irreligious would hold the power unopposed and the world would go to the devil. The Bible often mentions rich men but never tells another to part with everything. Ananias was struck dead for pretending to give all, not for keeping some, and Peter said the land was his own until sold, and the money his afterwards. How would the Lord have been buried without the rich Joseph? He did say, 'If you want to be perfect, go and sell what you have,' but I can't be perfect; it's hopeless, and he doesn't expect it." It would be more honest to say, "I don't want to be perfect; I'm content to be saved." Such people don't care about being perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect, only about being what they call *saved*, and little think that perfection is salvation: the two are one. "And besides," he concludes in triumph, "the text says, 'How hard it is for those who trust in riches to enter the kingdom of God!' I don't trust in my riches. I know they can't save me."

Suppose I were speaking with such a young man. I would state a truth only as a siege to win his surrender to the law of liberty; if I couldn't persuade him, I'd keep quiet. I wouldn't labour to instruct the keenest mind; I'd rather learn. Only persuading the heart, will and actions deserves a man's full energy, first for his own manhood, then his neighbour's: the beam out of his own eye before the speck out of his brother's, if that speck is more than the end of his own beam. Making someone happy as a lark *might be* doing him serious wrong; making him wake up, rise, look up and turn is worth the life and death of the Son of the Eternal.

So I say to the young man:

"Have you been keeping the commandments?"

"I wouldn't dare say that," I imagine him answering. "I should know better than that young man how much the commandments demand."

"But does that answer mean," I press, "that you think the Lord a hard master and so have tried less to please him? Or that you have strained toward his perfect standard and seen that the law can't be fulfilled? Surely you've noticed that the shocking command to give up everything came to someone who had kept the commandments for years. Have you kept them as he did, so that it could come to you? Dissatisfied with your keeping and longing to be perfect, have you gone on your knees to the Master to learn more of the way to eternal life? Or are you so content with yourself that you've never hungered and thirsted for God's righteousness, the perfection of your being? If so, take comfort: the Master doesn't ask you to sell what you have and give to the poor. *You* follow him, *you* preach good news with him, when you don't care about righteousness! You're not the company he wants, and he won't ask for your purse; it's nothing to him whether you give or keep. Is he to be obliged for money to someone outside his kingdom, false and ignoble? Bring him a true heart and an obedient hand, which he gave his life's blood for."

"Please don't be harsh. I admit I haven't been what I should, but I want to repent and enter into life. Don't take my reluctance to throw everything away, without knowing it's required, as disregard for higher things."

"Then once more: *go and keep the commandments*. It hasn't come to your money yet; you aren't yet a child in the kingdom, caring for your father's arms and not just the shelter of his roof. Let the commandments tell you how to use your money; it is pitiable presumption to wonder whether you must sell it all. Wait until keeping them has shown you the great reward of loving what's right, then that for all your effort you're only an unprofitable servant; until you know that only those who need no law can keep it, and would rather cease to be than live the poor, selfish life that is all you can call your own; until you sense something beyond your mind's thought but not your heart's longing, something not yours, seemingly never to be yours, without which your life is worthless. When all this brings you to the Master crying, 'What must I do to inherit eternal life?', he may say, 'Sell all you have, give to the poor, and come follow me.' Obey then and you'll be most honourable; refuse and you'll be most pitiable. Until then you'd be no comfort to him and no pleasure to his friends. For the young man, selling all and following him would have meant accepting a patent of nobility from God; it isn't offered to you. If one of the disobedient gave up every straw he owned in hope of that honour, he'd just be sent back to keep the commandments in the easier circumstances of poverty.

"Does that comfort you? Alas for you! Your relief is that the Lord has no need of you, doesn't require your money, and doesn't offer you himself instead! You haven't sold him for thirty pieces of silver, but you're glad not to buy him with all you have. How do you differ from the young man in the story? He was invited to do everything, to share the divine nature; you never had the chance to refuse, because you aren't fit to be invited. People like you can never enter the kingdom. You wouldn't know you were in heaven if you were there."

"But I don't trust in my riches. I trust in the merits of my Lord and Saviour, in his finished work and the sacrifice he offered."

"Yes, yes! You'll trust in anything but the Man himself, who tells you it's hard to be saved. All the merits of God and his Christ can't give you eternal life; only God and his Christ can, and they can't, and wouldn't if they could, unless you keep the commandments. Knowing the living God *is* eternal life; what you need is not his merits but him. As for trusting in riches, who with even half a conscience or half a head could imagine that anyone relying on them to get him in could enter? A Jew confident in his wealth might hope it signalled God's favour that wouldn't fail him, or be too self-satisfied to imagine being lost; but *trusting in his riches*? No. Saying he doesn't trust in them to take him into life is the last refuge of the money-worshipper, the man who needs wealth for his peace. The man who thinks of nothing else does trust in it, in a fearful sense; yet hundreds who do will say, 'I don't trust in my riches; I trust in...' some stock phrase."

"You're forgetting yourself. You're criticizing the Lord's own words: he said, 'How hard it is for those who trust in riches to enter the kingdom of heaven!'"

"I'm not. I believe our Lord never said those words. The two oldest manuscripts, the Sinaitic and the Vatican, read, 'Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!' I'm glad Westcott and Tischendorf prefer that reading, though Tregelles and the Revisers don't. I take it to be the Lord's. Some copyist with a rich man's mind, uneasy at the Lord's view of money and eager like you to compromise, added a marginal note: it isn't having riches but trusting in them that makes entering hard! *Hard*? For a man who trusts in riches it is eternally impossible; it is the man who merely has them for whom it is hard. Is the Lord supposed to teach that a man who trusts in riches can enter, that this is impossible for men but possible with God? He never said it. Mr. Facingbothways's annotation crept into the text and stands in the English version. Our Lord didn't explain away his hard words; he let them stand as the burning fire meant to purge us. Where simplicity meets simplicity they are understood; the double heart must mistake. It is hard for a rich man, simply because he is rich, to enter the kingdom of heaven."

Some comfort themselves that God will take the difficulty into account, another form of the notion that a rich man, having had his good things here, must have them there too. They'll certainly get fairness, but what good is that if they don't enter the kingdom? It is life they need; existence without it can't be endured, yet they think they can do without eternal life if only they live for ever! Those who know what eternal life is count it the one terror to live on without it.

Take the Lord's words, then, as he spoke them: "Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!" He first has them reflect on how hard it is for anyone to enter, then restates the rich man's difficulty more strongly: "It is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." It always has been and will be hard to enter; it is hard even to believe one must be born from above, passing into a new, unknown consciousness. The law-abiding Jew and the ceremonial Christian shrink from self-annihilation, from the life of grace and truth, from the high clear air of heavenly delight, and from the all-embracing love that fulfils the law and sets it aside; they can't accept a state of being as itself eternal life. What is hard to believe in is hard to enter. How hard? As hard as the Master could put it: "If any man comes to me and does not hate ... his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." A rich man finds this harder still, since so much is tied to his life to swell his sense of self that casting it off as the ugly shadow of the self God made is far harder.

Nobody knows how hard it is to enter the kingdom of heaven except those who have tried hard and not stopped trying. Don't tell me one can pass at once into full assurance; I want not the certainty of eternal life but eternal life. Whatever other preachers say, in St Paul the spirit and flesh often fought. Only those who want life simply as eternal, and struggle every day and soon every hour, know how hard entering is; they see that no moment is life without the presence that strengthens. I don't deny anyone's testimony of peace and unspeakable joy as the instant result of the new birth; I say only that if by salvation they mean less than absolute oneness with God, it's no salvation to me, and I wouldn't be content with it with every joy of heaven thrown in. If they aren't righteous as he is righteous, they aren't saved, however glad; they are only on the way. If they don't love their neighbour, not "as themselves" (a phrase hard to understand and not Christ's) but as Christ loves him, I can't count them entered into life, though life may have begun to enter them. The disciples little knew what the Lord's "how hard it is to enter the kingdom" would ask of them.

New demands keep coming to the Christian; the Spirit's ever-fresh calling is what works in the children of obedience. When he thinks he has arrived, he is in danger. When the mountain he has long climbed suddenly shows a distant peak, radiant white and nearly lost in heaven, that no human foot seems able to reach, then there is hope: it proves he has been climbing, since he sees what he couldn't before. He may know little of what he is, but he learns again and again that he isn't in the world as Jesus was; and the very wind that gives him courage as he climbs is the hope that one day he will be like him, seeing him as he is.

Possessions are *things*, and things, except as something to conquer and a means of spiritual gain, readily turn against the better life. Whoever depends on anything but life itself for his sense of well-being is a slave, hanging on something less than himself. A person isn't perfect unless he could sit calmly content with every *thing* taken from him, aware of a well-being untouched, still possessing all things as a child of the Eternal. Things, our bodies first, are given to train us in independence of them and true possession of them: we must own them, not be owned. They are meant to mediate, as lower shapes of unseen things that belong to the unshakeable world of silence and being, not speech and showing. Those unseen things take form in time and space not to exist, since they exist in eternal Godhead, but to be known by those in training for the eternal, and God's sons and daughters must possess them. Instead people grasp at the forms, treating the visible as what is to be owned and loving bodies rather than souls. Some good people can hardly believe that if the young man had given up his wealth, the Lord wouldn't have told him to keep it; they think heaven's treasure a poor substitute. "Isn't wealth power?" they ask. It is, and so is a wolf hiding in a robe: the power of a brute machine whose levers and valves its owner hardly understands. Most readers of the story agree with the young man at his worst moment, as he turned away, except that they aren't sorrowful.

Nobody can really possess things who can't do without them, who wouldn't be perfectly content in the knowledge that the cause of his being is present in his consciousness and with him. To be clear: anyone with God's presence is content. What I mean is that only someone who has the Father, and is eternally content in him alone, can possess a sunset, a field of grass, a gold mine or a person's love as God means him to. Whoever has God has all things, as their maker has them. To every man, woman and child I say: if you aren't content, it's because God isn't with you as you need him, more than your body ever needed food or air, more than your soul ever hungered for joy or peace.

We must get free of the tyranny of *things*. See how urgent it is. However tightly the young man clings to his wealth, God will do what he can: his child won't be left in the hell of possession. When the angel of death comes, where are the things that haunted the poor soul? The world and all in it slip from his hands and feet, taking his body, eyes and ears, and every purse and coffer that deluded him into thinking he owned anything.

"If death frees a man from the rule of things, why hurry it? Shouldn't the young man wait for the Inevitable to free him?"

Not so! I presume that only then does the man of things see their tyranny. Abstaining first shows a man his craving's strength; having nothing left may first show him how much he made a necessity of things. If he then fights them, casting out of his soul what death tore from his hands, he will first know the full passion of possession, the slavery of prizing the worthless part of the precious.

"Then what good is Death? He removes the sting but leaves the poison!"

This: it's not the fetters that chafe but the fetters that soothe that eat into the soul. When the golden fetters he loved to look at are gone, though they held him fast to his dungeon wall, he will first feel the soreness of their loss, in a weary indifference to earth and sea, space and stars. When it dawns on him that they were a horror and a disgrace, the good of saving death will appear, and he will begin to understand that having never was well-being: we don't live by possessing but possess by living. So losing what he thought he had moves him, hardly toward deliverance but in its favour: it may feel like the start of slavery when it is the start of freedom. No soul was ever freed without feeling its slavery; nothing but itself can enslave a soul, nothing outside itself free it.

Take the drunkard, freed from his body but keeping his craving, unable to indulge it. With no means left to drown thought, he finally has time to think; surely a fearful hope dawns on him then! But he isn't saved until, by God's power and his own obedient effort, he would refuse the temptation even for an eternity of drunkenness with all its delights and none of its penalties.

So death may give a new opportunity, with some hope for the multitude who count themselves Christians yet are possessed by *things* as by a legion of devils: respected in their church, thought blameless, kind and generous, believers in Jesus's redemption, yet whose care is always to heap up more, adding house to house and field to field, burying themselves deeper in the ash-heap of *Things*.

But things rule not only the rich man; people with no money are slaves too, if lack of it makes them unhappy. The man forever digging his grave is little better than the one already rotting in it, and the money one has and the other wants causes the same enduring stupidity in each. To both comes the word: "*How is it that you do not understand*?"

### THE CAUSE OF SPIRITUAL STUPIDITY

*The passage:* Why is it that you do not understand?

After feeding the four thousand with seven loaves and a few small fishes on the east side of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus crossed the lake and was met by certain Pharisees whose attitude drove him back to the boat and across again. On the way the disciples realized they had only a single loaf, probably bought by one of them while the Lord dealt with the Pharisees. Jesus, still occupied with the leaders' antagonism and wanting to destroy their influence on his disciples, began to warn them, using a figure they had heard before, leaven as a hidden but pervading energy. Now he tells them to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees. The disciples, their minds on their lack of provisions, thought of bread at once, concluded he spoke of leaven because it was missing, and perhaps imagined a warning about defilement from Pharisaical cookery: "It is because we have taken no bread!" A leaven like the Pharisees' was already at work in their hearts; for the sign the Pharisees sought in mockery of unbelief, they themselves had had a few hours before, and had already forgotten all that made it valuable.

It is to the man who is trying to live, who obeys the Master's word, that the word unfolds itself. Understanding the outside of things, we think we have them; but the Lord puts his things in suggestive shapes that give no satisfactory meaning to the mere intellect and unfold themselves only to the conscience and heart as the new creation of reality advances in a man. For life, that is, action, is the only condition into which the light of the Living can penetrate; only life can assimilate life. See how the disciples here fooled themselves!

See how the Lord calls them to their senses. He does not tell them where they are wrong; he attacks the cause in themselves, always of infinitely more consequence than any mistake: the one is a live mistake, an untruth in the soul, the other a dead blunder born of it. So the connection between their blunder and his exhortation is not on the surface. Often he speaks not to the words but to the thought; here he speaks to the whole mode of thinking, the inward condition of the men.

He sets out to rouse in them a sense of their lack of confidence in God, the cause of their blunder. He reminds them of the two miracles of the loaves and the fragments left over; one was not a day behind them, and already they were doubting! He makes them go over the particulars, not to refresh their memories but to make their hearts dwell on them; for they had forgotten the central revelation, the eternal fact of God's love and care. They knew the number of men, loaves, and baskets of fragments each time, but forgot the Love that had so broken the bread that its remnants twenty times outweighed its loaves.

Having questioned them like children and listened to the answers of children, he turns the light of their thoughts on themselves and demands, with an argument that overleaps its own logic's links, "Why do you not understand?" Then they understood, and knew he did not speak of the leaven of bread but of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees. He who trusts can understand; he whose mind is at ease can discover a reason.

How otherwise than by quelling their anxiety could "How many baskets did you take up?" and "Why do you not understand?" have made them see he did not mean the leaven of bread? What had the bread miracles to do with it?

The lesson he would have had them learn from the miracle, the only lesson worthy of it, was that God cared for his children and could, did, and would provide for their needs. They had not learned it. The miracle's love proved his mission better than its power: it was a throb of the Father's heart. The ground of the Master's upbraiding is not that they did not understand him but that they did not trust God, that after all they had seen they still troubled themselves about bread. Because we easily imagine ourselves in want, we imagine God ready to forsake us. The miracles of Jesus were the ordinary works of his Father, wrought small and swift that we might take them in. Their design was to show what God is: not that Jesus was God but that his Father was, and was what Jesus showed, for no other kind of God could be worth believing in. The Son's mission was to reveal his Father as he is, that men may know him and, knowing, trust him. It would be a small boon for God to forgive men and not give himself; less than God as he is cannot comfort men for the essential sorrow of their existence. Jesus came to give them God, who is eternal life.

Those miracles of feeding gave to their eyes, hands, and mouths the lesson his words gave their ears when he told them not to seek what they would eat or drink, since their Father knew their need, and to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things would be added. So little had they learned it that they remembered the loaves but forgot the Father, as men in their theology forget the very *Theou logos*. Forgetting, they were troubled about provision for the day, and the moment leaven was mentioned thought of bread. *What else could he mean? The connection was plain!* The miracle had set forth God's heart toward them, the loving care without which he would not be God. Had they learned this lesson, their hearts would not have been so uneasy as to mistake his word; had they but said that, though they had one loaf, they had him who makes all the loaves, they would never have made their blunder.

The answer to the Lord's reproach is plainly this: their minds were so full of care about the day's bread that they could think of nothing else; the mere mention of leaven threw them floundering afresh in the bog of their unbelief. When he reminded them of what they had seen, and so of what God is and of the foolishness of their care, the moment their fear was taught to look up they began to see what his former words must have meant.

The disciples' care was for the day, not the morrow; and *morrow* stands for any point of the future. The next moment is as much beyond our grasp and as much in God's care as a hundred years away; in neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything. Only those claims of the morrow that must be prepared today belong to today's duty; the moment that coincides with work to be done is the moment to be minded; the next is nowhere till God has made it.

Their lack of bread seems to have come not from neglect but from the suddenness of the re-embarkation; and had there been a want of foresight, the Lord did not come to reprove that but the primary evil of life without God, the root of all evils. Minor virtues, prudence among them, would thus almost be superseded. If a man forgets a thing, God will see to that; man is not lord of his memory or intellect. But he is lord of his will and action, and is to blame when, remembering a duty, he puts it off and so forgets it. If a man does the immediate duty of the moment, I suspect wonderfully little forethought will be needed; only that forethought is right which determines duty and passes into action. Work done is of more consequence for the future than the foresight of an archangel.

With the disciples as with the rich youth, it was *Things* that prevented the Lord from being understood. Because of possession the young man had no suspicion of the grandeur of the call with which Jesus honoured him; he thought himself hardly dealt with to be offered a patent of Heaven's nobility, he was so very rich! His soul was crowded with the meanest idols, among which his spirit crept upon its knees, wasting on them the gazes that belonged to his fellows and his Master. The disciples had left all and followed the Lord; but neither had they got rid of *Things*. The paltry solitariness of a loaf was enough to hide the Lord from them. Surely if he had told them to go all day without food for his sake, they would not have minded! But they lost sight of God, as if he did not see or did not care.

In the former case it was the possession of wealth, in the latter the lack of more than a loaf, that made them incapable of receiving the Lord's word: the evil principle was precisely the same. If it be *Things* that slay you, what matter whether things you have or things you have not? The youth did not trust God as having given; the disciples did not trust God as ready to give. We are like them when in *any* trouble we do not trust him. It is hard on God when his children will not let him give, when they carry themselves so that he must withhold his hand lest he harm them. To take no care that they acknowledge whence their help comes would leave them worshippers of idols, trusters in that which is not.

Distrust is atheism, and the barrier to all growth. Lord, we do not understand you because we do not trust your Father, who is whole-hearted to us as never yet was mother to her first-born! While we who are evil would die to give our children bread, we are not certain the only Good will give us anything we desire! The things of your world so crowd our hearts that there is no room for the things of your heart, which would raise ours above all fear and make us merry children in our Father's house! How many a whisper of the watching Spirit we miss through brooding over a need not yet come! Tomorrow makes today's whole head sick, its whole heart faint. You do not so, Lord; were you such as we, we would have good cause to be troubled! But you know it is difficult, with *things* pressing on every sense, to believe that where we can see no hand directing, a will nearer than any hand is moving them from within to fulfil his word! Help us to obey, to resist, to trust.

The care filling your mind at this moment, or waiting only till you lay the book aside to leap on you, that need which is no need, is a demon sucking at the spring of your life.

"No; mine is a reasonable care, indeed an unavoidable one!"

"Is it something you have to do this very moment?"

"No."

"Then you are allowing it to usurp the place of something required of you this moment!"

"Nothing is required of me at this moment."

"Yes, there is: the greatest thing that can be required of man."

"Pray, what is it?"

"Trust in the living God. His will is your life."

"He may not will that I have what I need!"

"Then you only think you need it. Is it a good thing?"

"Yes, it is a good thing."

"Then why doubt you will have it?"

"Because God may choose to have me go without it."

"Why should he?"

"I cannot tell."

"Must it not be to give you something instead?"

"I want nothing instead."

"I thought I was talking to a Christian!"

"I will consent to be called nothing else."

"Do you not know, then, that when God denies a child of his anything he values, it is to give him something *he* values?"

"But if I do not want it?"

"You are none the less miserable for not having it. Instead of his great possessions the young man was to have the company of Jesus and treasure in heaven. When God refused to deliver a certain man from a sore evil, though he asked three times, he gave him instead his own graciousness, consoling him in person."

"Ah, but that was St Paul!"

"True; what of that?"

"He was one by himself!"

"God deals with all his children after his own father-nature. No scripture is of private interpretation, even for a St Paul. It sets forth God's way with man. If you are not willing that God should have his way with you, then in God's name be miserable, until your misery drives you to the Father's arms."

"I do trust him in spiritual matters."

"Everything is an affair of the spirit. If God has a way, it is the only way. Every little thing in which you would have your own way has a mission for your redemption; and he will treat you as a naughty child until you take your Father's way for yours."

There will be this difference between the rich who love their riches and the poor who hate their poverty: at death the heart of the one will still be crowded with things and their pleasures, the heart of the other relieved of their lack; the one has had his good things, the other his evil. But the rich man who held his *things* lightly, a channel and no cistern, ever forsaking his money, starts in the new world beside the man who accepted, not hated, his poverty. Each will say, "I am free!"

For the only air in which the soul can breathe and live is the present God and the spirits of the just: that is our heaven, our home. Cleansed of greed, jealousy, vanity, pride, possession, and all the forms of the evil self, we shall be God's children in the fields of that heaven, none desiring to be before another or to cast him out; for ambition and hatred will then be seen to be one spirit. "What you have, I have; what you desire, I will; I give to myself ten times in giving once to you." But let me be practical: you are ready to be miserable over trifles and do not believe God good enough to care for your care; I would reason with you to rid you of troubles that hide from you the thoughts of your God.

The things readiest to be done, those lying on the very table of a man's mind, are in general the most neglected, even by the thoughtful. May a man become strong in righteousness without learning to speak the truth to his neighbour, or climb the last flight of the stair without setting foot on the lowest step? Truth is one: he who does it in the small thing is of the truth; he who postpones the small thing near him for the great thing farther off is not. Consider the parallels between ourselves and the disciples maundering over one loaf with the Bread of Life beside them. We too dull our understandings with trifles and waste heavenly time with hurry; to those who possess their souls in patience come the heavenly visions. When I trouble myself over a trifle, hunting the house for some little lost article not from need but from dislike of loss, or fretting over a borrowed book not returned while thousands on my shelves could give me treasure that neither moth, rust, nor thief touches, am I not like the disciples? Am I not a fool whenever loss troubles me more than recovery would gladden? God would have me wise and smile at the trifle; this losing of things is his mercy, teaching us to let them go. Or have I forgotten a thought that seemed a truth revealed to my heart? I keep trying to call it back, feeling a poor man till it is recovered, though it might be far more lost in a notebook I would never look into again. I forget that God cares about live truths, not things set down in a book or memory or embalmed in the joy of knowledge, but things that lift up the heart and are active in an active will. Had I faith in God, the maker of thought and memory, I would know that if it was a truth it must come again; it is in God, and so, like the dead, not beyond my reach: kept for me.

"These are foolish illustrations, not worth writing!"

If such things do not happen, mentioning them is foolish; if they do, he is foolish who treats them as if they did not. I choose them for their smallness, appealing to all who keep house about the size of trouble that suffices to hide the word and face of God.

With every haunting trouble, great or small, go to God and ask him, the God of your life, to deliver you, his child, from what is unlike him and antagonistic to your nature. If your trouble is such that you cannot appeal to him, the more need! Where one cannot go to God, something is specially wrong. If you let thought for tomorrow or next year distress you, if the chatter of the public peering purblind into the sanctuary of motive annoys you, or you greatly heed the judgment of men, capable or incapable, you open your windows to the mosquitoes of care, to drown with their buzzing the voice of the Eternal!

If you tell me that but for care the needful work of the world would be ill done, I ask, "What work is better done by the greedy or anxious than by the free, fearless soul? If the work is not God's, care may help it, for its success is loss. Is he worthy the name of man who for fear of starvation does better work than for the joy that his labour is not in vain in the Lord? You are not likely to get rich that way, but you will not block the gate of heaven against yourself."

Ambition in every shape has to do with *Things*, with outward advantages for the satisfaction of self-worship; it is the form of pride that usurps the place of aspiration. The sole ambition of God is to rise above oneself; all other is of the devil. Yet it is nursed in many a soul that thinks itself devout, filling it with petty cares and disappointments that shut out the glory of God. We must get rid of the love of men's praise, the desire of fame, the pride that takes offence, the puffing-up of knowledge, and every other form of self-worship. We must be free. A man whom another enslaves may be free as God; but God will not enter, or sup with, a man who is a slave in himself, for he cannot be his friend; he will not eat in a lumber-room, though the lumber be thrones and crowns. *Cannot*, I say rather than *will not*: men full of things would not partake with God were he by them all day.

Nor will God force any door. He may send a tempest to burst doors and windows and shake the house to its foundations; but not so will he enter. The door must be opened by a willing hand before the foot of Love will cross the threshold. He watches to see the door move from within. Every tempest is an assault in the siege of love; the terror of God is the other side of his love, love outside the house that would be inside, that knows the house is no home, only a tent, until the Eternal dwells there. *Things* must be cast out to make room for their souls, the eternal truths which in things find shape and show.

But who is sufficient to cast them out? A man who attacks the army of bats and demon-snakes infesting the place of the Holy finds the task too great: the temple will not be cleansed by him, and the very dust he raises is full of corruptive forces. Let those who would do what they cannot remember, with hope, that he who knows all about our being once told a parable to the effect that people ought always to pray and not lose heart.

### THE WORD OF JESUS ON PRAYER

*The passage:* People ought always to pray.

Because we cannot do what we would as we would, we are driven to look for help, and that gives us a new starting point. Every difficulty points to something our theory of life has not yet taken in, and checks our tendency to leave the narrow path. But there is a reality of being in which everything is easy and plain: oneness with the Lord of Life. To pray for that is the first thing, and every difficulty hedges us toward it. If I set out the reasonableness of prayer, remember it is for action, not speculation: prayer is a thing to be done, and it matters nothing whether you agree with me if you do not pray. I want to help someone pray, not to explain how a man might pray and still be a reasonable soul.

First, the parable. It is one of many in which the Lord takes a story about a very common or bad person to argue, from the lesser to the greater, about the way of the All-righteous. Did the unrighteous judge, to save himself annoyance, punish a man who had not offended him for the sake of a woman he cared nothing about? And shall not the living Justice avenge his praying friends, while he bears patiently with their enemies over the injuries done them? That is how I take the phrase the Revision rightly renders "and he is long-suffering over them." He will avenge them speedily; yet "when the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?"

Here is a word of the Lord about prayer, and it is a comfort that he recognizes the difficulty: we need encouragement to go on praying, it looks as if we were not heard, and no wonder we are ready to faint. In his parable the suppliant must go again and again to the one who can help her, and wins only at last. Yet he allows no actual delay on God's part, so he plainly knows how things must look to those he wants to keep praying. He teaches us to go not by the look of things but by the reality behind it; one necessity of God's own willed nature outweighs a whole army of appearances. It looks as if he does not hear you: never mind; he does, he must; go on as the woman did, and you too will be heard. She is heard at last because of her much going; God hears at once and will avenge speedily. The judge cared nothing for the woman; those who cry to God are his chosen, as their very crying shows. He made them to cry, and they cry: will he not hear them? They exist to pray, that there may be communion between them and him. A gulf of indifference lay between the woman and the judge; God and those who seek him are closer than hands clasped in love. This is bold, given the delay the parable admits. Why then does he seem to check himself with a sigh: "Howbeit when the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?" After all he had said and done, and time given for the holy leaven to work, would he find men trusting the Father? Would they be beyond the tyranny of appearances, children enough to believe that God was hearing and working for them, though his ways are so wide and his goal for them so high that they could detect no movement toward it? The sigh never meant that God might do more than he was doing, but that the Father would have a dreary wait before his children would trust him; it recognizes man's slowly yielded part in faith, and his blame for not trusting.

He seems here to refer to his second coming. About its time he refused information; about its manner he said it would be unexpected; about our duty he insisted that we be ready, faithful and at our work. Those who say "Lo here, lo there" about the signs of his coming think to be too keen for him; told to watch lest he find them neglecting their work, they stare about, watching lest he succeed in coming like a thief! If we gave ourselves to obedience instead of speculation, what a difference would soon be seen in the world! To the multitude of so-called religious questions the Lord would answer, "Strive to enter in at the strait gate"! Many eat and drink and talk and teach in his presence; few do what he says. Obedience is the one key of life.

I would meet difficulties, not answer objections: remove stumbling-blocks from the path of the man who would pray, and help him pray. If we live not by our own will but another's, there is reason in prayer, and only then. To the man who refuses that other will I have nothing to say; the hour may come when he wishes there were someone to pray to, but now I cannot help him.

If there is a God and I am his creature, some communication between us may be, should be, must be open. If someone allows a God not good enough to care for his creatures, I grant it would be foolish to pray to him. But the notion that, with all the good impulses in us, we are the offspring of a cold-hearted devil is so horribly inconsistent that I would ask that man what cold-hearted disregard for truth makes him capable of supposing it. God's terrors, or if not his terrors then his sorrows, will yet speak to such a man; the divine something in him will love, and the love be left moaning.

Suppose I find myself like one away from home, even in a kind of prison. I can rule neither the world I live in nor my own thoughts and desires. I cannot quiet my passions, order my likings, determine my ends, will my growth, control my memory, or love or hate where I would; I am no king over myself. I cannot supply my own needs, nor always tell which of my seeming needs are impostors. My being is too much for me: I can neither understand it, be satisfied with it, nor better it. May that not well give me pause, the pause that ends in prayer? I cannot account for my existence, had no hand in it, and cannot end it. I can do nothing to make up to those I love, or those I hate, for the evils I have done them. In my worst moments I disbelieve in my best, and in my best I loathe my worst; there is in me no wholeness; life is no good to me, for I scorn myself. Can it be strange, then, that I think there ought to be somewhere a being who accounts for himself and for me, and makes the round of my existence just; one whose presence in my being is imperative, not merely to supplement it but to make my existence a good to me? A life not rounded in itself, but dependent on what it cannot know, cannot be a known good to itself; it longs for a *logos* to be the interpreting soul of its *cosmos*, a *logos* it cannot have. To know God present, where he is the essential life, must be absolutely necessary to that life. He who is made in God's image must know him or be desolate: the child must have the Father! My soul's desolation without him bears witness. It cannot act from itself except in God; what seems acting from itself without him is only yielding to impulse, and all within is disorder and spasm. A cry behind me and a voice before tell me I must rise above my present self, perhaps above all my possible self, and I do not see how. I am an unknown *I* shut up in a world of consciousness, itself unknown; surely this world of my unwilled, compelled existence cannot be unknown or impenetrable to him from whom I am! Is it not his thinking in which I think, his consciousness by which I am conscious? What passes in me must be known to him far more thoroughly than to me. Though I flew toward the dawn or settled at the farthest sea, his hand would lead and hold me. If I speak to him, however low, or only think to him, surely he, my original, in whose life and will alone I think of him, hears and knows and acknowledges! Shall I not tell him, then, that he has troubled me by making me, that I am unfit to be what I am, that my being is not yet a good to me, that I need a law to account for it in righteousness and show me how to *be* a good and not an evil? Shall I not cry to him to comfort me, to move his breath on the waters of the Chaos he has made, to be my rest and strength, to deliver me from my sins and make me clean and glad? Such a cry is of the child to the Father; if there is a Father, he will hear, and let the child know he hears. Every need of God that lifts up the heart is a seeking of God, a begging for himself, the profoundest prayer, and the root and inspirer of all other prayer.

If it is reasonable for me to cry thus, God cannot but hear; a being who could not hear or would not answer prayer could not be God.

"But granting all this, is what you call a necessary truth an existing fact? You say, 'It must be so'; I say, 'What if there is no God?' Convince me that prayer is heard, and I shall know. We know the wind blows; why should we not know that God answers prayer? Why should the question need reasoning about at all?"

I reply: what if God does not care to have you know it at second hand? There is some testimony, and might be more were such things not so personal and delicate to talk about. But no testimony can be conclusive, since like a reported miracle it can always be put aside, and the conviction so gained is of little value.

Proof is scarcely possible for inward experience, and the better part of the evidence is of that kind: the testifier may be truthful yet utterly self-deceived. Take King David: old poetry, in the most indefinite language in the world! Many psalms are a cry as true as ever came from depth of pain or height of deliverance; yet it may all have been only the waves of the psychical aether! I lay nothing on testimony now, not valuing the bare assent of the intellect. The only assurance worth having, though the most incontestable evidence came from a thousand quarters, is that gained by personal experience, which a man can least readily receive from another or pass on as evidence. Even the evidence of Jesus Christ could not take its place. A truth matters enormously for the life, that is, the heart, conscience, and will; little as a fact for the understanding. God may hear every prayer ever offered, and a man may believe he does, and be none the better, so long as he has no prayers to be heard and no answers to receive. Reader, if you are in trouble, try whether God will not help you; if you are in no need, why ask about prayer? He knows little of himself who does not know he is wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked; but until he suspects a need, how can he pray? For one who does not want to pray I would not lift a straw to defeat him in the argument whether God hears; let him think what he will; it matters nothing in heaven or on earth, and whether in hell I do not know.

I am almost ashamed to mention the so-called scientific challenge to prove the efficacy of prayer by the results of simultaneous petition; science itself should show it absurd. A God who could be moved one way or another like that is not worth believing in, nor is he the God Jesus Christ believed in, who said he knew. I cannot believe in a God who would fail to hear a single prayer, even the feeblest or worst; but a God who would grant every request of every man or company of men would be an evil God, no God but a demon. A God who hangs in the thought-atmosphere like a windmill, waiting till enough men combine to send up prayer with force to turn his arms, is absurd. God waits to be gracious, not to be tempted. A man who proposes such a test has no worthy idea of a God and might well disbelieve in any; better that than believe in an unworthy one.

"But I want to believe in God. I want to know there is a God who answers prayer. There was a time when I believed. I prayed to him in great and sore trouble of heart and mind, and he did not hear me. I have not prayed since."

How do you know that he did not hear you?

"He did not give me what I asked, though the welfare of my soul hung on it."

In your judgment. Perhaps he knew better.

"I am the worse for his refusal. I would have believed in him if he had heard me."

Until the next desire came that he would not grant, and then you would have turned your God away. A desirable believer! A fine brother to him who thought nothing fit to give the Father less than his all! You would accept no decision against your desire; that ungranted, there was no God, or not a good one. This only I will say: God has not to consider his children only at the moment of their prayer. If a man is not ready for love's severity, he may be given what he wishes so that he comes to wish he had not been; but to give a child what he wants merely because he wants it, with no further purpose for his good, would be the cruelty of a devil. Yet every prayer is heard, and the real soul of the prayer may require, for its real answer, that it not be granted in the form requested.

"To have a thing in another shape might be equivalent to not having it at all."

If you knew God, you would leave that to him. He is not mocked, and he will not mock. He knows you better than you know yourself, and deals with you as the child of eternal ages, not of a day. You shall be satisfied if you will let him have his way with the creature he has made; the question is between your will and his. He is not one of those who give readiest what they prize least; he gives only his best, or what prepares for it. Not many years may pass before you confess, "You are a God who hears prayer and gives a better answer." You may see that the desire of your deepest heart would have been frustrated by getting what then seemed its embodiment. That God should listen as a loving father and deal with the request with perfect tenderness is enough for me; it is little that I go without what I pray for. If any answer not coming from love, and not for the final satisfaction of the one who prayed, would be unworthy of God, and love and knowledge watch over the wayward, ignorant child, then the trouble of seemingly unanswered prayer begins to abate, and a lovely hope takes its place. To hear is not necessarily to grant, God forbid! but it is necessarily to attend to, and sometimes to refuse.

Paul says he besought the Lord three times to remove a certain thing, and was told that Christ's grace was enough for him, for power is made perfect in weakness. God had something better for Paul than granting his prayer: he would make him strong, so that the power of Christ would descend and remain on him, stronger than his suffering, a sharer in the energy of God. If we have God, we can do without the answer to any prayer.

"But if God is so good, and knows all we need far better than we do, why should it be necessary to ask him for anything?"

What if he knows prayer to be the thing we need first and most? What if the main object of prayer in God's idea is to supply our endless need of himself, and our smaller needs are good because they drive us to him? Hunger may drive the runaway child home, and he may or may not be fed at once, but he needs his mother more than his dinner. Communion with God is the soul's one need beyond all others; prayer begins it, and some need is the motive of the prayer. If gratitude and love followed at once on the supply of our needs, and God our Saviour were the one thought of our hearts, it might be unnecessary to ask. But we take our supplies as a matter of course, as if they came from nothing, or the earth, or our own thoughts, not from a heart of love and a will which alone is force. So we must be made to feel some of our wants, that we may seek him who supplies them all and find his every gift a window to his heart of truth. So begins a communion with God, which is the sole end of prayer and of existence itself. We must ask that we may receive; but God's end in making us pray is not that we should receive what we ask for our lower needs, for he could give us everything without that. To bring his child to his knee, God withholds, that man may ask.

For the high necessities of our nature, God requires us to ask, by shutting us up to prayer, in order that he may be able to give. For how can he give to the soul what it cannot receive? The ripeness for receiving is the asking; the blossom-cup of the soul, ready to be filled with heavenly dews, is its prayer. When the soul's hunger for light and truth has waked its higher energies and roused the will to action, its only fitness for receiving the things of God, that action is prayer. Then God can give, and be toward the man as he would be; for the glory of God is to give himself. We thank you, Lord Christ, for it is by your pain alone that we rise toward knowing this glory of your Father and our Father.

Even for lower things: what might be unfit to do for a man who does not recognize the source of his life may be fit in the highest sense to grant when he comes to that source to ask; and even with an individual desire of one who mostly recognizes the Father, it may be well to give to him asking what would not benefit him unasked. For the real good of any gift, the giver must be in the gift, as God always is, for he is love; and the receiver must know and receive the giver in it. Every gift of God is a harbinger of his greatest and only sufficing gift, himself. No gift unrecognized as from God is at its own best; so many things God would gladly give us, even things we need because we are, must wait until we ask, that we may know where they come from. When in all gifts we find him, in him we shall find all things.

Sometimes one praying feels: "Were it not better to abstain? If this thing is good, will he not give it? Would he not be better pleased if I left it all to him?" I think it comes of a lack of faith and childlikeness, perhaps as a fear that, asking for what was not good, the prayer might be granted. Paul has no such thought; he says to cast all our care on God, who cares for us, and in everything to make our requests known to him. It may even come of ambition for spiritual distinction. In every request, heart and soul and mind ought to supply the low accompaniment, "Thy will be done"; but making any request brings us near to him, into communion with our Life, and helps us to think of him in all our affairs and give thanks in everything. Anything large enough for a wish to light on is large enough to hang a prayer on, and the thought of him to whom it goes will purify the desire; to say "Father, I should like this or that" would at once show us a bad wish and make us turn from it. So the Lord carried himself toward his Father when he said, "If it be possible, let this cup pass from me." But there was something he cared for more than his own fear, his Father's will: "Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done." He has no fear that God will be displeased at his saying what he would like, nor does he regard his Father's plans as so fixed that his prayer could not alter them. The true son-faith comes with boldness, fearless that the Father will do anything but what is right fatherly and full of loving-kindness. We must not think to please him by any asceticism, even of the spirit; we must speak straight out to him. The Father may will otherwise, but his grace will be enough for the child.

There could be no riches but for need. God himself is made rich by man's necessity: by that he is rich to give, and through it we are rich by receiving.

Prevailing by entreaty over an unwilling God is a heathen notion, held by those who think him a hard master, or like the unjust judge. Nothing so quenches prayer as the notion of unwillingness in the ear that hears; when prayer is dull, nothing makes it flow like the thought that God wants to give us everything. We are told to come boldly to the throne of grace, to obtain mercy and find help in time of need. We shall be refused if that is better; but what is good our Father will give with divine good will. The Lord spoke his parable "to the end that they ought always to pray, *and not to faint*."

### MAN\'S DIFFICULTY CONCERNING PRAYER

*The passage:* They ought to pray, and not to faint.

"How should any design of the All-wise be altered by prayer of ours?" How are we to believe such a thing?

By reflecting that he is the All-wise, who sees what lies ahead and will not block his own path. The objection springs from the poorest idea of God in relation to us: it supposes he has plans for our part of creation irrespective of us. What is the whole system of things for but our education? Does God care more for suns and planets and ordered harmonies than for his children? I venture to say he cares more for oxen than for those. He lays no plans irrespective of his children; since he means them to be free, active, living things, he keeps space for them: room to struggle out of the chrysalis, to undergo the change that comes with the waking will, and to enter on the divine sports and labours of children in their Father's house. He may keep his plans in a measure unfixed, waiting the free desire of the individual soul. The first course of his children's education is meant to bring them to pray: shall the system appointed to that end be so hard and fast that he cannot answer the prayer it exists to produce? Often the prayer itself is God's end; but how will the further end, oneness of the child's heart with the Father's, be reached if the child knows the Father cannot answer? *Will not* may be for love, but a self-imposed *cannot*? How could he be Father who would keep no room for his children's babbled prayers? There must be a Godlike region of choice, as there is a human, however little we can conceive it. It would be a glory in such a system that its suns themselves wavered and throbbed at the pulse of a new child-life.

What perfection in a dwelling would it be if everything were fitted like the pigeon-holes of a cabinet? What stupid perfection would leave no room to change the plan when the facts change, even by the mighty change that his child is praying! See God's freedom in his sunsets, never one like another, and in his skies and ever-changing earth: all moves not by dead law but by the vital law of liberty, ordered from within. A fine perfection, where a thing had only one way! I may move my arm as I please: shall God be unable to move his? For himself he might desire no change, but he is God for his growing creatures, and change is the necessity of their existence. They need a mighty law of liberty, with not one atom of chance in it. Creation's one idea is the begetting of a free, divine will in us: shall that will, praying with the Father's, find itself manacled by foregone laws, and not rather be a new-born law, working new things? No man is so tied by divine law that he cannot modify his work; shall God not modify his? Law is but a mode of life-action, and Life's slave. Is God only the prisoned steam in the engine, ordered by valve and piston, or an indwelling, willing power, as a man's soul in his body dimly typifies? If you say he made things to go and left them, I say that if his machine interfered with his answering a single child's prayer, he would sweep it away, not to bring back chaos but to make room for his child. But order is divine and cannot obstruct its own higher ends; free order, neither chaos nor law senseless and unpossessed, is the home of Thought. If you say there can be but one perfect way, I answer that the perfect way to a certain crisis can hardly be the perfect way beyond it; and since the crisis depends on a will, not all can be exactly prepared. God is not occupied with a grand toy of worlds, suns, forces and waves; these are his workshops and tools for bringing out righteous men and women to fill his house of love. Would he have let his Son die for a law of nature? They exist only for the birth of sons and daughters, who must be born again from above. Those whose doom, to grow or perish, implies their inability to lay hold of the perfect must be given many a modification of the ideal; the best *means* cannot be the ideal Best. Truth embodied for the low cannot equal that for the higher, else it will fail; but as the low ascend, their revelation will ascend also.

That God cannot modify his plans without changing a single law of his world is to me absurd. If we can change, God can change, or he is less free than we: his plans, I say, not his principles or ends, God forbid! He changes them in a divine fashion, above ours as the heavens are higher than the earth. Since in his miracles Jesus did only in miniature what his Father does in the great, I will take from them an instance of answer to prayer that bears importantly on my subject. Poor was the making of wine in the stone water-pots compared with its making in the vine, whose live roots gather water from the earth; but it is precious as the interpreter of that, and as the outcome of our Lord's sympathy with ordinary human rejoicing. It is more precious to me for another element in its origin: the regard of our Lord for a wish of his mother. Alas, how often it is misunderstood!

His mother had suggested that here was an opportunity to appear in his greatness, the potent purveyor of wine for the failing feast. It was not in his plan, as his words show; the Lord never pretended anything, to enemy or mother. He lets her know they have different notions of his work: "What to me and thee, woman? My hour is not yet come." But there was that in his look and tone from which she knew her desire, scarcely half-formed into a request, was granted. What am I to conclude, worthy of the Son of God and the Son of Mary, but that at his mother's prayer he made room in his plans for what she desired? He did for her what he would himself rather have left alone. He did not always do as she would have him; here he could, since it did not interfere with his Father's will. Was the perfect son to be the only son of man who did nothing to please his mother but what fitted his own plan? Not so could he be the living heart of the children's great response to the Father, or the grand family become real. Alas for the son who would not willingly do for his mother something he would rather not do! Had it turned from his Father's will, he would not have done it, for that would have been to answer her prayer against her. The Son could change his intent and spoil nothing; so can the Father, for the Son does nothing but what he sees the Father do.

Granting that God may answer those who pray for themselves, what of prayer for others? It would surely be selfish to pray only for ourselves; but the question is of the use of the act, so let us pray for all we can. But here the ground is changed, if the fitness for answer lies in the praying of the one who prays: the attitude needed for reception belongs not to those *for* whom prayer is made but to him *by* whom it is made. What fitness, then, in praying for others? Will God give to another, for our asking, what he would not give without it, or, if it could be done without the person's own part, would he not do it without a second person? If God were a tyrant whose heart anxious love might soften, or one who could be informed and reasoned with, or one whose interest a showing of character, need, or claim might awaken, prayer for another would have plain reason, though prayer to one so unworthy would be degrading. But if we believe that God is the one unselfish, good being in the universe, whose one design is to make his children perfect as he is perfect; that he is always giving himself to us for our life; that he does his best for *every* man (which once I heard a bishop decline to acknowledge); and that he knows every man's needs and, for love's sake, will not spare one pang that may purify one of his children, how can we think he will alter his way with one because another prays for him?

I do not know how to answer the argument. I can only, feeling the difficulty, say again: "Yet I believe I may pray for my friend, for my enemy, for anybody! There must be some genuine good and power in one man's prayer for another to the maker of both, just because their maker is perfect." I shall not bring authority to bear, for authority can at best make us believe reason is there, not see it. The difficulty is the same when we hear the Lord himself pray to his Father for those the Father loves, with a special love from the deeps of divine approval, because they have received his Son. Those who believe in Jesus will be satisfied that reason and right lie in what he does, but that is not understanding. Though I cannot explain, I can show some ground on which, even untaught, a man left alone with his heart might pray for another.

If God has made us to love and long to help like himself; if there are people for whom we would give our lives to lift them out of the evil gulf of their ungodliness; if the love in us would, for the easing of the love he kindled, give them a gift; if amid a sore need to bless we find utter impotence, the fire burning and unable to get out; and if all our hope lies in God: what can we do but go to him with this our own difficulty and need? Where the natural refuge is, there must be help; the best argument that he has help is that we have need. If I can be helped through my friend, I think God will take the thing up and do what I cannot, helping my friend that I may be helped, perhaps helping me to help him. In praying for another we pray for ourselves, for the relief of the needs of our love; so this comes under the former kind. Would God give us love, the root of power, and leave it helpless in us? Where he could not alter, he could perhaps at least expedite something, in view of some help we might then give. If he desires that we work with him, that work surely helps him!

Some things are argued for by the very possibility of supposing them; but I think I can go farther and imagine at least the *where*, if not the *how*, of help for another in answer to prayer: the divine conditions in which it is born.

God is ever seeking to lift us into sharing his divine nature; God's kings, those who have borne witness to the truth with Jesus, share his glory even on the Father's throne. See the grandeur of the Holy One's creative love: nothing less will serve it than that his children, through his suffering and theirs, share the throne of his glory! Does such perfection bind him with difficulties, or set him freer to do what he would amid opposing forces? If his glory is in giving himself, and we must share it by giving ourselves, why should we not begin here and now? If he wills that other children be brought to his knee and fireside by the help of the children born from above through his eternal Son, why should he not have kept some margin of room in which their prayers may work for those they have to help, who are of the same life? I cannot tell how, but may not those prayers in some way increase God's opportunity for working his best will, the good ones adding to his means of helping the not yet good? One way is clear: the prayer will react on the mind that prays, which will shine brighter and enlighten more. But there must be more in it. Prayer in its perfect idea is a rising into the will of the Eternal: may not the Father's help become one with the child's prayer, and for the prayer of him he holds in his arms go forth for him who wills not yet to be lifted to his embrace? God cannot bring his children to his bosom at once, and not at all except through his own suffering and theirs. But will not any good parent find some way of granting the prayer of the child who says, "Papa, this is my brother's birthday: I have nothing to give him, and I do love him so! Could you give me something to give him, or give him something for me?"

"Still, could not God have given the gift without the prayer? And why should the good of anyone depend on the prayer of another?"

I can only answer with a question: why should my love be powerless to help another? We must not tie God to our measures of time, or think he has forgotten a prayer that we, seeing no answer, have forgotten. Death is not an impervious wall; the prayers go through it. We may have some to help in the next world because we have prayed for them in this: will it not be a boon to them to have an old friend to serve them? What I venture to say is this: if in God we live and move and have our being, and the very possibility of loving lies in our existing in the live air of love, God himself, then we are nearer each other than by any bodily nearness; and if prayer is a pulse that sets this atmosphere in motion, it brings us closer than the parts of our body are by their nerve-telegraphy. Surely in the Eternal hearts are never parted! Surely the system of things would be incomplete in relation to love, its best thing, if love had no help in prayer. If I love and cannot help, does my heart not move me to ask him to help who loves and can, him without whom I would neither love nor care to pray? Will he answer, "Child, do not trouble me; I am already doing all I can"? Then who that loved would not be content to be nowhere in the matter? But how if the limitless Love, the self-forgetting devotion that demanding all gives all, should say, "Child, I have been doing all I could; but now you are come, I shall be able to do more! Here is a corner for you, my little one: push at this thing to get it out of the way"? How if he should say, "Pray on, my child; it goes through me in help to him. We are of one mind about it; I help and you help. I shall have you all safe home with me by and by! Only we must work, and not lose heart. Let your light so shine that men glorify me by knowing I am light and no darkness"? What then? Oh that lovely picture by Michelangelo, with the young ones and the little ones come to help God to make Adam!

But the answer to prayer may come in a shape that seems a refusal, even in an increase of what we seek deliverance from. I know of one who prayed to love better: a sore division came between, out of which at length rose a dawn of tenderness.

Our vision is so circumscribed, our theories so small, our faith so continually fitted to our dwarf intellect, that there is endless room for rebellion against ourselves. We must not let our poor knowledge limit our intellect, our intellect our faith, or our faith our divine hope; reason must humbly watch over all, reason, the candle of the Lord.

Some argue for prayer not from any answer to be looked for but from the good gained in the spiritual attitude of praying. Some who believe in no ear to hear or heart to answer will yet pray; they say it does them good; they pray to nothing at all, but get spiritual benefit.

I will not contradict their testimony. So needful is prayer to the soul that the mere attitude of it may encourage a good mood. To pray to what is not is in logic a folly; yet the good they say comes of it may rebuke the worse folly of their unbelief, for it indicates that prayer is natural, and how could it be natural if inconsistent with the very mode of our being? Theirs is a better way than that of those who believe there is a God but not that he will answer, yet pray to him; that is more foolish and more immoral than praying to the No-god, and mocks him, themselves, and the truth.

On the other hand, though God give no assent to the individual prayer, and the prayer be for something not good enough to be a gift of God, the soul that prays will get good of it, if only in being brought a little nearer the Father and making way for coming again. Prayer reacts for good on the praying soul irrespective of answer. But to pray for the sake of the prayer, regardless of there being no one to hear, would indicate to me a nature morally false and not merely illogical, did I not suspect a vague apprehension of a Something diffused through all existence, and some shadowiest communion with it.

There are moods of such satisfaction in God that a man may feel nothing is left to pray for and he has only to wait for what the Lord will work; moods of such hungering that petition is crushed into an inarticulate crying; and a communion with God that asks for nothing, yet asks for everything. This last is the very essence of prayer, though not petition. A man may believe, not in God, but that there is a God, and yet not desire communion with him; but he who prays and does not faint will come to recognize that to talk with God is more than to have all prayers granted: it is the end of all prayer, granted or refused. And he who seeks the Father more than anything he can give is likely to have what he asks, for he is not likely to ask amiss.

Even those who ask amiss may sometimes be answered. The Father will never give a stone to the child who asks for bread; but I am not sure he will never give a stone to the child who asks for a stone. If the Father says, "That is a stone; it is no bread," and the child answers, "I am sure it is bread; I want it," may it not be well he should try his bread?

Now for another point in the parable, where I think I can help: the Lord's apparent recognition of delay in answering prayer. The structure of the parable takes delay for granted, yet he says, "He will avenge them speedily!"

The reconciling conclusion is that God loses no time, though the answer may not be immediate.

He may delay because it would not be safe to give us at once what we ask; we are not ready. To give before we could truly receive would destroy the heart and hope of prayer, and cease to be our Father. The delay itself may bring us nearer our help, deepen the desire, perfect the prayer, and ripen the receptive condition.

Again, time may be needed to work out the answer, not from any straitening in God but from our own condition and capacity, or our friend's. God is limited by regard for our best; our best implies education, in which we must have a large share, and being human it takes time. Perhaps the better the gift, the more time it needs. To give us a spiritual gift God may have to begin far back in our spirit, in regions unknown to us, and do much that we can be aware of only in the results; our consciousness is to our being as the flame of the volcano to the world-gulf it issues from, and God works in that gulf, behind our consciousness. He may be coming toward our consciousness from behind with his own presence, the one thing we most earnestly cry for, long before we are aware that he has answered and is visiting his child. To avenge speedily must mean to make no delay beyond what is necessary, to begin the moment it is possible. Because the Son of Man did not appear for thousands of years after men began to cry for a Saviour, shall we imagine he did not come the first moment it was well he should? To come sooner would have delayed his kingdom, not hastened it. God does not put off like the unrighteous judge, until irritated by the needy; he will hear while they are yet speaking; before they call he will answer.

The Lord uses words without anxiety about their misuse by those who do not search for his will in them; the word *avenge* may be kept from the parable without its special meaning there, yet it suggests a remark or two.

Of course no prayer for revenge that would gratify the selfishness of our nature, which God's fire must burn out of us, need think to be heard. Be sure, when the Lord prayed his Father to forgive those who crucified him, he uttered his own wish and his Father's will at once: God will never punish according to the abstract abomination of sin, as if men knew what they were doing. "Vengeance is mine," he says; rightly understood, we might as well pray for God's vengeance as for his forgiveness. That vengeance is to destroy the sin, to make the sinner abjure and hate it; no vengeance that seeks or effects less is satisfying. The man himself must turn against himself, and so be for himself. If nothing else will do, then hell-fire; if less will do, whatever brings repentance and self-repudiation is God's repayment.

Friends, if any prayers are offered against us, if God's vengeance is cried out for because of some wrong you or I have done, God grant us his vengeance! Let us not think we shall get off!

But perhaps the Lord was thinking here not of persecution or any human wrong but of the troubles that most trouble his true disciple. That comforts those whose foes are within them, for then he recognizes the evils of self against which we fight not as parts of ourselves but as our foes, on whom he will avenge the true self at strife with them. No evil is, or could be, of the essential being of the creature God made! What is not good, however associated with our being, is against it, its enemy. When we fight, he will avenge. Till we fight, evil has dominion over us, to make us miserable; no one can be other than miserable under the yoke of a nature contrary to his own. Comfort yourself, then, who find your own heart and soul too much for you: God will avenge his own elect. He is not delaying; he is at work for you. Only pray, and do not faint. Ask, and it shall be given you. Seek most the best things; to ask for them is to have them; the seed of them is in you, or you could not ask.

But from whatever quarter our troubles come, outside world or inside, let us still pray. In his own right way, the only way that could satisfy us, God will answer our prayers with help. He will avenge us of our adversaries, and that speedily. Only let us be adversaries to no man, but fountains of love and forgiving tenderness to all. And from no adversary, whether on the way with us or haunting the secret chamber of our hearts, let us hope to be delivered till we *have paid the last farthing*.

### THE LAST FARTHING

*The passage:* You will by no means come out from there until you have paid the last farthing.

The parables have a wonderful quality that the Lord himself points to but we seldom grasp: the mere intellect cannot understand them. They speak to the conscience and the will, not to the intellect and imagination. They are strong and direct but not definite. They are meant not to explain anything but to rouse a man to say, "I am not what I ought to be; I do not do what I ought to do!" The wise may give endless rambling interpretations, while the child who uses the parables to walk the one path keeps receiving light from them. The Lord's words, like those of all true teachers, are most obscured by those who interpret rather than do them, and theologians have hidden the gospel more than any adversary. Christ came for our will, not our understanding. He who does what he sees will understand; he who wants to understand rather than do will stumble on and talk foolishness, lacking what could understand such things. Only those who walk by what they find can understand the gospel and its parables. The speaker never meant anyone else to know intellectually what would harm him so known, since he would imagine he had grasped and even possessed it. When the pilgrim of the truth reaches the region of the parable, he finds its interpretation. It is not a fruit or jewel to store, but a well springing by the wayside.

Let us look at what the Lord himself said about his parables. I take Matthew xiii. 14, 15, because it is plainer and quotes Isaiah in full, after the Septuagint; the other Gospels should be read in its light (Mark's is so compressed it could be falsely read, and John seems to blame the devil directly for the blinding). The point is that those who close their deeper eyes by insincerity shall not be able to use even the superficial eyes of the understanding in the matter. Whether this follows by necessity or as a special punishment, it is God's will and comes from the live Truth: they shall not see what is not for such as they. It is the punishment of the true Love, and constantly fulfilled. If I know anything of God's truth, the objectors to Christianity I know do not; their arguments, though not false in themselves, miss the matter. They see what they argue against, but not what they think they argue against.

This removes the difficulty that the parables are plainly for teaching the truth, yet the Lord speaks of them as for concealing it. They are for the understanding of the practical man only, who does what he knows and seeks to understand vitally. They reveal to the live conscience, not to the keenest intellect, though they may rouse the conscience with glimpses of truth where a man is near waking. Ignorance may be both a punishment and a kindness, since all punishment is kindness, the best of which the man is then capable: "Because you will not do, you shall not see; it would be worse for you to see, being unwilling to do." They are punished by having the way closed; their own doing falls on them. To tell them things plainly would only harden them, since they would not act on them. They get parables, lanterns of the truth, clear to those who walk by their light and dark to those who will not; the latter would have the light in their eyes, and it would only blind them. Their punishment is to be in the wrong and stay there until they come out of it: "You choose the dark; you shall stay in it till its terrors make you cry out." God puts a seal on a man's will, either as his great punishment or his mighty favour: "Ye love the darkness, abide in the darkness"; "O woman, great is thy faith: be it done unto thee even as thou wilt!"

I do not know what special meaning lies in the magistrate, judge, and officer, beyond perhaps a general sense of the final approach coming by steps; but I think I know what "agree on the way" and "the uttermost farthing" mean. The parable appeals to the common sense of its hearers in every affair of righteousness. Settle the claim against you; compulsion waits behind it. Do now what you must do one day. Since payment cannot be escaped, escape the prison that enforces it. Do not drive Justice to extremities. You cannot escape the eternal law of things; yield of yourself, and do not make God compel you.

To the honest man, or the man who would be honest, this word is gracious. To the untrue it is a terrible threat; to him who is of the truth it is sweet as the most loving promise. He who is of God's mind rejoices at the word of the changeless Truth; the voice of the Right is his salvation. If God were not inexorably just, the feeblest lover of right would have no stay: "You are true, O Lord; one day I also shall be true!" "Render the right, cost what it may" is dreadful to those whose life is a falsehood; but those who love righteousness more than life would pay the last farthing. It is a joy deep as peace to know God is determined on such payment, determined to have his children clean as snow, so that with his help they not only make up for any wrong but at length, by eternal choice of good, become incapable under any temptation of doing what God would not do.

Men often cherish, without giving it form, the evil fancy that there is some way out of strict justice, some way to escape doing *all* that is required. There is none; such a way would be worse than the road to the everlasting fire, for it would end in eternal death. There is no heaven with a little hell in it, no keeping some of the devil in our hearts or pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather! Do not think to be delivered from the necessity of *being* good by being made good. God is the God of the animals in a far lovelier way, I suspect, than many dare think, but he will not be God of a man by making a good beast of him. You must be good; neither death nor good company will make you so, though if you are willing and try, all helps will be given. A robe of imputed righteousness is the poorest of legal cobwebs spun by spiritual spiders. To me it seems an invention of well-meaning dulness to soothe insanity, though it has served as an escape from worse imaginations. John seems to point at it: he that does righteousness is righteous even as Christ is righteous. Christ is our righteousness not so that we escape punishment, still less being righteous, but as the live, potent creator of righteousness in us, so that, receiving his spirit, we resist unto blood, striving against sin, and know in ourselves how lovely righteousness is and how mean, ugly, and unnatural unrighteousness is. He *is* our righteousness, and it is no fiction, pretence, or imputation.

What keeps men from seeing righteousness and unrighteousness as they are is that they have been told many things are righteous or unrighteous which are neither. Righteousness is just fairness, from God to man and from man to God and to man: giving every one his large, mighty due. He who does this, and no one else, is righteous. Any system that persuades men there is any salvation but becoming righteous as Jesus is righteous, that a man can be made good as a good dog is good without his own willed share, or that he is saved by having his sins hidden under imputed righteousness, is, so far as it does so, of the devil and not of God. Thank God, even error does not injure the true of heart. They grow in the truth, and as love casts out fear, truth casts out falsehood.

I read in this parable that a man had better make up his mind to be righteous and fair, and pay what he owes in every relation of life, wherever one man may demand of another or complain of unfair play. Arrange matters with those who have anything against you while you are still together and things can be arranged; *you will have to*, under harder circumstances than now. Putting off is no use. There are means of compelling you.

"In this affair, however, I am in the right."

"If so, very well, for this affair. But I have reason to doubt whether you are capable of judging righteously in your own cause. Do you hate the man?"

"No, I don't hate him."

"Do you dislike him?"

"I can't say I *like* him."

"Do you love him as yourself?"

"Oh, come! come! no one does that!"

"Then no one is to be trusted when he thinks, however firmly, that he is all right and his neighbour all wrong in any matter between them."

"But I don't say I am all right and he is all wrong; there may be something to urge on his side. What I say is that I am more in the right than he."

"This is not fundamentally a question of things but of your spiritual condition and action toward your neighbour. If you were all right toward him, you could do him no wrong. Whatever the dispute, you owe him something you do not pay, as surely as you think he owes you something he will not pay."

"He would take immediate advantage of me if I owned that."

"So much the worse for him. Until you are fair to him, it does not matter to you whether he is unfair to you or not."

"I beg your pardon, it is just what does matter! I want nothing but my rights. What can matter to me more than my rights?"

"Your duties, your debts. You are all wrong. It matters little *to you* whether he gives you your rights; it is life or death to you whether you give him his. Whether or not he pays what you count his debt, you will be compelled to pay all you owe him. If you owe him a pound and he owes you a million, you must pay the pound whether he pays the million or not. If, owing you love, he gives you hate, you, owing him love, must still pay it. A love, justice, or praise withheld from you, a judgment passed on you without judgment, will not absolve you of a love unpaid, a justice undone, a praise withheld, a false judgment passed. These uttermost farthings, to say nothing of debts the world itself counts grievous wrongs, you must pay, whether he pays you or not. We have a good while to pay, but a crisis comes, always sooner than those expect who are not ready, when the unyielded demand will be followed by prison.

The same holds for every demand of God: refusing to pay makes an adversary who will compel you, for your own sake. If you say "I will not," he will see to it. There is a prison whose doors, we know, open only when the last farthing is paid.

The main debts God demands are those at the root of all right, which we owe in mind, soul, and being. Whatever in us could make an adversary or keep us from doing God's will or agreeing with our fellow must be yielded. Every relation to God and our fellow must be heartily acknowledged and met as real. Smaller debts, if any is small, follow.

If the man acknowledges the debt and would pay but cannot, the universe will be taxed to help him. If he accepts God's will, he is the Father's child, the Father's whole power and wealth are his, and the uttermost farthing will easily be paid. If he denies the debt, or acknowledges it and does nothing, then at last the prison! God in the dark can make a man thirst for the light who in the light sought only the dark. The cells may differ in darkness but not in this: every door opens only to payment. There is no day but God's will, and he who is of the night cannot roam the day forever; unfelt and unprized, the light must be taken from him that he may know what darkness is. When the darkness is perfect, when he is without the light he spent the light in slaying, then he will know darkness.

I think I have seen from afar something of the final prison, the innermost cell of the debtor of the universe; I will try to convey what it may be.

It is the vast outside, the ghastly dark beyond the gates of the city of which God is the light, where evil dogs range, silent as the dark, for there is no sound any more than sight. The time of signs is over; all were misused, and nothing is left by which to believe. The man wakes from the final struggle of death in absolute loneliness, worse than any deserted childhood. Nothing outside his consciousness reaches him: all is dark and dumb, no motion, no wind, no dream of change, no scent from a far field, no sign of God. God has so far withdrawn that the man is conscious only of what God has withdrawn from. In the live world he cared for nothing but himself; now, in the dead world, he is in God's prison, his own separated self. He would not believe in God because he never saw him; now he doubts there is such a thing as a man's face, or that he ever saw one rather than dreamed it. He never came near enough to human beings to know what one was, so may well doubt that they ever were, or that he was one.

Next after doubt comes reasoning on the doubt: "The only one must be God! I know no one but myself: I must be God!" Poor helpless dumb devil, his own glorious lord god! He will imagine himself that resistless force which, without his will or knowledge, is the law by which the sun burns and the stars keep their courses. His fancy will breed a thousand fancies, running riot like mice in a deserted house, and he will call it creation, and *his*. With no reality to set beside them or correct them by, and God's measured order and sweet graces nowhere for him, what he thinks will be his realities, for lack of what God thinks. Soon misery will beget on imagination a thousand shapes of woe, which he cannot rule or tell from real presences: a world of miserable contradictions and cold-fever dreams.

But no human imagination could adequately picture being left without a shadow of God's presence. If God gave it, man could not understand it; he knows neither God nor himself by understanding. No man who cares least about God was ever left in this world as God could leave him. I doubt any man from whom God had withdrawn could go on following his wickedness.

The most frightful thing that could befall a man, to his own consciousness, is to have to live an existence with which God had nothing to do. It could not be, for caused being ceases when the causation ceases; we live and do always in God, never out of him. But suppose the man so left that he seems utterly alone, yet, alas, with himself, with not the smallest interchange of thought or contact of existence possible. I believe he would be glad of contact with the worst-loathed insect, a shape of life beyond his own huge, void, formless being! He would be ready to worship his worst enemy, could he be aware of him; I imagine some such feeling in the devils' prayer to enter the swine. The misery would be not only the absence of all being but his own, but the fearful, endless, unavoidable presence of that self. Without the correction, reflection, and support of other presences, being is not merely unsafe but a horror, for anyone but God, who is his own being. For one whose idea is God's and the image of God, his own being is far too fragmentary and imperfect to be good company. It is the lovely creatures around us, in whom God gives himself, that save us, until we know him, from the frenzy of aloneness, which is Self, Self, Self. The man who minds only himself must at last go mad unless God interferes.

Is there any way out of the misery? Will the soul that could not believe in God with all his lovely world around testifying of him believe when shut in its own lonely, weary all-and-nothing? For a time it would try to believe it was nothing, a paltry dream that dreamed itself, and to hope the dream might dream it was no more. Self-loathing, for no sin and from no repentance or vision of better, would begin and grow to a misery no soul can tell. Yet if a being can feel self-disgust, is there not some room for hope, as much as a pinch of earth in a rock's cleft gives a pine? There must be hope while there is existence; where there is existence there must be God, and God is for ever good. But alas, the distance from the light! Such a soul is at the farthest verge of life's negation. No, not the farthest: a man is nearer heaven in deepest hell than just before he begins to reap the reward of his doings, for he is ready to receive the smallest show of the life that is as an unspeakable boon. All his years in the world he took the gifts of sun and air, earth and sea and human face divine as things that came because that was their way; now the poorest thinning of the darkness he would hail as men of old the glow of a descending angel, a messenger from God. He would not think of God, for it takes long; but hope, not yet seeming hope, would begin to dawn, and the thinner darkness would be a cave of light, a refuge from the horrid self of which he used to be so proud.

A man may think it impossible ever to think so unpleasantly of himself! But he has only to let things go, and it will be his real, natural way of thinking. All I have said is imaginary; but imagination is made to mirror truth, its images are more or less after the model of things that are, I suspect it is the region whence prophecy issues, and when we are true it will mirror nothing but truth. I deal here with the same light and darkness the Lord, Paul, John, Peter, and Jude dealt with. Ask yourself whether the faintest dawn, even of physical light, would not be welcome to such a soul as a refuge from the justly hated self.

And the light would grow across the awful gulf between the soul and its haven, repentance, which is the first pressure of the bosom of God. In the faint twilight the man would feel another thought beside his, another thinking Something near his dreary self, perhaps the man he had most wronged, hated, and despised, and would be glad someone was near: the man he had most injured and was most ashamed to meet would be a refuge from himself, oh, how welcome!

So I might imagine a thousand steps up from the darkness, each a little nearer the light; but ah, the weary way! He cannot come out until he has paid the uttermost farthing! Yet repentance once begun may grow more and more rapid. If God once gets a willing hold, if with but one finger he touches the man's self, swift as possibility he will draw him into the light. For the forlorn, self-ruined wretch was made to be a child of God, partaker of the divine nature, heir of God and joint heir with Christ. Out of the abyss he cast himself into, refusing to be heir of God, he must rise and be raised, setting out to the heart of God, the one goal and home of the human race, or the last glimmer of humanity will die from him. Whoever will live must cease to be a slave and become a child of God. There is no half-way house where ungodliness may be dallied with and not prove fatal. Whether few or many are cast into such a prison as I have imagined, there is no deliverance for a human soul, in it or out of it, but in paying the last farthing, in becoming lowly, penitent, self-refusing, and so receiving sonship and learning to cry, *Father*!

### ABBA, FATHER!

*The passage:* The spirit of adoption, by which we cry, "Abba, Father."

To cry *Father*! from a full heart is the hardest and gladdest thing in the world. I want to help whoever I can to call on the Father so.

Every form of systematic Christian teaching has things that check this outgoing of the heart, and some make it impossible. The more delicate the affections, the more easily they are chilled and blown aside; even the suspicion of a cold reception paralyzes them. Such a cold wind at the very gate of heaven (thank God, *outside* it!) is the so-called doctrine of *Adoption*. When a heart hears and believes, or half believes, that it is not God's child from the first of its being but may possibly be adopted, its love sinks in a cold faint: where is its own father, and who is this who would adopt it? In childhood this doctrine was to me a repellent cloud-phantom that took maturer thought to dissipate. But to stand against its hideousness takes not much knowledge or insight, only love that will not be denied, and courage to question the phantom.

A devout and honest scepticism on God's side, not to be put down by anything called authority, is needed by anyone who would know the liberty with which Christ makes free. What good men believe deserves respect, but no teaching, whoever the teachers, must come between the soul and the Father, who himself teaches his children. To accept authority may even be to refuse what it would teach, which stays misunderstood for lack of the natural doubt and inquiry we were meant to go through.

As no scripture is of private interpretation, so no feeling exists in one human heart alone; so I conclude many have groaned like me under this doctrine's supposed authority. Refusing to look up to God as Father is the one central wrong of the human affair, and being unable to, the one central misery; whatever clears a difficulty from the way of recognizing the Father undermines every difficulty in life.

"Is God not my Father," cries the child's heart, "that I need to be adopted? Adoption can never satisfy me. Am I not his to begin with? Is he my Father only by a legal contrivance? There may be much love in adoption, but accepting it from anyone makes me the child of another! Adoption by God would be blessed if another had given me being; but if he gave it, adoption is not reception but repudiation. 'O Father, am I not your child?'"

"No; but he will adopt you. He will not acknowledge you his child, but he will call you his child, and be a father to you."

"Alas," cries the child, "if he is not my father, he cannot become my father. A primary relation cannot be added later. That might matter little with earthly fatherhood, but for the very origin of my being, if he is only a maker and not a father, I am only a machine, not a child, not a man! It is false to say I was created in his image!

"It avails nothing to answer that we lost our birthright by the fall. I need not argue that *I* did not fall with Adam; I have fallen many a time, and a shadow on my soul, which I or another may call a curse, always comes between my heart and the blue of every sky. But can any repudiation, even God's, undo the fact of an existing origin? And it is not only that he made me: by whose power do I go on living? When he cast me out, did I begin to draw my being from myself, or from the devil? In whom do I live and move and have my being? I cannot fail to be the creature of God."

"But creation is not fatherhood."

"Creation in the image of God is. And if I am not in God's image, how can his word mean anything to me? 'He called them gods to whom the word of God came,' says the Master himself. To be fit to receive his word is to be of his kind. However defaced his image in me, it is his image still, one that can hear his word. What makes me evil and miserable is that the thing spoiled in me is the image of the Perfect; nothing can be evil but in virtue of a good hypostasis. Nothing can make me not the child of God. If someone says, 'Look at the animals: God made them, but you do not call them his children,' I answer, 'I am to blame; they are not! I cling to my blame: it is the seal of my childhood.' Two things I am sure of: God is to them 'a faithful creator,' and the sooner I put in force my claim to be his child, the better for them, for they too are fallen, though without blame."

"But you are evil: how can you be a child of the Good?"

"Just as many an evil son is the child of a good parent."

"But in him you call a good parent, there yet lay evil, and that accounts for the child being evil."

"I cannot explain. God let me be born through evil channels. But however I became an unworthy child, I cannot have ceased to be a child of God, as a child is always the child of the man he comes from. Is not my heart's very complaint at the word *Adoption* proof of it? Is it not the spirit of the child crying, 'Abba, Father'?"

"Yes; but that is the spirit of adoption; the text says so."

"Away with your adoption! I could not even be adopted if I were not such as adoption could reach, of the nature of God. Can a man adopt a dog? I must be of a nature for the word of God to come to, and so far of the divine nature, of the image of God! Had God dropped me and held no communication with me, I grant I could never have cried thus or cared when told I was not his child. But he has never repudiated me, and does not now desire to adopt me. Why should it grieve me to be told I am not a child of God, if I am not? If you say, 'Because you have learned to love him,' I answer that adoption would satisfy one who was not but would be a child; I cannot do without a father, and no adoption can give me one."

"But what is the good of all you say, if the child is such that the father cannot take him to his heart?"

"Ah, nothing, I grant, so long as the child does not desire to be taken to the father's heart; but the moment he does, it is everything to him to be indeed the child of the one his soul thirsts for. However bad I am, I am the child of God, and therein lies my blame. I would not lose my blame; in it lies my hope, the pledge of what I am meant to be and shall one day be, the child of God in spirit and in truth."

"Then you dare to say the apostle is wrong in what he so plainly teaches?"

"By no means; I say that our English presentation of his teaching is very misleading here. It is not for me to judge the learned and good men who revised the New Testament; I can only wonder why they kept the word *adoption*. Only Paul uses it in the New Testament. Liddell and Scott give 'Adoption as a son,' a mere submission to popular theology, citing only the New Testament. The relation of the word \[Greek: *niothesia*\] to \[Greek: *thetos*\], 'taken,' or rather '*placed* as one's child,' is, I presume, the sole ground for that translation; even plentiful and invariable usage could not justify it here, in face of what Paul elsewhere shows he means. The Greek word *might* be variously meant, though I find no use of it earlier than Paul; the English can mean but one thing, and not what Paul means. 'The spirit of adoption' Luther translates 'the spirit of a child'; *adoption*, *kindschaft*, or *childship*

Of two things I am sure: that by *niothesia* Paul did not intend *adoption*; and that if the Revisers had felt the word come between God and their hearts as I have, they could not have let it stay in their version.

Once more: Paul's word does not imply that God adopts children not his own, but that a second time he fathers his own, who are born a second time, from above; that he will be tenfold, infinitely, their father, and have them back into the very bosom they issued from, that they might learn they could live nowhere else, and be one with himself. It was for this that, in his Son, he died for them.

Let us look at the passage where he reveals his use of the word, in his epistle to the Galatians, iv. 1-7.

Paul writes that so long as the heir is a child he differs nothing from a slave though lord of all, being under guardians and stewards until the time his father set. So we too, as children, were in bondage under the rudiments of the world; but when the fullness of time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. Because we are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father; so we are no longer slaves but sons, and if sons, heirs through God.

How could the Revisers choose this last reading, "an heir through God," and keep *adoption*? The passage makes it as plain as Paul could that the word means raising a father's own child from tutelage and subjection to others, a state he says is no better than a slave's, to the position and rights of a son. None but a child could become a son; the idea is a spiritual coming of age: *only when the child is a man is he really and fully a son*. So it is in the earthly relation: many good children of good parents never know them or feel toward them as children might until they have grown and left home, or lost them. To be a child is not necessarily to be a son or daughter. Childship is the lower condition in the upward process toward sonship, the soil it grows from, without which it were impossible. God, like an earthly parent, cannot be content with children only; he must have sons and daughters, children of his soul, spirit, and love, not merely in that he loves them, or they love him, but in that they love like him, as he loves. For this he does not adopt them; he dies to give them himself and raise his own to his heart; he gives them a birth from above, born again out of himself and into himself, for he is the one and the all. They are not his real sons and daughters until they think, feel, and judge as he does, are at home with him and without fear before him because they love the same things and seek the same ends. For this we are created; it is the one end of our being and includes all others. Only unbelief can make men believe that God has cast them off and said they never were his children, while he spends himself to make us the children he designed, who would take him for their Father! He is our father all the time, but until we respond as true children he cannot let all the father out to us; there is no place for the dove of his tenderness to alight. Nothing will satisfy him, or do for us, but that we be one with our father! Because we are the sons of God, we must become the sons of God.

Some readers, alas, may find no cheer or dawn in the word *Father*, and feel no tremble of even a vanished emotion at it. It is hardly likely to be their fault. Children seldom love up to the mark of reason, and some are inexplicable to the parent who loves them, yet if the parent has been ordinarily kind, even a son grown worthless will sometimes feel in better moments a dim reflex of childship, a faintly pleasant or sorrowful remembrance of the father around whose neck his arms once clung. In my own childhood my father was the refuge from all the ills of life, even sharp pain. To the son or daughter who takes no pleasure in the name *Father* I say, "Interpret the word by all you have missed in life. Every time someone might have been to you a refuge from the wind, a covert from the tempest, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land, a father might have been a father indeed. If you have found a man or woman such a refuge, you have seen a shadow of the perfect, the back of the only man, the perfect Son of the perfect Father. All that human tenderness can give in nearness and readiness of love, and infinitely more, must be true of the perfect Father, the maker of fatherhood, the Father of all earth's fathers, especially those who have shown a father-heart."

This Father would make sons and daughters indeed: sons and daughters not merely by having come from his heart but by having returned to it, choosing to be what he is. He will have them share his being and nature, strong where he cares for strength, tender and gracious as he is, angry where and as he is angry. Even in the small matter of power, he will have them able to do whatever his Son Jesus could on earth, whose life was the perfect man's, whose works were perfected humanity's. Everything must at length be subject to man, as it was to The Man. When God can do what he will with a man, the man may do what he will with the world; he may walk on the sea like his Lord, and the deadliest thing cannot hurt him. The Lord said that whoever believes in him will do the works he does, and greater.

|         God, whose pleasure brought
| Man into being, stands away
| As it were, an handbreath off, to give
| Boom for the newly-made to live.

He has made us, but we have to be. All things were made *through* the Word, but what was made *in* the Word was life, the light of men. Those who live by this light, as Jesus lived, by obedience to the Father, share in their own making; the light becomes life in them, the life first born in Jesus; by obedience they become one with the godhead: "As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God." He does not *make* them sons of God but gives them power to become so: in choosing and obeying the truth, man becomes the true son of the Father of lights.

The Galatians passage is enough to show that *adoption* does not fit Paul's idea. While we merely obey the law God has laid on us without knowing the Father's heart that it comes from, we are slaves, not necessarily ignoble; but when we come to think *with* him, when the son's mind and action are the Father's, then the son is *of* the Father, and we are the sons of God. Both this passage and the one from Romans at the head of this sermon have *Abba, Father*, showing that he uses the word \[Greek: uiothesia\] in the same plain sense in both. Of the other passages where he uses it (he alone does, and may have coined it), one is in this same eighth chapter of Romans, which I keep for last. Another is in the next chapter, verse four, where he speaks of the \[Greek: viothesia\], literally the *son-placing* (the placing of sons in their true place), as belonging to the Jews. "Whose is the \[Greek: viothesia\]" cannot mean that they had already received it, or that it was theirs more than the Gentiles'; only that as the elder-brother-nation they had the foremost claim and would naturally first receive it, their best men always being nearest it. It must be wrought out first in those prepared for it; those were the Jews; of the Jews was the Son, bringing the sonship to all. Theirs was the \[Greek: viothesia\], as theirs was the gospel: to the Jew first, then the Gentile, though many a Gentile would have it before many a Jew. Those, and only those, who out of a true heart cry "*Abba, Father*," whether of some paltry little so-called church other than the body of Christ, or of none, are the sons and daughters of God.

Paul uses the word also in Ephesians i. 5. The authorized version has "predestinated us unto the adoption of children"; the revised has "foreordained us unto adoption as sons"; there is little to choose, and neither gives Paul's meaning. Whatever is gained by "of children" or "as sons" added to translate the word for which "adoption" alone serves elsewhere, the advantage goes only to the wrong interpretation.

Children we were; true sons we could never be, save through The Son. He brothers us. He takes us to the Father's knees, and beholding his face we grow sons indeed. We could never have known the Father's heart or felt it possible to love him as sons but for him who cast himself into the gulf between us. Even had we never sinned we could not have reached the sonship foreordained in him without him; we should have been little children loving the Father, but far from the sonhood that understands and adores. Those led by the Spirit of God are sons of God; anyone without the Spirit of Christ is none of his; and if we lack each other's spirits, we do not belong to each other. There is no unity but having the same spirit, and there is but one spirit, that of truth.

It remains to note yet another passage.

Paul never meant anything he wrote to contribute to a system of theology. One sign is that he uses this word, perhaps coined by himself, in different and apparently opposing, though never contradictory, senses; his meanings always vivify each other. His ideas are so large they strain his words, but the honest heart, which alone he addresses, is in no danger of misunderstanding, though the ignorant and unsteadfast still wrest them. He speaks of sonship now as the Israelite's possession, now as his who has learned to cry *Abba, Father*; and in the passage I consider last, Romans viii. 18-25, as yet to come, and as concerning our bodily rather than spiritual condition. This use, though unlike any other, is entirely consistent with the rest.

The 23rd verse says that we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the spirit, groan within ourselves, "waiting for adoption, the redemption of our body."

The ideas in this verse and the main use are plainly associated. Putting a son in his true place has outward relations as well as inward reality; the outward arises from the inward and reveals it. When the child, his time under tutors past, took his place as a son, he would naturally change his dress and manner of life; so when God's children cease to be slaves doing right from law and duty and become sons doing right from the essential love of God and neighbour, they too must exchange the garments of slavery for the robes of liberty, lay aside the body of this death, and appear in bodies like Christ's, with whom they inherit of the Father. But many who have learned to cry *Abba, Father* are yet far from the liberty of the sons of God: sons, no longer children, yet groaning as in bondage! The apostle is not working out an idea but writing a letter with burning heart; yet he gives lines enough for us to work it out, and this is how it takes shape:

We are the sons of God the moment we lift up our hearts seeking to be sons, the moment we begin to cry *Father*. But as the world must be redeemed first in a few men, so the soul is redeemed first in a few of its thoughts, wants, and ways, and the new creation takes long to finish. Having taken millions of years to bring the world to where a few of its inhabitants desire God, shall the creature of this new birth be perfected in a day? The process may now go tenfold faster, since the new factor of man's fellow-working, for which all the previous means existed, is developed; but its end is far below the horizon of man's vision:

The apostle speaks of the thing now as to come, now as done, when it is only begun; our ways of thought are like that. A man's heart may leap for joy the moment a strong hand grasps his hair amid the sea-waves; he may cry, "I am saved!" and be safe, but not saved. So we are sons when we begin to cry Father, but far from perfected sons. While there is in us the least taint of distrust, the least lingering of hate or fear, we have not received the sonship; we lack the life that raised Jesus' body; we have not attained to the resurrection of the dead, by which word in Philippians iii Paul means, I think, what he here means by the sonship, which he puts in apposition with the redemption of the body:

So long as our outward condition is not that of sons royal and divine; so long as the garments of our souls, these mortal bodies, are mean, torn, and stained; so long as we groan under sickness, weakness, weariness, old age, forgetfulness, and all heavy things, we have not received the sonship in full; we are only getting ready one day to creep from our chrysalids and spread the great heaven-storming wings of the psyches of God. We groan, burdened, waiting for the sonship, that is, the redemption of the body: its uplifting to be a fit house and revelation of the indwelling spirit, nay, like Christ's, of the deeper indwelling God. We shall always need bodies to manifest us to each other, bodies that present the soul with absolute truth. So the revealing of the sons of God in verse 19 is the redemption of the body: it is redeemed when made a fit revelation of them, as it was meant to be and always, imperfectly, was. This will be when truth is strong enough in the sons of God, for the soul makes the body. When we are sons of God in heart and soul, we shall be so in body too: "we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is."

I care little to speculate on the kind of this body; two things only are needful to believe: that it will show the same self as before, and that it will show the being truly, without the defects of the former bodily revelation. Through their bodily presence we shall know our own infinitely better and find endlessly more delight in them. We must believe this or distrust the Father of our spirits. Until the body is redeemed, the \[Greek: uiothesia\] is only on the way, and it can come only by our working out the salvation he is working in us.

This redemption of the body, its deliverance from all that is amiss, unfinished, weak, or worn out and prevents the revelation of the sons of God, Paul calls not the *adoption* but the \[Greek: niothesia\], sonship in full manifestation. It is the slave left in the sons and daughters of God that has let the word *adoption* mislead them!

To see how the whole utterance hangs together, read verses 18 to 25, noticing the 19th: the earnest expectation of the creation waits for the revealing (*the outshining*) of the sons of God. When the sons of God show as they are, taking the appearance and place that belong to their sonship, sitting with *the* Son of God on their Father's throne, they shall in fact be lords of the lower creation, bestowers of liberty and peace upon it; then shall the creation, subjected to vanity for their sakes, find its freedom in their freedom and its gladness in their sonship. The animals will glory to serve them. Let the heartless scoff! The heart that cries *Abba, Father* cries to the God of the sparrow and the oxen; hope cannot go too far in hoping what that God will do for the creation that now groans and travails in pain because our higher birth is delayed. Shall not the judge of all the earth do right? Shall my heart be more compassionate than his?

If my interpretation does not satisfy a reader, I pray him not to spend his strength disputing my faith but in making sure of his own progress toward freedom and sonship. Only the child of God can judge truly; right opinion on the most momentous questions will deliver no man. The only cure for any ill in me or about me is to become the son of God I was born to be. Until Christ is born in me and I am revealed a son of God, pain and trouble will endure, and God grant they may! Call this presumption, and I can only widen my assertion: until you yourself are the son of God you were born to be, you will never find life a good thing. If I presume for myself, I presume for you; but I do not presume. Jesus Christ and his love-slave Paul both represented God as a Father perfect in love, grand in self-forgetfulness, supreme in righteousness, devoted to the lives he has uttered. I will not believe less of the Father than I can conceive of glory after the lines he has given me, after the radiation of his glory in the face of his Son. He is the express image of the Father, by which we, his imperfect images, are to read and understand him: imperfect, we have yet perfection enough to spell toward the perfect.

It comes to this, then, after the apostle's grand theory: the world exists for our education; it is the nursery of God's children, served by troubled slaves, troubled because the children are themselves slaves, children but not good children. Beyond its own will or knowledge, the whole creation works to develop the children of God into the sons of God. When at last the children have arisen and gone to their Father, clothed in the best robe, with ring and shoes, shining out in their predestined sonship, then shall the mountains and hills break forth before them into singing, and all the trees of the field clap their hands. Then shall the wolf dwell with the lamb, the leopard lie down with the kid, the calf, the young lion, and the fatling together, and a little child lead them. Then shall the fables of a golden age, which faith invented and unbelief threw into the past, unfold their essential reality, and the tale of paradise prove a truth by becoming a fact. Then shall every ideal show itself a necessity, aspiration though satisfied put forth longer wings, and the hunger after righteousness know itself blessed. Then first shall we know what was in the Shepherd's mind when he said, "*I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly*."

### LIFE

*The passage:* Jesus says he came so that people may have life, and have it abundantly.

In a word, he came to supply all our lack, from the root outward; for what do we need but more life? The infant needs it, and gets it in abundance from his mother's breast. The old man, weak in limb and low in pulse, needs more of the life that seems to be ebbing. Weary with feebleness he calls on death, but it is life he wants; only the death encroaching in him desires death. He longs for rest, but death cannot rest, and neither can weakness: it takes strength as well as weariness to rest. How different is the strong man's weariness after overlong labour from the sick man's, who cries in the morning, "Would God it were evening!" and in the evening, "Would God it were morning!" Low-sunk life imagines itself weary of life, but it is death it is weary of. No soul that knew what life is ever cried out for its opposite. Why does the worn-out suicide seek death? Really to escape it---the death of homelessness, hunger and cold, of failure and disappointment, of exhausted passion, of madness, of a household he cannot rule, of crime and fear of discovery. He seeks darkness as a refuge from the death that possesses him; what he calls his life is a dream of horrible phantoms.

"More life!" is the unconscious prayer of all creation, groaning and travailing for the redemption of its lord, the son who is not yet a son. Can the dumb cry not be read in some animals' faces, some flowers' looks, many an aspect of Nature? All things are possible with God, but not all are easy. For him *to be* is easy, since there he deals only with his own perfect will; to create in the grand fashion in which he is now creating us is not. It must be hard, as divine history shows, to create what is not himself yet is like himself. The problem is to separate from himself, far enough that it can turn and look at him, what must still depend on him utterly. It must be able to choose him and say, "I will arise and go to my Father," and so develop the highest *Divine* it is capable of: the will for the good against the evil, the will to be one with its source and complete the circle by returning---to live consciously and willingly from that source, and be the thing the maker thought of when he willed it.

I imagine this separation from himself, such that will in the creature becomes possible, to be so difficult that God must begin inconceivably far back among the infinitesimal beginnings---eternal miles beyond the farthest discovery in *protoplasm*, let alone anything resembling man. There he sets in motion the division from himself that issues in individuality, consciousness, and conscious choice, at last pure because it chooses the right, the true, the divinely harmonious. But individuality is only a means; the end is oneness, impossible without it. Where there is only one there is no unity, no delight of love, no harmony, no good in being. Two at least are needed, and the more individuals, the richer and diviner the unity.

God is life, and the will-source of life. In the outflowing of that life I know him; and when I am told he is love, I see that without love he could not create. I know nothing deeper in him than love, nor believe there can be. The being of God is love, therefore creation, and I imagine he has been creating from all eternity. As he saw it was not good for man to be alone, he has never been alone himself: the Father has always had the Son, whose existence I imagine an easy outgoing of the Father's nature, while making beings like us I imagine the eternal labour of a God. Speaking humanly, as we must, I imagine God has never been content to be alone even with the Son of his love, the prime and perfect idea of humanity, but has from the first willed and laboured to give existence to other creatures who should share his blessedness. He is developing them into likeness to that Son, distant and small for long but for ever growing. Perhaps none of them yet, though unspeakably blessed, has any idea of the blessedness in store.

Let no one think that saying God undertook a hard labour in willing that many sons and daughters should share his nature lessens his glory! The greater the difficulty, the greater the glory of him who does what he undertook, with no half-success, but absolute satisfaction for innumerable radiant souls. He knew what it would cost: not only energy of will, and the separation from himself that is only creation's first step (itself perhaps painful), but suffering beyond our imagining, which only God could bear, in bringing out the God-life in the individual soul. That suffering is ever renewed, since the soul itself thwarts him and forces him to use only the best means its resistance leaves him, not the absolutely best. Man finds it hard to get what he wants because he does not want the best; God finds it hard to give because he would give the best and man will not take it. What Jesus did was what the Father is always doing; the suffering he endured was the Father's from the foundation of the world, reaching its climax in the Son. God provides the sacrifice, and the sacrifice is himself; he has always sacrificed himself for his creatures, for it lies in the essence of creating them. The worst heresy, next to dividing religion from righteousness, is to divide the Father from the Son and show the Son doing what the Father does not do. If Jesus suffered for men, it was because his Father suffers for men; he only came close to them through a body and senses, to bring their spirits close to his Father and theirs, giving them life and losing what could be lost of his own. The God and Father of Jesus Christ could never be satisfied with less than giving himself to his own! The unbeliever may easily imagine a better God than common theology offers; but no loving heart can reflect the length and breadth and depth and height of the love of God shown in his Son. The whole history is a divine agony to give divine life to creatures; its outcome will be radiant life, whose flower is unspeakable joy. Every child will look in the Father's eyes and be received with an infinite embrace.

The life the Lord came to give exceeds the highest undivine man's by far more than his exceeds the least human animal's, and there is more and more of it, to eternity, for each who will receive it. The Father has given the Son to have life in himself; that life is our light, and the life in us is what makes us see. The Christian's whole growth is the more and more life he receives. At first his religion may hardly differ from a prudent wish to save his soul; at last he loses that soul in the glory of love, and so saves it, and self becomes only the cloud on which God's white light divides into unspeakable harmonies.

"In the midst of life we are in death," said one; it is more true that in the midst of death we are in life. Life is the only reality; death is a shadow, a negation that owes the very idea of itself to what it denies. If God were not, there would not even be nothing, for nothingness owes its idea to existence.

One form of the question between matter and spirit is which came first and caused the other: did things without thought cause thought, or thought without things cause things? To those who cannot doubt that thought came first, it is plain that death can cure nothing and life must cure everything: the ills of existence come from its imperfection, not from itself, and we need more of it. We who *are* have nothing to do with death; what mourns mourns only from lack of enough being. We are vessels of life not yet full of its wine; where the wine does not reach, the clay cracks and aches. Who would pour out the wine that is there, instead of filling the vessel to the brim! Life is the law, the food, the necessity of life---everything. Many mistake the joy of life for life itself, and languish with a thirst at once poor and inextinguishable, yet even that thirst points to the one spring. These love self, not life, and self is only life's shadow; taken for life and set at the man's centre, it becomes a live death in him, a devil worshipped as a god, the worm of the death eternal that he clasps to his bosom as his one joy!

The soul full of harmonies has more life than the soul consumed with cares; the sage than the clown; the poet than the man whose life flows out that money may come in; the man who loves his fellow than the one who tries to exalt himself above him; the man who strives to be better than the one who longs for the praise of many. But the man to whom God is all in all, who feels his life-roots hid with Christ in God, who knows himself heir of all wealth and worlds and ages, and of power essential and in itself, has begun to be alive indeed.

In all the troubles of life let us remember that our one lack is life, the life-making presence in us. When most oppressed and weary of life, as our unbelief puts it, it is really the inroad of death we are weary of. When most inclined to sleep, let us rouse ourselves to live, and shun the false refuge of a weary collapse, a hopeless yielding to things as they are. The life in us is what is discontented; we need more of it, not more of the cause of its discontent. He has the victory who, in pain and weakness, cries out not for death or the repose of forgetfulness but for strength to fight---more power, more consciousness of being, more God in him; who, when sorest wounded, says with Sir Andrew Barton in the old ballad:

| Fight on my men, says Sir Andrew Barton,
|   I am hurt, but I am not slain;
| I\'ll lay me down and bleed awhile,
|   And then I\'ll rise and fight again;

---and says it with no silly notion of playing the hero (what have creatures not yet barely honest to do with heroism!), but because to fight so is the truth and the only way.

Suppose that in the extreme of our exhaustion an angel came, as to Elijah asleep in the desert, and showed us the waiting bread and water. Would we answer in faint unwillingness, "I am weary unto death! The battle is lost, or not worth gaining! The world is too much for me! Let me be gathered to my fathers and be at rest!"? I should be loath to think that if the enemy came roaring upon us in recognizable shape we would not, like the red-cross knight, stagger to meet him, heavy sword in nerveless arm. But when effort has failed, it takes more faith to rise and eat the food that will bring back more effort, travail and weariness. The true man trusts in a strength that is not his, that he does not feel and does not always even desire---a power that seems far off yet is at the root of his very fatigue and need of rest, rest as far from death as labour is. To trust in God's strength in our weakness; to say, "I am weak: so let me be: God is strong"; to seek from him, as the natural cure for all that is amiss, power to live even when weary---this is the victory that overcomes the world. To believe in God our strength despite all seeming denial, out of weakness, unbelief, numbness and lethargy; to believe in the wide-awake real through the stupefying dream; to will to wake when the whole being thirsts for godless repose---these are the broken steps up to the high fields where repose is a form of strength, strength of joy, and joy of love. "I am weak," says the true soul, "but not so weak that I would not be strong; not so sleepy that I would not see the sun rise; not so lame that I would not walk! Thanks be to him who perfects strength in weakness, and gives to his beloved while they sleep!"

If we will let our God and Father work his will with us, there is no limit to the enlargement of our existence. We have no conception how vast a consciousness we could be made capable of. Many can recall a moment when life seemed richer than ever before, some mostly in dreams; can a soul, awake or asleep, hold a bliss greater than the living God can seal, perpetuate and enlarge? Surely God could at any moment, by a word to a soul, by breathing afresh into the secret caves of its being, give it a sense of life before which the most exultant earthly triumph would pale to ashes! If a sunlit sea crowded with sails ever filled your soul as with a new gift of life, think what your sense of existence must be when he whose thought has only fringed its garment with such a show makes his home with you, and lets you feel, thinking the gladness of a God inside your being, that he carries you as a father in his bosom!

I have been speaking as if life and the consciousness of it were one; but consciousness of life is only the outcome of life. The real life is that which is of and by itself, life because it wills itself; this can only be God. But in us there ought to be a life corresponding to his, one that wills itself and so shares in its own being. There is an original act possible to man which must begin the reality of his existence: he must live in and by willing to live. A tree lives, with perhaps some vague consciousness known by but not to itself, only to the God who made it; I trust such lower life is on the way to thought and blessedness, in that process of separation from God in which living souls are created. But it is not life in the Bible's high sense: true life knows and rules itself, and eternal life is life come awake. Even the most exalted animals' life is not such, whatever it may become, though I refuse to believe their fate fixed as we see it. No one would call the dog's existence, looking strange lack out of wistful eyes, one to be satisfied with; as little can I call the human pleasure, refinement and common endeavour around me life. What in them is true dwells amid unchallenged corruption, which demands repentance, labour and prayer to destroy it. Most men and women seem to me to live a life in death, in unwhited sepulchres, withering forms possessed by spirits that slumber and babble in their dreams. That they do not feel it so is nothing; the sow wallowing in the mire may rightly call it her way of being clean, but theirs is not the life of the God-born. The day must come when they will hide their faces with the shame the good man now feels at the memory of living like them. Nothing is worthy of the name of life but the life eternal, God's life, shared in his degree by the man made in his image to be alive as he is alive. Its outcome and light is righteousness, love, grace and truth, but the life itself, like God, will not be defined: it is a power, the formless cause of form. It shows itself to the soul hungering after righteousness, which cannot show it to another except in the shining of its own light. The ignorant soul understands by eternal life only an endless elongation of consciousness; what God means is a being like his own, beyond decay or death, so essential that it has no relation to nothingness, having come out of the heart of Life, the fountain of being. It partakes of the divine nature and, like the Eternal himself, has nothing in common with what can pass or cease: God owes his being to no one, and his child has no lord but his Father.

This eternal life consists for man in absolute oneness with God and all divine modes of being. It is a love as deep as it is universal, as conscious as it is unspeakable, that can no more be reasoned about than life itself---a love whose presence is its all-sufficing proof and whose absence is an annihilating defect. He who lacks it cannot believe in it: how should death believe in life, though all the birds of God sing jubilant over the empty tomb! What must be the delight of such a being, the splendour of a consciousness, when immortal, uncreated life flows in silent fullness from the heart of hearts, in the great day of God and the individual soul!

What then is our practical relation to the original life---what have we to do toward attaining the resurrection from the dead? If we did not and could not make ourselves, how can we, now that we are made, do anything at the unknown roots of our being? What conscious unity can there be between the self-existent God and beings who live at another's will, who cannot refuse or cease to be, and can assert their relation to life only by refusing to be content with what is not life?

The self-existent God is that other by whose will we live, so the links of the unity must already exist and need only be joined. The link by which to close the circle of oneness with the Father must lie in the deepest part of man's nature, and there we find it: the *will*, the deepest, strongest, divinest thing in man, and so, I presume, in God, for so we find it in Jesus Christ. Only in the relation of the two wills, God's and his own, can a man come into vital contact with the All-in-all---not by a one-sided unity of complete dependence, but by a willed harmony of dual oneness. When a man entirely says, "Not my will, but thine be done," and so wills the will of God as to do it, he is one with God as a true son with a true father. When he wills that his being be conformed to its origin, the life in his life, and sets himself *to live the will of that causing life*, then, receiving God, he becomes in that act a partaker of the divine nature, a true son and heir; by a son's obedience he receives the very life of the Father. Obedience joins the links of the eternal round, as the other side of the creative will: will is God's will, obedience is man's will, and the two make one. The root-life, knowing well the thousand troubles it would bring on him, has created and goes on creating other lives so that, though incapable of self-being, they may by willed obedience share the bliss of his essential being. If we do the will of God, eternal life is ours---not mere continuity of existence, which in itself is as worthless as hell, but a being one with the essential Life, and so within God's reach to fill with the endless outgoings of his love. Our souls shall be vessels ever growing and ever filled with more of the life proceeding from the Father and the Son, from God the ordaining and God the obedient. We can never know the delight of that life until we have it; but even now it may seem to the holy fancy too glorious to bear, as if we must die of very life to awake to a higher life and be filled with a wine our souls were too weak to hold. To be aware for one moment of such pure, simple love toward even one of my fellows as I trust I shall one day have toward each would bring a sense of life my imagination can now only feebly shadow---a mighty glory of consciousness! It would not be always present, for my love, not my glory in that love, is my life. For we are made for love, not for self. Our neighbour is our refuge; *self* is our demon-foe. Every man is the image of God to every man, and as we love him we shall know it. The precious thing to a human soul is, and one day shall be known to be, every human soul. And if it is so between man and man, must not the glory of existence be endlessly redoubled in the creature's infinite love---for all love is infinite---to the infinite God, the one great life, than whom there is no other, only lovely shadows of him!

Reader, to whom my words seem inflation and foolish excitement: you may care nothing that I seem to myself to speak words of truth and soberness. But what if they seem otherwise to you not merely because you are not whole, but because you do not thirst after harmony, are not of the truth, have not yet begun to live? How should the reveller, coming out worn and wasted from haunts where the violent seize joy by force and find her perish in their arms, sing with the sons of the morning when the ocean of light bursts from the fountain of the east? As little can you, with your mind full of petty cares or pettier ambitions, understand the groaning and travailing of creation. You may honestly desire to save your own wretched soul, but you can as yet know little of your need of him who is *the first and the last and the living one*.

### THE FEAR OF GOD

*The passage:* John says that when he saw him he fell at his feet as though dead, but the Lord laid his right hand on him and said, Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last and the Living One.

Fear is not found only in religion's first beginnings. While love is imperfect there is room for torment; only love, which alone can fill a heart, casts out fear. What holds in the beginnings of religion holds, in some degree, until the religion, that is the love, is perfected.

The unknown that is yet known to exist will always be more or less formidable. When it is known as immeasurably greater than we and as making demands on us, the more vaguely we grasp the demands the more room there is for anxiety, and a guilty conscience can raise anxiety to terror. The kind and degree of terror depend on the mind that dwells on the Supreme. It needs no exalted idea of God: those fear him most who imagine him like their own evil selves, only stronger, free to work his arbitrary will on them. Thinking him only a little higher than themselves brings no unity with him---who are so far apart as those on the same level of hate and distrust? Power without love and dependence without righteousness wake a worship without devotion, a loathsome flattery. Where the notion of God is better but the conscience troubled, his goodness does little to remove apprehension; the same sense of evil and offence that gave rise to the bloody sacrifice still works in most who call themselves Christians. Naturally, man's first emotion toward the being he calls God, yet knows so little, is fear.

Where fear can exist, it is well that it should, causing continual uneasiness until nothing less than love casts it out. For one who does not know God and cannot be satisfied with himself, fear of God is as reasonable as it is natural, and serves powerfully to develop his true humanity. Neither the savage nor the self-sufficient sage, whether we call him degenerate or undeveloped, is rightly human; the humanity is there but must be born in each, and for its birth everything natural, fear included, must do its part. Until love, which is the truth toward God, can cast out fear, it is well that fear hold: it is a bond, however poor, between what is and what creates, which can be broken only by tightening an infinitely closer one. God must be terrible to those far from him, for they fear he will do---is doing---with them what they cannot desire and can ill endure. Such as many men are, and all without God would become, they must prefer a devil, for his supreme selfishness, to a God who will die for his creatures and insists on giving himself to them and on their being unselfish and blessed like himself. They must become what is the power and worth of life, or die; the vague sense of this frightens them. They love their poor existence as it is; God loves it as it must be---and they fear him.

Men of low, undeveloped nature hold such false notions of what is good and what the Power requires that they cannot but fear, and their devotion is lost in sacrifices of ingratiation. God takes them where they are, accepts what they honestly offer, and helps them outgrow themselves, to offer the true offering and know him whom they ignorantly worship. He will not abolish their fear except with the truth of his own being; until they apprehend it, he receives their sacrifices of blood, the invention of their sore need, changing only their modes for the time. He destroys the lie that is not all a lie only by the truth that is all true. Though he loves them utterly, he does not tell them there is nothing in him to fear; that would drive them from him for ever. While they remain as they are, there is much in him that cannot but affright them, and they do well to fear him; it is the only true relation between them. To remove that fear other than by letting them know his love with its purifying fire, which for ages perhaps they cannot know, would give them up utterly to evil. Persuade men, while they still love their own will and are slaves to passionate impulse, that fear is vile and an insult to God, who will have none of it---what follows? They will insult God as a discarded idol, a superstition, a falsehood under whose evil influence they have too long groaned. How much will they learn of him then? Nor would the old fear be long in returning, now before powers once thought inanimate and endowed with souls by fear's imagination: spiritual chaos would come again. God loves righteousness; rather than do an unfair thing he would lay down his Godhead and assert himself in ceasing to be; that his creature might not die of ignorance he died as much as a God could die, divinely more than man can, to give him himself. Such a God may well look fearful from afar to a creature who recognizes no imperative good in himself, fears only suffering, and has no aspiration, only wretched ambition. But as such a creature comes nearer to him in whose likeness he was begun---as the eternal right begins to disclose itself, as he becomes capable of the idea that his kind belongs to him as he could never belong to himself, and nears the capacity to see that his individuality is perfected only in love of his neighbour and his being ends only in oneness with its source (I do not say as he sees these things, but as he nears seeing them)---his terror of the God of his life will abate. Though far from guessing the bliss awaiting him, he draws nearer the goal of his nature, the central secret joy of sonship to a God who loves righteousness and hates iniquity, does nothing he would not permit in his creature, and demands nothing of him he would not do himself.

The fire of God---his essential being, his love, his creative power---differs from its earthly symbol in burning only at a distance. The farther from him, the worse it burns; as we turn and approach him the burning turns to comfort, which will grow to such bliss that the heart cries out, with a gladness no other can reach, that it desires no one in heaven or on earth but him. The glory of being, shining on the corrupt and deathly, must like the sun consume the dead. What it burns in the soul is not of the soul, yet the foul growth feeding on the soul clings so close that the burning is felt through every spiritual nerve. When the parasites are consumed---when the man yields his self and its low world and returns to his lord and God---what he felt only as burning he will feel as love, comfort, strength, an eternal ever-growing life. For now he lives, and life cannot hurt life, only death, which ought to be destroyed. God is life essential and eternal, and death, which is corruption living only in the decay of life's things, cannot live in his sight. If any child of the father finds he is afraid before him, that the thought of God is a discomfort or a terror, let him not stop to dress but rush in his nakedness, a true child, from his own evil and God's terror into the salvation of the Father's arms, the home he was sent from that he might learn it was home. If an evil father is won by the sight of the child he was vexed with running to his embrace, how much more will the Father of our spirits, who seeks nothing but his children themselves, receive him with open arms!

Self, accepted as the law of self, is life's one demon-enemy; God is the only Saviour from it and from all that is not God, for God is life and all else is death. Life destroys death and all of death's kind.

When John saw the glory of the Son of Man, he fell at his feet as one dead. Whether he saw him in what we vaguely call a vision, or as humanly as when he leaned on his bosom, I do not care to ask: it would take all glorious shapes of humanity to reveal Jesus, and he knew the right way to show himself to John. It seems to me that the words spoken can have come from no mere vision, that the very Lord himself spoke them, while John plainly received them as a message to give again. Points in the description of the Lord's appearance commend themselves even to our ignorance by their grandeur and fitness. Something akin to terror overwhelmed the three disciples who saw his glory on the mount; but since then John had leaned on the Lord's bosom, followed him to the judgment seat without denying his name, borne witness to his resurrection, and suffered for him, and was now "in the isle that is called Patmos, for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus." Why should he be afraid? No glory even of God *should* breed terror; when a child of God is afraid, the word *Father* is not yet freely formed by his spiritual mouth. The glory can breed terror only in one who can be terrified by it, and while he is such it is well the terror be bred and maintained until he seeks refuge from it in the only place where it is not---the bosom of the glory.

One point is not distinguishable in the Greek: whether it means "one like unto *the* Son of Man" or "one like unto *a* son of man." The authorized version has the former, the revised the latter. I incline to the former: John saw him like the man he had known so well, and the dazzling glory---nothing blinds so much as light---made him unsure, not any unlikeness mixed with the likeness.

But the appearance of The Son of Man was not meant to breed terror in the son of man to whom he came. Why then was John afraid? Joy to us that he was, for the words that follow---surely no phantasmic outcome of uncertain vision or blinding terror! They bear the best sign of their source: they must be from the heart of our great Brother, the one Man, Christ Jesus, divinely human!

It was only the imperfection of the disciple, unfinished in faith and so in everything a man needs, that caused his terror. The Lord's words imply this: he speaks of the very thing that made John afraid as the thing that ought to have taken all fear from him. For what was the glory John saw---the head and hair pouring out radiance, white as white wool, snow-white as his garments on Mount Hermon; his eyes like a flame of fire in the midst of it, and his countenance as the sun shining in his strength; the feet with a darker glow, like fine brass burning in a furnace, a humbler glory than the head's, as if in memory of his humiliation; the girdle under his breast, golden between the snow and the brass---but the effulgence of his glory who was himself the effulgence of the Father's, the poor expression of the unutterable truth that was the very reason John ought not to be afraid?---"He laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last, and the living one."

Our terror must be endless until we come heart to heart with the fire-core of the universe, the first and the last and the living one!

But oh, the joy to be told by Power himself, the first and the last, the living one---told what we can then see *must* be true, but are so slow to believe---that the cure for trembling is the presence of Power; that fear cannot stand before Strength; that the visible God is the destruction of death; that the one safety in the universe is the perfect nearness of the Living One! God is being; death is nowhere! He told Paul that strength is made perfect in weakness; here he teaches John that weakness, not strength, is what to fear. All appearances of strength that might rightly move terror are false; the true Strong is the *One*, as the true Good is the *One*. The Living One has the power of life; the Evil One only the power of death, whose very nature is a self-necessity for being destroyed.

But the glory of even the mildest show of the Living One is such that the dearest of his apostles, the best of the children of men, is cowed at the sight. John has not yet learned that glory is part of his inheritance, that nothing in a man made in God's image is alien to the most glorious of heavenly shows; so he falls as dead---when lo, the voice of him who was and is and is for evermore tells him not to be afraid, for the one reason that he is the first and the last, the living one! For what shall be the joy, peace and completion of him that lives but closest contact with his Life?---as close as before he issued from it, only infinitely higher in kind, since now it is willed on *both* sides. He who has had a beginning needs the indwelling power of that beginning to be complete, not merely to his consciousness but in himself, ended where he began, with an "endless ending." Then he is complete as God is, one with the self-existent. John Boanerges, far from trembling because he on whose bosom he had leaned now stood with the glory of his love streaming forth, ought to have felt the more joyful and safe the more the living one's strength was manifest. Jesus was never fit to be trusted because he wore the weakness of the flesh, but because he was strong enough to take that weakness as the garment in which his strength could best work; now that strength shone with its own light. Had John been as close in spirit as in bodily presence, he would have fallen at his feet, but not as one dead: as one too full of joy to stand before the life that was feeding his, to embrace and kiss the feet of him who had now, as in a second resurrection from above, arisen before him in yet heavenlier glory.

It is the man of evil, of self-seeking design, not he who would fain do right and submit at once to the Master's word even in his worst time, who is reasonably afraid of power. When God is no longer the world's ruler and there is one stronger than he, when there is might inherent in evil and making-energy in what is by nature destruction, then will be the time to dread power. Even then the bad man would have no security against being ground up for some no-idea of the Power of darkness. And then the good, instead of trembling, should resolve with the Lord of light to endure all, to let every billow of evil break on him, and do no smallest ill or tell the whitest lie for God, knowing that territory so gained could be only a province of the kingdom of darkness. If there were two powers, one of evil and one of good, as men in ignorance have not unnaturally imagined, duty would reveal who is born of the good power, while one born of the evil could do nothing but be evil. But Good only can create; and were Evil ever so much the stronger, men's duty would remain the same: to hold by the Living One and defy Power to its worst, like Prometheus on his rock defying Jove and for ever dying, thus for ever foiling the Evil. Evil can destroy only itself and its own; at worst it could cause a succession of deaths, from each of which the defiant soul would rise to more victorious endurance, until it laughed Evil in the face and the demon-god shrank withered. For those who believe that good is the one power, and that evil exists only because for a time it cannot help subserving the good, what place is there for fear? The strong and the good are one; and if our hope coincides with God's and is rooted in his will, what should we do but rejoice in the glory of the First and the Last?

The First and the Last is the enclosing defence of the castle of our being; the Master is before and behind, began it and will see it endless. He garrisons it; he is the living, live-making one.

The reason for not fearing before God is that he is all-glorious, all-perfect. Our being needs such a God; children can do with nothing less than the Father, the infinite one. Beyond all the order the intellect can descry, the imagination devise, the hungriest heart long for or the fullest heart thank for, as the heavens are higher than the earth, rise the thought, the creation, the love of the God who is in Christ, his God and our God, his Father and our Father.

Ages before Jesus was born, where even Moses and his law were yet unknown, the suffering heart of humanity saw and was persuaded that its peace lay only with the first, the last, the living one:

*Oh, that you would hide me in the grave... and remember me!... You will call, and I will answer you; you will long for the work of your hands.*

### THE VOICE OF JOB

*The passage:* Job says: if only you would hide me in the grave and keep me secret until your wrath is past, set me a time and remember me! If a man dies, will he live again? All the days of my appointed time I will wait until my change comes. You will call, and I will answer; you will long for the work of your hands.

The book of Job seems to me the most daring of poems: from a position of the most vantageless realism, it assaults the very citadel of the ideal! Its hero sits among the ashes, covered with loathsome boils, scraping himself with a potsherd. Sore in body, mind, heart and spirit, he is the type of humanity in the depths of misery. I mean the individual endlessly repeated: Job is *the human being*, at the centre of pain's assaults and fear's invasions, which sooner or later threaten to overwhelm every man, show him enslaved to the external, and stir him to seek the infinite, where alone he is free. In leaden despair Job cries aloud to the unseen Might, scarcely known, which he still regards as the God of his life. It is no slave's cry, no more than Prometheus' defiance of Jupiter from his rock. Job is more overwhelmed than the Titan, for he is in infinite perplexity as well as pain, but there is no cowardice in his cry. Before the Judge he asserts his innocence and will not grovel, knowing that would insult the holy. He feels he has not deserved such suffering, and will neither tell nor listen to lies for God.

Prometheus is more stonily patient than Job. Job is no Stoic; he bemoans himself like a brave child who thinks he suffers wrong and recoils, bewildered, from the unreason of it. Prometheus faces a tyrant he despises, and endures with unbewailing unsubmission, upheld by knowing he fights humanity's battle against an all but all-powerful Selfishness; endurance is the only weapon that avails. Job is more troubled because the one who has laid on him a torture so heavy that he takes his flesh in his teeth for pain is He who is the head and heart, the beginning and end of things. Job cannot and will not believe him a tyrant; even as he pleads against his dealing with him he loves him, and looks to him as the source of life and gladness. He dares not think God unjust, yet cannot allow that he has done anything to deserve this. Hence his profound perplexity: how can the two be reconciled? It has not occurred to him that what it would be unfair to lay on him as punishment may be laid on him as favour, by a supreme love that would give him blessing beyond all prayer---blessing he would not dare ask if he saw what it requires, but which, once known, he would endure all again to have. So he is sorely divided: he must not think God has mistaken him, yet the seeming mistake forces itself on him at every turn. He had never relaxed his pursuit of a godly life, yet the God he acknowledged in all his ways has raised his hand against him as rarely against any transgressor: his children swept away, his possessions gone, he is poor as the poorest and diseased as the vilest. Worse than all, death is denied him; he is left to linger in self-loathing, meeting at every turn the awful suggestion that God has cast him off. He does not deny there is evil in him---"Do you open your eyes on such a one," he pleads, "and bring *me* into judgment with *you*?"---but he denies he has been a wicked man, a doer of what he knew to be evil, or that there was any guile in him. And who, because he knows and laments the guile in himself, will dare deny that there was once a Nathanael in the world? Had Job been Calvinist or Lutheran, the book would have been very different: his perplexity would have been how a just God could require of a man more than he could do, and punish him as if he were a perfect being who chose the evil he knew in all its enormity. I call no one Master but Christ, and from him I learn that his quarrel with us is that we will not do what we know, will not come to him that we may have life. How much more powerful with men would be expostulation grounded on what they will not do rather than on what they have done!

Job's child-like judgment of God had never been perverted, to the dishonour of the great Father, by the low popular theories that explain God's ways through people who do not understand *him*. Such explanations suit those who do not care to know him, content to stare from afar at the cloud where thunders and voices come from; to those who would arise and go to the Father they are a grievous burden, threatening to sink them to Tophet. The contradiction between Job's idea of God's justice and what has befallen him haunts him, with a sting worse than all his other misery, but it is not fixed in hopelessness by an accepted explanation more frightful than itself. Let the world-sphinx put what riddles she will; she can devour no man while he waits an answer from the world-redeemer. Job refused his friends' explanation because he knew it false; accepting the kind many would give him today would have meant being devoured at once by the monster. He holds to the skirt of God's garment and besieges his door, the one source of true answer. No answer will do but the one God alone can give; for who but God can justify God's ways to his creature?

We must not look for logic in a soul whose very consciousness is contradiction; misery is rarely logical, being itself a discord. Yet it is natural that Job, *feeling* as if God wronged him, should long to see God, to stand face to face with him and confront the One. His one hope is that if he could get God to listen and lay his case clear, God would see how things were, explain the matter, and give him peace: the man in the ashes would know that the foundations of the world still stand, and that God has not closed his eyes or---horror of horrors---ceased to be just. Surely the Just would set the mind of his justice-loving creature at rest!

His friends are good, religious men of the pharisaic type: men who pay court to God instead of coming into his presence as children; men whose traditional theories satisfy their feeble intellects and who therefore think everyone must accept them or perish; men anxious to appease God rather than trust him, who would rather receive salvation from God than God as their salvation. They would persuade Job to confess he was a hypocrite, insisting such things could not come on him but for wickedness, and, since they knew of no open wickedness, for some secret vileness. They grow angry when he will not be persuaded against his knowledge of himself. Nor was Job overweening, for the prologue prepares us: God says to the accuser, "Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and upright man, one who fears God and shuns evil?" God gives him into Satan's hand confident of the result, and at the end approves what Job has said of himself. Yet the very appearance of God is enough to turn Job against himself: his part was to trust God altogether, in spite of every appearance and reality. He will justify himself no more. He sees that though God has not been punishing him for sins, he is far from what he ought to be: "Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer you? I will lay my hand on my mouth."

But let us look more closely at how Job thinks and speaks about God, and how he addresses him---so different from the pharisaic in all ages, in none more than our own.

Growing indignant at the idea that his nature needed such treatment, Job cries, "Am I a sea or a whale, that you set a watch over me?"---*you know I am not wicked.* "You set a print upon the heels of my feet!"---*so that my footprints show the way I have gone.* To his friends he cries: "Will you speak wickedly for God, and talk deceitfully for him?"---*do you not know I am the man I say?* "Will you accept his person?"---*siding with him against me?* "Is it good that he should search you out? or as one man mocks another, do you so mock him?"---*saying what you do not think?* "He will surely reprove you, if you secretly accept persons!"---*even God's own person!*

Such words please the Father of spirits. He is not a God who accepts flattery that puts him above obligation to his creatures, who demands a righteousness different from his own, or who deals ungenerously with his poverty-stricken children. Job is confident of receiving justice. His faith is profound, yet he is always complaining---a strange but natural conflict that is simply the form his faith takes in trouble. Even while he declares the hardness of his treatment, he seems sure that all he needs to set things right is admission to God's presence: to be heard must be to have justice. Used by any living man, his language would horrify the religious of today in proportion to their lack of truth, just as it horrified his three friends, the honest pharisees of the time, whose religion was "doctrine" and rebuke. God speaks no word of rebuke to Job for the freedom of his speech; he has always sought such as Job to worship him. It is those who know only the outsides of religion, who speak of God only as the *Almighty* or *Providence*, who say of a man who goes close up to God and speaks out of the deepest in the nature God made, "he is irreverent." For such men, to utter the name of God in the drama, highest of human arts, is blasphemy. They pay court to God without loving him, treating him as far away rather than as the only home. They accept God's person. "Shall not his excellency"---another thing than what you admire---"make you afraid? Shall not his dread"---another thing than the pagan respect you show---"fall upon you?"

In his desolation, God's truth seems to Job, more plainly than ever, the one thing that holds together the world that came into being by the word of his mouth. If God cannot be reached, nothing is left to the man so lately greatest in the east but despair and hell. Like a child escaping the dogs of the street, he flings the door open and rushes, not looking back, to seek the presence of the living one. Carrying the burden of his death, he cries, "Look what you have laid on me! Shall mortal man, the helpless creature you made, bear a cross like this?" God is the God of comfort, known to man as refuge and life-giver or not known at all. But alas, Job cannot come to him; he sees his face nowhere; God has hidden himself. "Oh that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his seat! I would order my cause before him and fill my mouth with arguments. Will he plead against me with his great power? No! he would put strength in me. There the righteous might dispute with him, and I should be delivered for ever from my judge. Behold, I go forward, but he is not there, and backward, but I cannot perceive him; on the left hand and the right I cannot behold him. But he knows the way I take; when he has tried me, I shall come forth as gold."

He cannot find him! Yet he is in God's presence all the time, and his words enter the ear of God his Saviour.

The grandeur of the poem is that Job pleads his cause with God against all the remonstrance of religious authority, recognizing no one but God, and is justified in it. Grandest of all, he implies, if he does not say, that God *owes* something to his creature. This is the beginning of the greatest discovery: that God owes *himself* to the creature he made in his image, since he made him unable to live without him. This highest claim of his creatures upon him is his divinest gift to them. To fulfil it he sent his Son, that he himself, the Father of him and of us, might follow into our hearts. Perhaps the worst thing in a theology built out of man's dull *possible*, and not out of the being and deeds and words of Jesus Christ, is its constant impression that God acknowledges no such obligation. Are we not the clay, and he the potter? how can the clay claim from the potter? We are the clay, but *his* clay, spiritual, live clay, with needs and desires and *rights*---clay worth the Son of God's dying for, that it might learn to consent to be shaped to honour. We can have no merits, but God has given us rights. Apart from him we have nothing, but having come forth from him we have rights toward him---never, never *against* him! His whole labour is to induce us to claim what he gave us the rights to in creating us. We had no claim to be created, which would be absurd, but being made, we have claims on our maker: our needs are our claims. A man who will not provide for his child's hunger is condemned by the whole world.

"Ah, but," says the partisan of God, "the Almighty's relation is very different from an earthly father's; there is no parallel." I grant it. The man did not create the child; he only yielded to an impulse created in himself. God is infinitely more bound to provide for *his* child than any man for his; the relation is divinely closer. Every hunger, aspiration and longing of our nature is to be referred to him, who made all our needs and made us creatures of a thousand necessities---and have we no claim on him? We have innumerable, infinite claims; and his one great claim on us is that we should claim our claims of him.

It is terrible to represent God as unrelated to us in a way that allows appeal to his righteousness. How could he be righteous, or have anything to do as judge of all the earth, if he owed us nothing? He owes us nothing that he does not pay like a God; but it is of the devil to imagine imperfection or disgrace in obligation. So far is God from thinking so that in every act of his being he puts himself under obligation to his creatures. When doubt and dread invade and the voice of love in the soul is dumb, nothing can please the Father better than to hear his child cry to him from whom he came, "Here I am, O God! You made me: give me what you made me needing." The child's necessity, weakness and helplessness are the strongest of his claims. If I am a whale, I can claim a sea; a sea, room to roll and break in waves; a lion, I seek my meat from God; a child, I claim above all that if any need of mine is denied, it be by the love of a father who will let me see his face and plead my cause before him. This must be just what God desires! What would he have but that his children claim their birthright, the divine nature, God himself, which he made them for and has been giving them ever since he began them to be? A created need is a created claim, and the Father's heart delights to acknowledge it. The story of Jesus is the heart of his answer, not primarily to prayers, but to the divine necessities of the children he has sent out into his universe.

Away with the thought that God could have been a perfect, adorable creator and done less than he has done for his children, that any being but Jesus Christ could have been worthy of all-glorifying worship, that his nature could have lacked absolute love and self-devotion, these highest splendours!

In the light of this truth, look at the words at the head of this sermon: "Oh that you would hide me in the grave!" Job appeals to his creator, whom his sufferings force him to regard as displeased with him, though he knows not why. *We* know he was not displeased, but Job had not read the preface to his own story. He asks God to hide him and forget him for a time, so that the maker's desire to see once more the work of his hands may awake in him, and silence, absence and loss may speak for the buried one and make the parent's heart long for the child's face. Then "you shall call and I will answer you; you will have a desire to the work of your hands," and Job will rise in joy to plead the cause of his righteousness with confidence. For God is nearer to a man than anything he has made: what is closer than the making and the made, the willing and the answering that owes its power to answer to the other's will and desire? God must love his creature who looks up to him with hungry eyes---hungry for life, acknowledgment, justice. The whole existence of a creature is one entire claim on his creator: just *therefore*, let him do with me as he will, even seat me in the ashes to scrape myself with a potsherd, I will bring forward my claim all the more, insist on it, assail with it the ear and heart of the Father. Is it not the sweetest music a maker's ear can hear---except the word of the perfect Son, "Lo, I come to do your will, O God!"? We, imperfect sons, shall learn to say the same, and so enter our birthright and share the divine nature; that is why the Son came and died, to slay our selfishness and mean hollow pride and wake our childhood. We are our Father's debtors for our needs, rights and claims, and he will have us pay the uttermost farthing. So true is he that he will even compel us, through misery if need be, to put in our claims, for he knows we have eternal need of them: without the essential rights of his being, who can live?

I protest, therefore, against all teaching that, born of the faithlessness of the human heart, gives the impression that God's exceeding goodness toward man is not the natural and necessary outcome of his being. The root of every heresy popular in the church draws nourishment only from unbelief. The idea that God would be God all the same, as glorious as he needed to be, had he not taken on himself the divine toil of bringing home his wandered children or done anything to seek and save the lost, is false as hell. It is as if God could be less than he is---less than perfect, less than Jesus Christ, less than Love absolute; as if the God of the New Testament were not under his own perfect necessity of loving-kindness, but had made himself better than, by his own nature and love, he needed to be. They would have it that, being unbound, he deserves the greater homage! So he might, if he were not our Father. But to think of the living God not as our Father but as one who has greatly condescended, not at all bound by his own willed grandeur of righteous nature to do as he has done, is killing to all but a slavish devotion, and thinks of him as nothing like the God we see in Jesus Christ.

It will be answered that we have fallen and God is thereby freed from any obligation, if any ever were. That is another lie. No amount of wrong-doing in a child frees a parent from the divine necessity of doing all he can to deliver him; the bond cannot be broken. It is the vulgar, slavish, worldly idea of freedom that it means being bound to nothing. God's idea of liberty is not such! Speaking as a man: the more vital obligation he takes on, the more children he creates with claims on him, the freer he is as creator and giver of life, the essence of his Godhead; to make scope for his essence is to be free. Our Lord teaches that the truth, known by obedience to him, will make us free: our freedom lies in living the truth of our relations to God and man. To be alone in the universe would be to be slave to unspeakable longings and lonelinesses. And speaking humanly again: God could not be satisfied with himself without doing all a God and Father could do for the creatures he made---without doing just what he has done, is doing and will do to deliver his sons and daughters and bring them home rejoicing. To answer the human heart's cry, "Would that I could see him! would that I might come before him and look on him face to face!" he sent his Son, the express image of his person. And lest our understanding of God be limited by the constant presence to our weak, dullable spiritual sense of any embodiment whatever, he took him away. Having seen him, in his absence we understand him better. If we dare, like Job, to plead with him in the heart-eating troubles that come from being unable to love the misrepresentation of him our would-be teachers hold out; if we speak out before him what seems to us right, will he not be pleased with his children's love of righteousness---the truth that will not part him from his righteousness? He will not plead against us with his great power but put strength in us, and instruct us where we are wrong. The heart that wants to think aright, worships him not as a tyrant but as perfectly righteous, will not call unjust things righteous, and clings to the skirt of his garment with pleading eyes is the Father's delight, and he will open to it riches of his being it has not entered that heart to conceive. "O Lord, they tell me I have so offended against your law that as I am you cannot look on me, but threaten me with eternal banishment from you. But if you do not look on me, how can I ever be other than I am? I was born in sin and have never known myself clean: how can I see sin as you see it, or cleanse myself? You must take me as I am and cleanse me. Is it not impossible that I should behold the final goodness of good and final evilness of evil? How then can I deserve eternal torment? Had I known good and evil as you see them and still chosen evil, I know not what I should not deserve; but you know it has always been something good in the evil that enticed my selfish heart, and all my kind's. You require us to forgive: surely you forgive freely! Bound you may be to destroy evil, but are you bound to keep the sinner alive to punish him, even if it makes him no better? Sin cannot be deep as life, for you are the life; sorrow and pain go deeper than sin, for they reach the divine in us: you can suffer, though you will not sin. To see men suffer might make us shun evil but never hate it; we might see that you hate sin, but never that you love the sinner. Chastise us in loving kindness, and we shall not faint. Evil is deep in us, but we are not all evil, for we love righteousness; and are you not yourself, in your Son, the sacrifice for our sins, the atonement of our breach? You made us subject to vanity but have taken your godlike share of the consequences. Could we ever have come to know good as you know it except through the sea of sin and the fire of cleansing? They tell me I must say *for Christ's sake* or you will not pardon, and it takes the heart out of my poor love; I thank you that nowhere in your gospel does one of your servants say such a thing. In spite of our fears and grovelling, our weakness and wrongs, you will be to us what you are, such a perfect Father as no loving child-heart on earth could invent. You will take our sins on yourself and give us your life to live with. You bear our griefs and carry our sorrows; surely you will one day enable us to pay every debt we owe each other. You have given yourself to us that, having you, we may be eternally alive with your life. We run within the circle of what men call your wrath, and find ourselves clasped in the zone of your love!"

But be it well understood that when I say *rights* I do not mean *merits* of any sort. We can deserve nothing from him, in the sense of any right proceeding from ourselves. All our rights are such as the bounty of inconceivable love has glorified our being with, bestowed for the one purpose of being satisfied, and so deep and delicate that they cannot be satisfied until we long for it with our deepest desire. The giver of them came to men, lived with men, and died by the hands of men that they might possess these rights abundantly; God could do no more to fulfil his part, save what he is still doing every hour for every individual. Our rights are rights with God himself at the heart of them. He could recall them only by making us cease; while we exist, by the being that is ours, they are ours. If he could not make us care for the rights he gave out of the depth of his creative being, I think he would have to uncreate us. As to deserving, that is absurd; he had to die in the endeavour to make us listen and receive. "When you have done all that is commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants; we have done what it was our duty to do." Duty is a thing prepaid: it can never have desert. There is no claim on God that springs from us; all is from him.

But lest any unchildlike soul, in arrogance and ignorance, think to stand on his rights *against* God and demand this or that after the will of the flesh, I will name some of the things he has a right to, perhaps first of all, from the God of his life, because of the divine germ in him. He has a claim on God for any pain, want, disappointment or misery that would help show him to himself as the fool he is; a claim to be punished to the last scorpion of the whip, spared no pang that may urge him toward repentance; even a claim to be sent into the outer darkness, whether what we call hell or something speechlessly worse, if nothing less will do. He has a claim to be compelled to repent: hedged in on every side, with the great shepherd's strong, sharp-toothed sheep-dogs sent after him one after another to thwart every desire, foil every plan and frustrate every hope, until he sees that nothing will ease his pain or make life worth having but the presence of the living God within him, that nothing is good but God's will and nothing noble enough for the heart's desire but oneness with the eternal. For this God must make him yield his very being, that he may enter in and dwell with him.

That the man would enforce none of these claims is nothing: it is not a man who owes them to him but the eternal God, bound by his own will of right toward the creature he made to discharge them. His candle burns dim in the man's soul; it must shine as the sun. For what is the all-pervading dissatisfaction of his wretched being but an unrecognized hunger after his Father's righteousness? The soul God made hungers thus, though the selfish, usurping self that is its consciousness hungers only for low things, ever trying in vain to fill its narrow content with husks. For even the most degraded chamber of the soul, the temple of the deified Self, cannot be filled with less than God; the usurping Self must be miserable until it stops looking at itself in the mirror of Satan and opens its innermost closet to the God who means to dwell there and make peace.

He who has looked on the face of God in Jesus Christ, whose heart overflows even a little with answering love, sees God standing with full hands, and his children hanging back, refusing to take, doubting the God-heart that is absolute in truth and love.

It is not at first easy to see how God answers Job; I find no explanation at all of why he afflicted him. He justifies Job's words, says Job has spoken rightly of him and his friends have not, and calls up before him one after another the works of his hands. The answer, like some of our Lord's, seems addressed to Job himself and not to his intellect: to the revealing, God-like imagination in the man, not to any logical faculty. It sets forth God's power as seen in his handiwork and wondered at by the men of the time, and all that is said of the creatures concerns their show to men's eyes. In what belongs to nature's deeper meanings and her mediation between us and God, her appearances are her truths, far deeper than any scientific discoveries about them. God cares *most* for the show of things, for it is the face of far deeper things; in it we see, as in a glass darkly, the face of the unseen. To know a primrose is higher than to know all its botany, just as to know Christ is infinitely higher than to know all theology, all that is said about his person or babbled about his work. The body of man likewise exists for its outside, the face and form in which revelation dwells, not for its hidden secrets. So Nature exists primarily for her face, her look, her appeals to heart and imagination, her simple service to human need, and not for the secrets to be discovered in her and turned to man's further use. What is our knowledge of the oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and ozone of the atmosphere beside the blowing of the wind on our faces, or the analysis of water beside the babble of a running stream? What is any knowledge of things to the heart, beside its child-play with the Eternal! By infinite decomposition we should learn nothing more of what a thing is, for the moment we decompose it, it ceases to be and its meaning is gone. Far more than astronomy does the mere look of the vault over our heads do for us: think what our idea of greatness, God and infinitude would be if we were reared under a flat white ceiling instead of a blue, light-spangled firmament! I would not depreciate science, but its discoveries are unspeakably less precious than the merest gifts of Nature, which we take unthinking from her hands from morning to night. One day, I trust, we shall enter their secrets from within, by natural contact between our heart and theirs. When we are one with God we may understand in an hour what no man of science, investigating from the surface with the keenest intellect, would reach in a lifetime. Whether such power will come in this world or only beyond it matters nothing to me: life is one, God is the same there and here, and I shall be the same, however larger the life he gives me.

The argument implied in the poem, not expressed, seems to be this: Job saw God so far before him in power, and his works so far beyond his understanding that they filled him with wonder---creation's vast might, the times and seasons, the marvels of the heavens, the springs of the sea, the gates of death; the animals with their generations, providing, beauties and instincts; the strange and awful behemoth on land and leviathan in the sea, perhaps now vanished from the living world. Beholding these, he ought to have reasoned that he who could work so grandly beyond his understanding must use wisdom in things that touched him nearer, though they came no nearer his understanding: "Shall he that contends with the Almighty instruct him? He that reproves God, let him answer it." "Will you annul my judgment? Will you condemn me that you may be righteous?" In this world power is no *proof* of righteousness; but was it likely that he who could create should be unrighteous? Did such works foreshadow injustice toward the creature made in his image? Did Job understand even his own being, history and destiny? Might not God's ways with him be beyond him, and might he not trust him to do justice? His maker was so much greater than Job that his ways with him might well be beyond Job's comprehension; God's thoughts were higher than his as the heavens are higher than the earth!

The true child, the righteous man, will trust absolutely, against all appearances, the God who has created in him the love of righteousness.

God does not, I say, tell Job why he afflicted him; he rouses his child-heart to trust. For the rest of Job's life, I imagine, his slowly vanishing perplexities would give him fresh meditations about God and his ways, new opportunities of trusting him, and added means of growing in the knowledge of God. Everything we cannot understand is a closed book of larger knowledge and blessedness, whose clasps the blessed perplexity urges us to open. There can be nothing that is not in itself a righteous intelligibility---whether intelligible to us matters nothing. The awful thing would be anything unintelligible in its nature: that would be the same as *no God*. That God knows is enough for me; I shall know, if I can know. To think God did not know would be death, for it would be to conclude there was no God to know.

How much more than Job are we bound, who know him in his Son as Love, to trust God in all the troubling questions that press on us about the motions and results of things! About the lower animals, and about souls that seem never to wake from the sleep of death or to fall into it again, we will trust him.

In the confusion of Job's thoughts---how could they be otherwise, with two such facts staring at each other, that God was just yet *punishing* a righteous man as if he were wicked?---he could not yet conceive or receive the thought that approving love itself might inflict or allow the torture, that such suffering is granted only to a righteous man that he may be made perfect. I can well imagine that, as one moment he doubted God's righteousness and the next cried, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him," some doubt of God's existence mingled in the chaos. To deny God's existence may, paradoxical as it seems, involve less unbelief than the smallest *yielding* to doubt of his goodness; a man may be haunted with doubts and only grow in faith. Doubts are the Living One's messengers to rouse the honest, the first knock at our door of things not yet understood but needing to be, and they commonly meet the inhospitable reception given angels who do not come in their own likeness. Doubt must precede every deeper assurance, for uncertainties are what we first see when we look into a region unexplored. So Job's longing to see God may well include a mighty desire to be assured of God's being; to acknowledge is not to be sure of God. One great point in the poem is that when Job hears God's voice, though it gives no explanation, it is enough: he knows that God is, and hears his creature's cry. That God is there, knowing all about him, is enough to reconcile seeming contradictions and make the worst ills of outer life endurable. God settled everything when, answering out of the whirlwind, he showed he had not forsaken him. Nothing but a far closer divine presence can ever make life fit for a son of man, for the simplest of reasons: he is made in God's image and must have in him the reality of which his being is the image; without it his conscious self is a mask, a spiritual emptiness. For the present, though, Job, yielding to God, was calmed and satisfied. Perhaps he came to see that if anything God could do would make him doubt God, it was time to be so troubled, that the imperfection of his knowledge of God might be revealed and an earthquake of his being bring to the surface the gold of God in him. To know that our faith is weak is the first step toward strengthening it; to be capable of distrusting is death; to know that we are, and cry out, is to begin to live---to begin to be made such that we cannot distrust, such that God may do anything with us and we shall never doubt him. Until doubt is impossible we lack true, childlike knowledge of God; for either God is such that one *may* distrust him, or to distrust him is the greatest injustice a man can commit, so that if we can distrust him we know him imperfectly or not at all. But all he was required to receive at the moment was the argument from God's loving wisdom in his power to his loving wisdom in everything else. For power is a real and good thing, giving an immediate impression that it proceeds from goodness; however long it may last after goodness is gone, it was never born of anything but goodness. In the deepest fact power and goodness are one.

Seeing God, Job forgets all he wanted to say. He had meant to order his cause before him; he had longed to see him to defend himself, imagining God as well as his friends wrongly accused him; but his speech is gone. To justify himself in the presence of Him who is Righteousness seems to him what it is: foolish, worthless labour. If God does not see him righteous he is not righteous and may hold his peace; if he is, God knows it better than he. All the evils and imperfections of his nature rise before him in the presence of the one pure one, who is right and has no selfishness. "Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer you? I will lay my hand on my mouth. Once have I spoken, but I will not answer; yes, twice, but I will proceed no further." Again, after God has called behemoth and leviathan to witness for him, he replies, "I know that you can do everything, and that no thought can be withheld from you. Who is he that hides counsel without knowledge?" This was the question with which God first made his presence known; in Job's mouth now it is the humble confession, "*I am that foolish man*." "Therefore I have uttered what I understood not; things too wonderful for me." "Hear, I beg you, and I will speak"---henceforth he will cry to be taught, not to justify himself. "I will demand of you, and you declare to me"---he will seek the more diligently to know God's counsel. That he cannot understand will no longer distress him but urge him to fresh endeavour after the knowledge of him who is perfect in all his doings. "I have heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you. Therefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes."

Job had his desire: he saw the face of God---and abhorred himself in dust and ashes. He sought justification and found self-abhorrence. Was this punishment? The farthest from it possible. It was the best thing, to begin with, that the face of God could do for him. Self-contempt is a blessed gift when its giver is the visible glory of the Living One. To see there is to partake; to turn from self is to begin to be pure of heart. Job was right that he did not deserve to be punished so for his sins; neither did he deserve to see God's face, yet that crown of all gifts was given him---and it was to see himself vile. By the very sufferings he had cried out against, the living one came near, and he was silent. Oh the divine generosity that lets us be abashed and self-condemned before the Holy, to come so near him as to see ourselves dark spots against his brightness! We must be of his kind, else no sight of him could make us feel small and ugly and unclean. To be rebuked before him is to be his. Good as Job was, he had never yet been right near God; now God has become very real to him; he knows in very deed that God is he with whom he has to do. God laid these troubles on him that through them he might draw nigh and enable him to know him.

Two things are clearly contained in this poem: that not every man deserves to be punished everlastingly from the Lord's presence for his sins; and that the best of men, when he sees the face of God, will know himself vile. God is just and will never deal with the sinner as if he could commit the pure sin; yet if the best man is not delivered from himself, that self will sink him into Tophet.

Any man may, like Job, plead his cause with God, though perhaps not to like justification: he gives us liberty to speak and hears with absolute fairness. But, blessed be God, the one result for all who draw nigh will be to see him plainly, surely right, the perfect Saviour, the profoundest refuge even from the wrongs of their own being, so seeing him they will abhor themselves and rejoice in him. And, as the poem indicates, when we turn from ourselves to him, becoming true---being to God and ourselves what we are---he will turn again our captivity; those who sowed in tears shall reap in joy and come again rejoicing, bringing their sheaves. Then the waters that rise from God's fountains will run in God's channels.

The prosperity that follows Job's submission embodies a great truth. A man must do right even if it send him to Hades, even to hell for ever, yet while the Lord lives we need not fear: *all* good things must grow out of and hang upon the one central good, the one law of life, the Will, the One Good. To submit absolutely to him is the only reason; then circumstance as well as all being must bud and blossom as the rose. What matter whether in this world or the next, if one day I know my life as perfect bliss, with no limitation, hindrance, pain or sorrow more than it can dominate in peace and perfect assurance?

I care not whether the book of Job is a history or a poem; I think it is both, and care not how much of each. It was probably, in the childlike days of the world, a well-known story in the east, which some man whom God had made wise to understand his will and ways took up and told as a poet. Who can say its age? It must be before Moses. I would gladly throw out Elihu's part as an interpolation. One in whom, of all men I have known, I put the greatest trust once told me, in effect, that the language of the rest of the poem and that of Elihu differ as Chaucer's and Shakspere's do.

The poem is difficult, and in the original inaccessible to me; but through all the evident inadequacy of our translation, who can fail to hear two souls, the poet's and Job's, crying with agonized hope that, whatever the evil shows around them, truth and righteousness are the heart of things? Job's faith, even his hope, seems at times on the point of giving way; he struggles like a drowning man, but his courage revives as his head rises. Christians we call ourselves! What would our faith not be, were it as much greater than Job's as the word from Jesus' mouth is mightier than what he heard out of the whirlwind! Here is a book of faith indeed, before the law was given by Moses: Grace and Truth have visited us---but where is our faith?

Friends, our cross may be heavy and the *via dolorosa* rough, but we have claims on God, the right to cry to him for help. He has spent and is spending himself to give us our birthright, which is righteousness. We cannot be saved but by leaving our sins: we shall not be condemned for past sins, but we shall be if we love the darkness rather than the light and refuse to come to him that we may have life. God offers us the one thing we cannot live without, his own self: we must make room for him and cleanse our hearts that he may come in, and do as the Master tells us, who knew all about the Father and the way to him---*we must deny ourselves, and take up our cross daily, and follow him*.

### SELF-DENIAL

*The passage:* Jesus told everyone that whoever would follow him must deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow; whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses it for his sake will save it (St. Luke ix. 23, 24).

Christ is the way out and the way in: out of slavery, conscious or unconscious, into liberty; out of the unhomeliness of things to the home we desire but do not know; from the stormy skirts of the Father's garments to the peace of his bosom. To picture him we need endless figures, some of them opposed: he is the door of the sheepfold and the shepherd of the sheep, the way and the leader in the way, the rock that followed and the captain of our salvation. We must become as little children, and Christ must be born in us. We must learn of him, and the one lesson he has to give is himself: he first does all he wants us to do and is first all he wants us to be. We must see things as he saw them, take God's will as the very life of our being, and care neither for our own way nor for what is said of us. The world must be nothing to us.

I would not be misunderstood. By *the world* I mean not the world God makes and means, still less the human hearts in it, but the world man makes by choosing the perversion of his own nature, a world opposed to God's. I mean every way of judging and thinking---political, economic, ecclesiastical, social or individual---that is not God's: that leaves him out of account, does not set his will supreme as the one law of life, and cares for the customs of society, the practice of the trade, the usage of the time, rather than what is true and right. From everything against the teaching of Jesus, from the world in the heart of the best man in it, and above all in his own heart, the disciple must turn to follow him. The first thing in all progress is to leave something behind; to follow him is to leave one's self behind. "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself."

Some take this to mean that the disciple must go against his likings because they are his likings, thinking that abstaining from what is pleasant or doing what is disagreeable, thwarting the lower nature, is good in itself. I will not dare say what a man may not get good from, if he does it in simplicity and honesty. When a man, wanting to do right, mistakenly does wrong, God will see that he is shown the better way, perhaps by means of the very mistake. I allow that a mere effort of will, arbitrary and uninformed by duty, may add to a man's power over his lower nature. But in that nature God must rule, not the man, however well he means. From a man's ruling himself in the smallest opposition, however devout, to the law of his being, comes the huge danger of nourishing, through the pride of self-conquest, a far worse self than the unchained animal self: the demoniac self. True victory over self is God's victory in the man; subjugation is not enough, it must be subjugation by God. In whatever a man does without God he must fail miserably, or succeed more miserably. No part of a man can rule another part, for God created it, and the part is greater than the whole. By crossing his natural and therefore rightful inclinations, a man may develop a self-satisfaction that is a root of all sin: doing what God does not require, he becomes not a law but a law-giver to himself, who commands rather than obeys. The diseased satisfaction some feel in laying burdens on themselves pampers, little as they suspect it, the most dangerous appetite of the very self they think they are mortifying. All God's creatures are good, received with thanksgiving; a thing becomes evil only when used where a higher law forbids, or refused for self-discipline where no higher law forbids and God therefore allows it. To be his own schoolmaster is a dangerous position; the pupil cannot be expected to progress, except in the wrong direction. To enjoy heartily and thankfully, and to do cheerfully without when God wills, is the way to live with regard to the lower nature, which must not be confused with the things of *the world*. If anyone calls this dangerous doctrine, I answer that God's law is enough for me; man's laws are false and come of rebellion. God, not man, is our judge.

It is not to thwart or tease the poor self that Jesus speaks; God did not give it to us for that. He tells us to leave it altogether---yield, deny, refuse, lose it---and only so shall we save it and have a share in our own being. The self is given us to sacrifice, so that we, like Christ, may have something to offer. We are to abandon it utterly, not torment it; then it can no more be vexed.

"What can this mean? We are not to thwart, but to abandon? How abandon, without thwarting?"

It means this: we must refuse and deny self altogether as a ruling or originating element in us. It is no longer to be the regent of our action. We are no more to think, "What should I like to do?" but "What would the Living One have me do?" It is not selfish to take what God has made us desire, nor are we very good to yield it when he would take it from us; we would be very bad not to. But to yield it heartily, without struggle or regret, is to deny the Self itself, not just something it would like. The Self is God's making, but it must be the "slave of Christ," that the Son may make it also the free son of the same Father; it must receive all from him and follow him, with Christ as its law. The time will come when it is so possessed and enlarged by the indwelling God, its deepest self, that no enforced denial is needed: it will have learned to receive with thanksgiving, demand nothing, and no longer turn on its own centre. God's eternal denial of himself, revealed in him who took up his cross daily in the flesh, will have developed in the man, whose eternal rejoicing will be in God and his fellows, before whom he will cast his glad self to be a carpet for their walk, a footstool for their rest, a stair for their climbing.

To deny oneself, then, is to act no longer from the standing-ground of self; to allow no private communication between the self and the will; not to let the right hand know what the left hand does. No grasping, no wish to feel worthy, no ambition, no wish to surpass another, no longing for men's praise shall move the will. It is to shrink from no contempt of community or country that goes against the mind of the Living One, and for no love or entreaty of parent, spouse, child, friend or lover to turn aside from following him: we forsake them all as ruling powers in our lives, and do nothing to please them that would not first please him. Right deeds, not the judgment on them, and true words, not their reception, shall be our care. We shall not love money, trust in it, or seek it as the business of life; and whether we have it or not, we must think of it as the gift of God, not a windfall of circumstance. By the uplooking will we must draw our life fresh every moment from the Living One, and not glory in the mere consciousness of health and being. It is God who feeds us, warms us, quenches our thirst; we must know that even our understanding is his, and that we live and feed on him every hour. To know this in the depth of our knowing is to deny ourselves and take God instead; to try after it is to begin the denial, following him who never sought his own. So we must deny all anxieties and fears: when young, not minding what the world calls failure; when old, not being vexed that we forget, cannot do, or grow weak or ill. We have to do with God, who can, not with ourselves, where we cannot; the being we could not make is his care, and our care is to will his will, his to give us all things. This is to deny ourselves. "Self, I have not to consult you but him whose idea is the soul of you, and of which you are as yet all unworthy---the Causing of you, not the caused you. You may be my consciousness, but you are not my being; if you were, what a poor, dingy, weak wretch I should be! My life is hid with Christ in God, with you certainly, but as an obedient servant, not a master. Submit, or I will cast you from me and pray for another consciousness. God is more to me than my consciousness of myself: he is my life, and you are only so much of it as my poor half-made being can grasp at once. Because I have fooled and spoiled you, treating you as my very self, you have dwindled and lessened me till I am ashamed of myself, and I am often disgusted by your paltry, mean face. No! Let me have the company of the Perfect One, my elder brother, not of you! I will not make a friend of the mere shadow of my own being. Good-bye, Self! I deny you, and will do my best every day to leave you behind me."

And in this we must not forget that when Jesus tells us to follow him, come to him, believe in him, he speaks first and always as *the Son* of the Father, in the active sense: the obedient God, not one who claims sonship as ground for further claim. He is the Son who came expressly and only to do the Father's will. When he says *Follow me*, he himself is following the Father; his face is set homeward. Even this is nothing unless we *believe* in him, which is to do as he does. We must believe in him altogether practically, as he believed in his Father: not as one about whom we hold something, but as one we follow out of the body of this death into eternal life. To hold a theory about why he died or wherein lay his atonement is not to follow him; such things are revealed only to those who follow him in his active being, who do as he did and live as he lived. He is all for the Father; we must be too. To follow him is to learn of him, to think his thoughts, use his judgments, see and feel as he did, so that we may be of one mind with his Father. Nothing less, even working miracles and casting out devils, makes a disciple; busy from morning to night doing great things for him on any other road, we should only earn the answer, "I never knew you." When he says, "Take my yoke upon you," he does not mean a yoke he lays on us; it is his own yoke, the Father's will, which he carries and would have us bear with him. Of this yoke he says it is easy, of this burden that it is light---and he says it with Gethsemane before him and the hour and power of darkness waiting. There is no magnifying of himself. He first denies himself and takes up his cross, and then tells us to do the same. The Father magnifies the Son; the Son magnifies the Father.

We must be jealous for God against ourselves, and watch the cunning, deceitful Self---always so until it is thoroughly denied, left quite empty of our will and regard, and God has come into it and made it, not indeed an *adytum*, but a *pylon* for himself. Until then even its denials and its turnings from dear things for Christ's sake will foster its self-regard and breed a deeper self-worship. While it is only thwarted and not denied, satisfaction with conquered difficulty may minister yet more to its self-congratulation. When the Self cannot have honour for its gifts, its conquests, and the "golden opinions bought from all sorts of people," it will please itself with its abnegations and forsakings. It may not *call* itself a saint, but it will soon *feel* itself one, a superior creature looking down on the foolish world, walking on high "above the smoke and stir of this dim spot," and worshipping itself the more intently because it has given up the approval of others and no longer needs them to assure it of its merits. In a thousand ways Self will delude itself. Christ sought nothing but his Father's will; we have to grow diamond-clear, true as the white light of morning. A hopeless task, were it not that he offers to come himself and dwell in us.

I have wondered whether "take up his cross" was already a common phrase when the Lord said it, since he had not yet told them he would be crucified. I can hardly believe crucifixion so common that bearing the cross had passed into ordinary speech. As the Lord's idea was new to men, so I think was its image. I grant that, being so hateful to the Jews, it *might* have come to stand for the worst human misery, but would they use as a figure something that so sorely showed their slavery? I hardly think so. Certainly it had not come to stand for the self-abnegation he had just brought to light, hardly yet to the light, only the twilight; and nothing less, it seems to me, can have suggested the terrible symbol.

But although the denial of self is an entire and absolute idea, it has to be done *daily*. It is deeper and harder than any single effort of the most herculean will, for the will itself is not pure or free until the Self is absolutely denied. The water of life from the well within us takes long to permeate every part of our spiritual frame, until at last, reaching the outermost folds of our personality, it casts out disease, our bodies are redeemed by indwelling righteousness, and creation is delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. Every day till then we must take up our cross, and every hour see that we are carrying it. A birthright may be lost for a mess of pottage, and what Satan calls a trifle must be a thing of eternal significance.

Is there not many a Christian who, having begun to deny himself, spends much strength in the vain and evil effort to accommodate matters between Christ and the dear Self, seeking to save what he must so certainly lose, and in how different a way from the Master's! It is one thing to have the loved self devoured of hell in hate, horror and disappointment, another to yield it to the conscious possession of the living God, who will then first raise it to its true individuality, freedom and life. With its cause within it, it shall indeed be saved. Here is the promise to those who leave all and follow him: "Whosoever shall lose his life, for my sake, the same shall save it"---in St. Matthew, "find it." What speech of men or angels can shadow this dimly glorious hope! To lose ourselves in the salvation of God's heart! To be no longer a care to ourselves, but to know God taking divinest care of us! To be a resting-place for divine love, a branch of the tree of life for the dove to alight on, an open air of love, a thoroughfare for the thoughts of God and all holy creatures! To know one's self by the reflex action of endless brotherly presence, yearning for nothing from anyone, pouring out love by the natural motion of the spirit! To revel in the hundredfold of everything good we left for his sake, above all in the unsought love of those who love us as we love them! To know that God and we mean the same thing, that we are pleasing to the Father; to live nestling at his knee, climbing to his bosom, blessed in the simple being that is one with God! What a self to receive again for the one we left! We left it paltry, low and mean; he took up the poor cinder of a consciousness, carried it back to the workshop of his spirit, made it a true thing, radiant, clear, fit for eternal companying and indwelling, and restored it to us for ever!

All high things can be spoken only in figures, which cannot *fit* intellectually matters too high for them; they can be truly interpreted only by those who have the spiritual fact in themselves. Speaking of a man and his soul implies a self and a self reacting on each other, and we cannot divide ourselves so; the figure suits imperfectly. The Lord never meant to explain things to our understanding; what we need is a word to think with about high things, and a true figure, though far from perfect, gives us that. But the imperfection of his figures cannot lie in excess: any symbol falls short of the meaning it holds. It is the low stupidity of an unspiritual nature that reads his meaning as less than his symbols; the true soul sees that his words always represent more than they present. There is no joy belonging to human nature as God made it that will not be enhanced a hundredfold for the man who gives up himself, though he may seem to yield the very essence of life. To yield self is to give up grasping at things in their second causes, as men call them, which are merely God's means, and to receive them from their source, seeing where they come from. The careless soul takes the Father's gifts as if things had a way of dropping into his hand. So he is a slave of chance and his own blundering: for the good that comes he gives no thanks, for who is there to thank? At his disappointments he grumbles, for there must be someone to blame! What power would not be worse than squandered in sustaining him in his paltry, low-aimed existence? No world could be built on such an idea. It is the children who shall inherit the earth; those who will not be children cannot possess it. The hour is coming when all that art, science and nature can give, in ennobling subjugation to the higher as man is subject to the Father, shall be the endless delight of the sons and daughters of God. To the man to whom God is all in all, God can give these things; another cannot receive them. We are not to love God for what he can give; we cannot love him except because he is our God and altogether good and beautiful. But neither may we forget what the Lord does not forget: in the end, when truth is victorious, God will answer his creature in the joy of his heart. For what is joy but the harmony of the spirit? The good Father made his children to be joyful; only, before they can enter his joy they must be like him, ready to sacrifice joy to truth. No promise of such joy appeals to selfishness; every reward Christ holds out enters the soul only as a death to selfishness. His heaven is a loving of all, a forgetting of self, each dwelling in all and all in each. A joyful child is rarely selfish, even in the nursery; it is not selfish to be joyful. What could keep him who sees the face of God from joy? That bliss lies behind all other bliss. The one bliss of the universe is the presence of God, which is God being to the man, and felt by him as being, what in his own nature he is: the indwelling power of his life. God must be to his creature what he is in himself, for only by his essential being can he create; his presence is the unceasing call and response of father to child. Where is the selfishness in being so made happy? It may be deep selfishness to refuse to be happy. Is there selfishness in the Lord's seeing the travail of his soul and being satisfied? Selfishness is taking bliss from another; finding one's bliss in another's is not selfishness, and the greater the joy so reaped, the farther from it. The one bliss next to the love of God is the love of our neighbour. If anyone says, "You love because it makes you blessed," I deny it: we are blessed because we love. No one could reach the bliss of loving his neighbour who was selfish and sought it from love of himself. Love is unselfishness. In the main we love because we cannot help it; there is no merit in it, but neither is it selfish. Many confound righteousness with merit and say, "If it makes you happy to love, where is your merit? It is only selfishness!" There is no merit, I reply, yet the love born in us is our salvation from selfishness and the very essence of righteousness. That a thing is joyful does not mean I do it for the joy of it, and when the joy is in others it is pure. That *certain* joys should be joys is the very denial of selfishness; the man whom love itself did not make joyful would be demoniacally selfish. It is selfish to enjoy content while beholding others lack; even in the highest spiritual bliss, to sit careless of others would be selfishness, and the higher the bliss, the worse. But that bliss is surely right of which a great part is labour that others may share it, and I do not doubt such labour will be a great part of our heavenly gladness; the redeeming Father will find plenty of like work for his children. Those who think that where all are good things must be dull have little Christian imagination; it is because there is so little good in them yet that they know so little of the beauty of life divine. There will be interest and variety enough, not without pain, in helping those still wearily toiling up the heights of truth, perhaps unwilling to part with the miserable self which, while they cherish it, they are not yet worth being or capable of having.

Some of the things a man may have to forsake in following Christ are not forsaken because of what they are in themselves. Nature, art, science and fit society are not among the things he loses in forsaking himself: they are God's and have no part in the world of evil, false judgments, low wishes and unrealities that make up the conscious life of the self that must be denied; that life will never be restored to him. But in forsaking himself to do his true work in the world, a man may find he must for a time leave some of God's things---not as bad things, but because they draw his mind from the necessities of the true life in himself or others, and there is no room for them until those of paramount claim have been so heeded that these no longer impede but further them. Then he who knows God will find that knowledge opens his understanding to all else; he will behold things from within instead of searching wearily into them from without. This gave King David more understanding than all his teachers. Then the things he left will be restored a hundredfold. So it is in forsaking friends. To forsake them for Christ is not to forsake them as evil or to cease to love them---"for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?"---but to let their love cast not even a shadow between us and our Master, and to be content to lose their approval, company, even affection, where the Master says one thing and they another. It is to learn to love them in a higher, tenderer, truer way, which keeps all that was genuine in the former and loses all that was false. We shall love *their* selves, and disregard our own.

I do not forget the Lord's word about *hating father and mother*. I have a glimpse of its meaning, but dare not try to explain it now. It is all against the self, not against the father and mother.

There is another kind of forsaking that may fall to some, and may be very difficult: forsaking the notions of God and his Christ they were taught in youth, which they held, and could not help holding, when they began to believe. They have begun to doubt whether they are true, but casting them away feels like parting with every assurance of safety.

There are so-called doctrines long accepted by good people which I find hard to understand how any man can hold and love God, except by closing the spiritual eyes tight. If a man cares more for opinion than for life, it is not worth persuading him to renounce his opinions; he would only put others in the same place of honour, a place that can *belong* to no opinion. What such a man believes matters nothing, for he is not a true man: holding with a school he supposes right, he props himself up with the worst unbelief of all, opinion calling itself faith. But for him who is in earnest about God's will it is of endless consequence to think rightly of God; he cannot come close to him or truly know his will while his notion of him is in any point that of a false god. If he seems to himself to give up even his former assurance of salvation by yielding ideas of God unworthy of God, he must nonetheless take up that cross also. He will come to see that he must follow *no* doctrine, however truly man's word could state it, but the living Truth, the Master himself.

Many good souls will one day be horrified at what they now believe of God. If they have not thought about it but have given themselves to obedience, they may have done little harm so far; but they can make little progress in knowing God while, even passively, holding evil things true of him. If they do think about them and find no obstruction, they must be far from any true knowledge of God. But some find them a terrible obstruction and yet imagine, or fear, them true. These must take courage to forsake the false in *any* shape, to deny their old selves in the most seemingly sacred prejudices, and follow Jesus not as the tradition of the elders presents him but as he presents himself, with his apostles and the spirit of truth. There are "traditions of men" after Christ as well as before him, and far worse, as "making of none effect" higher and better things; we have to look to it *how we have learned Christ*.

### THE TRUTH IN JESUS

*The passage:* Paul says his readers did not learn Christ that way, if they heard him and were taught in him as truth is in Jesus: as regards their former way of life they are to put off the old man, who is going to ruin through the love of the lie (Eph. iv. 20-22).

How have we learned Christ? It ought to be a startling thought that we may have learned him wrong, which is far worse than not learning him at all, for a false Christ, hard to exorcise, then takes his place. The point is whether we have learned Christ as he taught himself, or as men taught him who thought they understood but did not; whether we know him with fleshly notions and low human fancies, or after the spirit, as God knows him. The Christian religion, being higher and wider than the Jewish, has been open to even greater corrupt misrepresentation. Have we learned false statements about him, or *himself*? Is our brain merely full of things concerning him, or does he dwell in our hearts, a lesson ever being learned, the power of our life?

I have been led to what I am about to say by an utterance of one in the front rank of those who assert that we can know nothing of the "Infinite and Eternal energy from which all things proceed." It is this:

"To visit on Adam's descendants, through hundreds of generations, dreadful penalties for a small transgression they did not commit; to damn all who do not use an alleged way of forgiveness most have never heard of; and to reconcile by sacrificing a perfectly innocent son to satisfy an assumed need for a propitiatory victim: these are acts that, ascribed to a human ruler, would call forth abhorrence, and ascribing them to the Ultimate Cause of things must become impossible, even if not felt to be full of difficulties."

I quote this not to oppose either clause, for I entirely agree with it, and I do not mean to address its writer or anyone who holds with him. I have never heard a word from that way of thinking that touched anything I hold. One of my earliest recollections is of beginning to be at strife with the false system here assailed, and I scorn such paganism as heartily in the name of Christ as in the name of righteousness. Rather than believe a single point involving its spirit, even with the assurance of the salvation it offers, I would join those who "know nothing," and set myself, hopeless of heart, to what I am now trying with infinite hope in the pure originating One: to get rid of my miserable mean self, comforted only by the chance that death would either end thought or reveal something of the Ultimate Cause that it would be no insult to him to hold. Even such a chance alone might enable one to live.

I will not now inquire how the writer comes to offer these so-called beliefs as Christianity, when so many who believe in Christ with true hearts, some of higher rank in literature than he, hold none of them and abhor them as much as he does. He would probably answer that he had to deal with the ruling notions of religious society; and that these are held by the bulk of Christians, educated and uneducated, however many think an explanatory clause here and there turns away the reproach, I am sorry to be unable to deny. Mitigated forms of expression change nothing: a brief examination would show these ideas to be not merely analogous to the originals but ultimately identical.

But if I had to do with the writer, I would ask how, refusing these dogmas as abominable, yet knowing they are attributed to men whose teaching has done more to civilize the world than any other, he has not inquired enough to satisfy a man of his faculty that this was not their teaching; that it was so different and so good that even the forced companionship of such lies has not destroyed its regenerative power. He will allow that a man named Jesus died for the truth he taught: can he believe he died for that? Would it not be well to inquire what he really taught, from the primary sources? I mention him only to make my position plain to those to whom I do speak: those who call themselves Christians.

If I asked these Christians how such opinions come to be held concerning the Holy One whose ways they take on them to set forth, most would answer, "He tells us these things himself in his word; we have learned them from the Scriptures." Many would offer explanations that seem to them to remove all cause for reprobation, and others would say that better ideas, though widely held, have not yet had time to show themselves in the belief of the nation's thinkers. Of those who present doctrine as the quotation describes, some are content that it should be so, and some find it grievous but do not see how to get rid of it. To the latter it may be a little comfort to hear one who has studied the New Testament for many years and loves it beyond words declare his conviction that there is not an atom of such teaching in the whole lovely, divine utterance; it is altogether men's invention, honest in part at least, but not true. Thank God, we are nowise bound to accept any man's explanation of God's ways, however good the man, if it does not commend itself to our conscience; to accept what we cannot see to be good would be sin.

But it is no part of my object now to set forth what I believe or do not believe; a time may come for that. I want to address those who call themselves Christians, and expostulate with them thus:

Whatever your *opinions* on the greatest of all subjects, is it well that the impression of Christianity on your generation should be that of your opinions, and not of something beyond opinion? Can Christianity be represented by opinion, even the best? If it could, how many of us are such as God would choose to represent his thoughts by our opinions of them? If you answer, "The opinions I hold are those of the Bible," I reply that none can understand, still less represent, another's opinions but those of the same mind with him, certainly not those who suppose *opinion* to be the object of any writer in the Bible. Is Christianity a system of articles of belief, however correctly worded? Never. I would rather have a man who held, as numbers of you do, the most obnoxious untruths and irreverent opinions, if he *lived* in the faith of the Son of God---trusted in God as the Son of God trusted in him---than a man with whose every formula of belief I agreed but who knew nothing of a daily walk with God. The one, holding doctrines of devils, is yet a child of God; the other, holding the doctrines of Christ and his Apostles, is of the world, yea, of the devil.

"What! A man hold the doctrine of devils, and yet be of God?"

Yes; for to hold a thing with the intellect is not to believe it. A man's real belief is what he lives by, and the man I mean lives by the love of God and obedience to his law so far as he has recognized it. Those hideous doctrines are outside him; he *thinks* they are inside, but they cannot really be inside any good man. They are sadly against him, for he cannot love to dwell on them, yet he lives in a measure like the true God. What a man believes is what he does. He would shrink with loathing from actions he thinks God justified in doing; like God, he loves and helps and saves. Will the living God let such a man's opinions damn him? No more than he will let the correct opinions of another, who lives for himself, save him. What I insist on is that, supposing your theories right and containing all that is to be believed, they are not what makes you Christians; with not a few of you they are just what keeps you from it. For when you say that to be saved a man must hold this or that, you leave the living God and his will and trust in a notion about him. Some of you say we must trust in the finished work of Christ, in his merits, the atonement, the blood he shed. All these statements repudiate the living Lord *in whom* we are told to believe, who by his presence with and in us, and our obedience, lifts us out of darkness into light and into the liberty of the sons of God. No belief *about him* is the faith of the New Testament. Unless the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus makes a man sick of his opinions, he may hold them to doomsday for me, for no opinion is Christianity and no plan of salvation is the gospel of the living God. Many will grant this heartily, yet the moment you talk with them you find they insist that to believe in Christ is to believe in the atonement, meaning only their special theory of it. If I say we must believe in the atoning Christ and cannot believe in any theory of atonement, they denounce me: "He does not believe in the atonement!" If I explain it otherwise than they do, they say I deny it, and count it of no consequence that I believe in the atoner with my whole heart, soul, strength and mind. This they call *contending for the truth*! Because I refuse an explanation that is not in the New Testament, though they think it is, and seems to me as false in logic as detestable in morals, I am not a Christian! What wonder that men such as the one I quoted refuse the Christianity they suppose such "believers" to represent! A potent faith in the Lord himself may mingle with this folly, but the importance they place on theory obstructs true faith even more than the theories themselves: while the mind is occupied in asking,

"Do I believe or feel this thing right?"---the true question is forgotten: "Have I left all to follow him?" To the man who gives himself to the living Lord every belief will come right; the Lord himself will see that his disciple believes aright about him. If a man cannot trust him for this, what faith has he? It is because he has little faith that he clings to preposterous, dishonouring ideas, the traditions of men about his Father instead of the teaching of Christ and his apostles. The living Christ is to such people a shadow, and no soul can thoroughly believe in the all but obliterated Christ of their theories: the disciple of such a Christ rests on his work, or his merits, or his atonement!

What I insist on is that a man's faith be in the living, loving, ruling, helping Christ, devoted to us as ever he was, with all the powers of the Godhead for the salvation of his brethren. What saves a man is not faith that he did this or his work wrought that, but faith in the man who did and is doing everything for us; without it he cannot heal us spiritually, any more than he healed physically when present to men's eyes. If you ask, "What is faith in him?" I answer: leaving your way, your objects, your self, and taking his and him; leaving your trust in men, money, opinion, character, atonement itself, *and doing as he tells you*. It is the one terrible heresy of the church that it has always presented something else than obedience as faith in Christ. The work of Christ is not the Working Christ, any more than his clothing is his body. If the woman who touched the hem of his garment had trusted in the garment and not in him who wore it, would she have been healed? Those who believe *about* Christ rather than in him get what comfort they do because, touching the mere hem, they cannot help believing a little in the live man inside the garment. No wonder they are so often miserable: they lie down to sleep with only the skirt of a robe in their hand, a robe never his, only supposed his by them, when they might sleep in peace with the living Lord in their hearts. Instead of knowing Christ in them saving them, they waste themselves in soul-sickening self-examination---whether they believe, whether they truly trust the atonement, are sorry enough, are of the elect, have an interest in the blood shed---the way to madness of brain and despair of heart; while the man who died for them waits to begin to save them from every evil, first from this self that consumes them with trouble about its salvation. He will set them free and take them home to the Father's bosom, if only they mind what he says, which is the beginning, middle and end of faith. If instead of searching the mysteries of corruption in their own charnel-houses they would awake and arise from the dead and come into the light he waits to give them, he would at once begin to fill them with the fulness of God.

"But I do not know how to awake and arise!"

I will tell you: get up and do something the Master tells you, and so make yourself his disciple at once. Instead of asking whether you believe, ask whether this day you have done one thing because he said, Do it, or once abstained because he said, Do not. It is absurd to say you believe, or want to believe, in him if you do nothing he tells you. If you can think of nothing he said that has had an atom of influence on your doing or not doing, you have good ground to think yourself no disciple. Do not waste your time trying to convince yourself otherwise. What if you succeeded, and he said after all, "Why did you not do the things I told you? Depart from me; I do not know you!" If it is true that you are his disciple, you can make it truer; if not, you can begin at once to *be* one, by obeying him in the first thing you can think of in which you are not obeying him. We must learn to obey him in everything, and so must begin somewhere: let it be at once, in the very next thing at the door of conscience! Oh fools and slow of heart, if you think of nothing but Christ and do not do his words, you build on sand. What have those teachers not to answer for who have turned your regard from the Lord's own words, which are spirit and life, to plans of salvation tortured out of his apostles' words, even were those plans as true as they are false! There is but one plan of salvation: to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, that is, to take him for what he is, our master, and his words as if he meant them, as he did. To do his words is to enter into vital relation with him; obedience is the only way to be one with him. The relation is absolute and can begin to *live* only in obedience: it is obedience. Have I the poorest notion of a God, and dare I enter into relations with him the first of which is not that what he says I will do? The thing is eternally absurd. I know what the father of lies whispers to those who dislike this teaching: "It is the doctrine of works!" But one word of the Lord humbly heard will send all the demons of false theology into the abyss. He says the man who does not do what he tells him builds his house to fall in ruin; he tells his messengers to baptize all nations, "teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you." It is faith he requires, the highest act of which the human mind is capable; but faith in what he is and says, a faith that can exist only in obedience, a faith which *is* obedience. For this, men have substituted a belief *about* him, faith in some supposed design of his coming in the flesh. It was himself and God in him that he manifested; but they make faith in him thus manifested secondary to accepting a paltry contrivance of juggling morality which they attribute to God and Christ and call the atonement and the plan of salvation. Do you put faith in *him*, I ask, or in the doctrines and commandments of men? If you say, "In him," then do you not see that you are bound above all things to obey him? You find it too hard to trust him as you would; it will remain so while you will not even try the things he tells you that you can do, and are not true to him. The very thing that would make you able to trust him you turn your back on: obedience you decline or neglect. You say you do not refuse? I care not whether you refuse, while you do not obey. Remember the parable: "I go, sir, and went not." What have you done this day because it was the will of Christ? Have you dismissed an anxious thought for the morrow, ministered to a need without letting your right hand know, forgiven your enemy, given to one who asked, sought God's kingdom first? Tell me something you have done, are doing, or are trying to do because he told you. If you do nothing he says, no wonder you cannot trust him, and are driven to take refuge in the atonement, as if something he did, and not he himself in his doing, were the atonement. "That is not as you understand it?" What does it matter how you understand it, so long as you are not of one mind with the Truth, not *at one* with God? Knowing you do not heed his word, why should I heed your explanation of it? You do not do his will, and so cannot understand him; you do not know him, and so cannot trust him. Your common sense ought to know itself unequal to the task; only the heart of the child can understand the Father. Would you have me think you guilty of the sin against the Holy Ghost, that you *understand* Jesus Christ and yet will not obey him? That were too dreadful; I believe you do not understand him. No man can yet do aright what he tells him, but are you trying? Obedience is not perfection, but trying. You count him a hard master and will not stir. Do you suppose he ever gave a commandment knowing it could not be done? He tells us a thing knowing we must do it or be lost; not even his Father could save us except by getting us at length to do everything he commands, for not otherwise can we know life or learn the holy secret of divine being. He knows you can try, and that in your trying and failing he will help you until you do God's will as he does it himself. He takes the will in the imperfect deed and at last makes the deed perfect. Correctest notions without obedience are worthless. Doing God's will is the way to oneness with God, which alone is salvation. Even clasping the Father's knees at the gate of heaven, you could not be at peace unless your whole being were in every vital movement one with the living God; with one brooding thought not a joy in him, or one desire you could not leave to his will, you would not be saved, and so could not feel saved. God, all and in all, ours to the fulfilling of our very being, is the religion of the perfect, son-hearted Lord Christ.

Well I know it is faith that saves us, but faith in God himself, not in any work of God. If I did not believe God as good as the tenderest, purest, most unselfish human heart could imagine him, an infinitude better and higher than we as the heavens are higher than the earth---believe it not as a proposition, but with the responsive condition of my whole nature; if I did not feel every fibre of heart, brain and body safe with him because he is the Father who made me---I would not be saved, for this faith is salvation: God and the man one, the vital energy flowing unchecked from creator into creature. The poorest faith in the living God revealed in Christ Jesus, if vital and true, that is obedient, is the beginning of the way to know him, and to know him is eternal life. A faith of any different kind will not save you. A faith, for instance, that God forgives me not because he loves me but because he loves Jesus Christ cannot save me, because it is a falsehood against God: if true, it would preach a God who was not love, in whom was no salvation, to know whom could not be eternal life. Such a faith would damn a man, binding him to a God who was anything but perfect. Such assertions, going by the name of Christianity, are the poor remnants of paganism, believed only by the part of our nature not yet Christian, so far as a lie can be believed. We must forsake all our fears and distrusts for Christ, and receive his teaching heartily, not letting the interpretation attributed to his apostles turn us aside. What they teach is never against what Christ taught, though the exposition of it often is, from the grievous fault of those who would understand, and even explain, rather than obey. We may be sure that no man will be condemned for any sin that is past. If he is condemned, it will be because he would not come to the light when it came to him, would not cease to do evil and learn to do well, hid his unbelief in the garment of a false faith, imputed to himself a righteousness not his, and preferred imagining himself worthy to confessing himself everywhere wrong and repenting. We may be sure also that if a man becomes Christ's disciple, Christ will not leave him ignorant of what he has to believe; if we do what he tells us, his light will go up in our hearts, while till then we could not understand even if he explained. If you cannot trust him to let you know what is right, but think you must hold this or that before you can come to him, then I justify your doubts in what you call your worst times, but which I suspect are your best, when you come nearest the truth: those in which you fear you have no faith.

So long as a man will not set himself to obey the word of the Lord Christ, whether spoken, written or printed, I would not take the trouble to convince him that the most obnoxious doctrines are false. It is those who would fain believe but are hindered by such doctrines that I would help. Disputation about things hides the living Christ, who alone can teach the truth, who is the truth. I write for those whom false teaching has driven away from God---as well it might, for the God so taught is not worth believing in. A stick, a stone or a devil is all some of our fellow men have to believe in; whoever believes in a God not altogether unselfish and good, who does not do all he can for his creatures, belongs to the same class, and his is not the God revealed in Christ. If a man sees any darkness in God, and especially if he defends it, I cannot but think his blindness has followed his mockery of "*Lord! Lord!*" Had he strenuously obeyed Jesus he would by now have received the truth that God is light and in him is no darkness, a truth not acknowledged by calling the darkness attributed to him light, and the candle of the Lord in man's soul darkness. It is one thing to believe that God can do nothing wrong, quite another to call right whatever presumption attributes to him.

The whole secret of progress is doing the thing we know. There is no other way of progress in the spiritual life, or in the understanding of it: only as we do, can we know.

Is there anything, then, you will not leave for Christ? You cannot know him, yet he is the Truth, the one thing that can be known! Would you rather keep this or that, with imperfection, than part with it to be perfect? You cannot know Christ, for the principle of his life was the simple absolute relation of realities: his one idea was to be a perfect child to his Father. He who will not part with all for Christ is not worthy of him and cannot know him, and the Lord, being true, cannot acknowledge him. How could he receive into his house a man who prefers something to his Father, who strikes a bargain and says, "I will give up so much if you will spare me"? Such a man counts it too much to yield all to him who gave us everything, even himself, by life and death. He will have to be left to himself, to find what it is to be without God! Those who know God, or have caught a far-off glimmer of him, find life insupportable unless God is All in all, the first and the last.

The duty of Christians to their fellows is to let their light shine, not to force on them their interpretations of God's designs. If you who explain the theory of Christianity had set yourselves instead to do the Master's will, the one object for which the Gospel was preached to you, how different would be the part of the world you touch! Had you given yourselves to understanding his word in order to do it, and not to quarrying material from it to buttress your systems, in many a heart the name of the Lord would be loved where now it is unknown. Men, undeterred by explanations you were not forcing on them, and attracted by your behaviour, would say to each other, as Moses at the burning bush, "I will now turn aside and see this great sight!" They would come to see how these Christians loved one another and were just to everyone: their goods the best, their weights surest, their prices most *reasonable*, their word most certain; no jealousy or emulation in their families, no worship of mammon, no selfishness as the ruling principle; children as diligently taught to share as some are taught to save or to spend on self; religion nowhere one thing and daily life another; the churchman not thinking first of his church, nor the peer of his privileges.

What do I hear you say?---"*How then shall the world go on?*" The Lord's world will go on, and without you; the devil's world will go on, and with you. The objection is another overwhelming proof of your unbelief. Either you do not believe his word that if we seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness all things needful will be added to us, or what he undertakes does not satisfy you and you prefer the offers of Mammon. You want what you call a fortune, the freedom of the world, and would not live under such restrictions as the Lord might lay on you if he saw something precious might be made of you. You would inherit the earth, but not by meekness; you would leave God to look after eternal life, if only you might be sure of not sharing with the rich man when you die. But unable to trust him for this world, you cannot trust him for the next. Refusing to obey him in your life, how can you trust him for your life? Hence your substitutes for faith: you hold him to his word, bind him by his promises, appeal to the atonement and the satisfaction made to his justice, while you take no trouble to fulfil the one reasonable and imperative condition---condition and means in one---on which alone he can deliver you from the burden of life into its strength and glory: that you be true and obedient children. You say "Christ has satisfied the law," but you will not satisfy him! He says, "Leave everything behind you, and be as I am towards God, and you shall have peace and rest," and you turn away muttering about *figurative language*. If you had been true, living *the* life, you would have drawn the world after you, however little. In your churches you would be receiving truest nourishment, thinking far less of serving God on Sunday and far more of serving your neighbour in the week. The sociable vile, the masterful rich, the deceitful trader and the ambitious poor, whom you drew in with the offer of a salvation other than deliverance from sin, would not be lording it over you and dragging you down; you would be cleaner and stronger without them. Publicans and sinners would have been drawn instead and turned into true men and women; and the Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile, who is repelled more by your worldliness than by your misrepresentations of God, would have hastened to the company of the loving and true, eager to learn what made them so good, happy, unselfish, free of care, ready to die and willing to live, careless to possess. Finding you hold, from the force of false tradition, such things as you do, he would have said, "No! such beliefs can never account for such mighty results!" You would have answered, "Search the Scriptures and see." He would have searched and found, not what you imagine there, but things infinitely better and higher that do account for what he wondered at: a truth he would hold for ever as the only gladness of his being. So you would have had your reward for being true Christians in spite of what you were taught, and been taught the truth in return by him whom your Christianity had enticed, sent to the fountainhead free of the prejudices that disabled your judgment. Delivered from the false notions that stunted your growth, how rapid it would have become!

If any of you tell me my doctrine is presumptuous, contrary to the New Testament and to what the best of men have always believed, I will not therefore defend even my beliefs, much less my opinions. I appeal to you instead whether I have spoken the truth about our paramount obligation to do the word of Christ. If you say I have not, there is no other ground on which we can meet. But if you allow it is a prime duty, even if not *the* prime duty, then I insist that you do it, recommending the knowledge of him so and not otherwise. I do not try to change your opinions; if they are wrong, the obedience I insist on can alone set them right. I assert that only so can you fit yourselves to understand the mind of Christ. None but he who does right can think right; you cannot *know* Christ to be right until you do as he does and tells you to do, nor set him forth until you know him as he means himself to be known. If you serve and trust Mammon, how can you know the living God, who alone is to be trusted? If you do not admit it is a man's duty to do the word of Christ, or admitting it do not care to do it, why should I care to convince you my doctrine is right? If I could convince your judgment while your hearts remain as they are, I should only add to your condemnation. The true heart must see at once that, however wrong I may be in other things, I am right in this: Jesus must be obeyed, and at once, in the things he did say; it will not long imagine it obeys him in things he did not say. If a man does what is unpleasing to Christ, believing it his will, he still gains by it, for it gives the Lord a hold of him which he will use; but before he can reach liberty he must be delivered from that falsehood. The man who does not choose to see that Christ must be obeyed will be left to the teaching of the Father, who brings all that hear and learn of him to Christ. The Father will leave no man to his own way. The Lord did not die to provide a man with the wretched heaven he may invent for himself or accept from others, but to give him life and bring him to the heaven of the Father's peace, for the children must share in the essential bliss of the Father and the Son. This has been the Father's work from the beginning: to bring us into the home of his heart, where he shares the glories of life with the Living One, in whom was born the life that lights men back to the original life. However a man refuses this destiny, it is useless to kick against the goads of God's love. The Father is goading him, or will goad him if needful, into life by unrest and trouble; hell-fire will have its turn if less will not do, and who can need it more than those who neither enter the kingdom of heaven themselves nor allow those to enter who would? The old race of the Pharisees is by no means extinct; they were St Paul's great trouble, and are found in every religious community under the sun.

The one thing truly to reconcile all differences is to walk in the light. So St Paul teaches in Philippians iii. 16. After setting forth the loftiest idea of human endeavour in declaring the summit of his own aspiration, he says not, "This must be your endeavour also, or you cannot be saved," but, "If in anything ye be otherwise minded, God shall reveal even this unto you. Nevertheless whereto we have already attained, let us walk by that same." Observe what widest scope the apostle gives to honest opinion, even in things of grandest import! The one essential point with him is that what we have seen to be true, *we walk by that*. In such walking only will love and truth grow; the soul, then first in its genuine element and true relation to God, will see into reality that was before a blank to it, and he who has promised to teach will teach abundantly. Faster and faster will the glory of the Lord dawn upon his people so walking, and fast and far will knowledge of him spread, for truth of action, before and after truth of word, will prepare his way. The man walking by what he has attained will be able to think aright; the man who does not think right is unable because he has not been walking right. Only when he begins to do the thing he knows does he begin to think aright; then God comes to him in a new and higher way and works along with the spirit he has created. The soul without its heaven above its head, its life-breath around it, its love-treasure in its heart, its origin one with it, cannot think to any real purpose, nor ever would. When man joins with God, all impotence and discord is cast out; until then God is in contest with the gates of hell that open in the man, and can but hold his own. When the man joins him, Satan is foiled. For then first nature receives her necessity, the law of all laws: that God and man are one. Until they begin to be one in reality as in the divine idea, nothing can go right with the man, and God can have no rest from his labour in him. As the greatest orbs in heaven are drawn by the least, God himself must be held in divine disquiet until every one of his family is brought home to his heart, to be one with him in a unity too profound to be understood by any but the God from whom it comes, yet guessed at by the soul from the unspeakableness of its delight when it is at length with the *only* one that can be its own. For God is the heritage of the soul in the ownness of origin; man is the offspring of his making will; God himself is his birth-place; God is the self that makes the soul able to say *I too, I myself*. This absolute bliss of the creature is that for which the Son died and the Father suffered with him. Then only is life itself, right, one, and as designed by the eternal life-outgiving Life.

Whereto then we have attained, let us walk by that same!

## Third Series

::: center
*TO MY WIFE*
:::

| Sun and wind and rain, the Lord
|     Is to seed his Father buried
| For he is the living Word,
|     And the quickening Spirit.

| BORDIGHERA:
|     *May* 3, 1889.

### THE CREATION IN CHRIST

*The passage:* Everything was made by him, and nothing that has been made was made without him. In him was life, and that life was the light of men (John i. 3, 4).

Anyone who loves the gospel and thinks about it, especially someone used to putting thoughts into words, has probably felt that something is wrong with the end of the third verse in English. It limps, and seems unworthy of the rest. That it is merely redundant is cold comfort to anyone hoping for perfection in the words of the man closest to the Lord. The last phrase is so useless it sounds foolish: "All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made *that was made*."

So I was hopeful when I saw in the Greek that moving one full stop would remove the redundancy. Punctuation has no authority for anyone who knows what scribes, editors and printers do to texts, and a precious meaning would be something to thank God for. It did reveal a truth, one that brought the wording into line with the apostle's highest thought. I was so glad that it hardly mattered that the best manuscripts and translations back the change; the case for the usual reading seemed to me worthless.

Let us look at the passage as I think it should be translated, and then at the meaning it was written for. That meaning belongs to the truth as it is in Jesus and doesn't depend on this passage, but John expresses it here magnificently and uniquely, if I am right about the interpretation that came to me the moment I saw how the words probably relate.

"All things were made through him, and without him was made not one thing. That which was made in him was life, and the life was the light of men."

Notice the contrast between *through* and *in*.

This great statement seems to me to hold, more than in shadow, the seed of creation and redemption: of everything divine in its bearing on everything human.

I write not to provoke controversy, which I loathe, but in the hope of showing those ready to see it the glory of the truth of the Father and the Son, as this first of seers expressed it. I care as little for a name for orthodoxy as for championing novelty. To the untrue, truth itself must seem unsound, because the light in them is darkness.

I believe that Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of the eternal Father: from the very first he is the Son, because God is the Father. That is an imperfect statement, as any human thought must be that reaches toward the unknown roots of our existence, but I believe it too firmly not to say it, even in words that cannot be right. So I believe the Father is the greater, and that without the Father there could be no Son. I won't argue this by logic, and state it only for what follows. Paul implies the same when he speaks of the Lord handing the kingdom to his Father, that God may be all in all. I worship the Son as the human God, the only Man, who draws his being and power from the Father. He is equal to his Father, and subject to him, as a son is, and has made himself his Father's equal in what is most precious in Godhead: Love. That is the essence of the statement I am dealing with, higher than making the worlds, which he did by the Father's power and not his own. So John, to whom the Lord must have said things he did not say to the rest, writes that all things were made not *by* the Son but *through* him.

We shouldn't explain things away into nothing; we should picture them as best we can, even if the pictures are only shadows of the heavenly. Our being and understanding are poor shadows, but they are shadows of his, cast by him, and no more our own doing than his creative power is. So, in shadow-speech, I say: when the Father brought the visible out of the unseen, he made essential use of the Son, so that everything was created *through* him. Who can understand how the Father's part differs from the Son's? Perhaps we will one day see a little into it, for I dare hope that through chosen sonship we will come much nearer to creating ourselves. To call the finest work of human genius "creation" seems to me a mockery of humanity, itself still being created.

Read the verse again. All things were made *through* him, but "that which was made *in* him was life." See it? The power by which he made the worlds was given him by his Father, but he had a greater power in himself. Something was made not through but in him, by himself: here he creates, in his grand way, within himself, as the Father did.

What life does the apostle mean? Many forms of life came through the Son, but they were results, not the life made in him. The Father could use him in creating only because of the life that was in him.

What God's life is to himself, we can only know that we cannot know, and even that is not plain ignorance: to see you cannot understand something is already to approach it. What it is to us we do know: the cause of everything we call life, of everything that is. The one endless mystery (I take the two to be one) is how God can be self-existent and how he can make others exist. It will stay a mystery for ever, not because God won't explain it but because he couldn't make us understand. A creature cannot know its own creation, since its cause comes before it, nor understand what it can do nothing like. To understand how we were made we would have to make ourselves, which takes being God; and the idea that I, with this cramped, self-dissatisfied consciousness, could have caused myself is the most dismal of all. Yet if I am a child of God I must be *like* him even in creative energy; something in me must answer, in a childlike way, to his eternal might. But I run ahead. The question now is what that life was, made *in* the Son, by him inside himself: not *through* him but *in* him, his own as God's life is God's own.

It was, I answer, the act in him that corresponds, as Son, to his Father's self-existence. What is deepest in God? Not his power. A being who was only power would be so far from divine that we could give him only fear, not righteous worship; however justly he judged, he could not be God. (Evil, of course, cannot create one atom.) The God we love could not be righteous unless he were something deeper than we usually mean by the word. In one word, God is Love. Love is the deepest depth in him, the root of all his being. He could not be God without creatures to be God to, but love is more: the heart and hand of his creation, his right and his power to create. Nor could he be righteous, meaning fair to his creatures, if love had not made them. His perfection is his love, and all his divine rights rest on it. He is not the great monarch! The simplest peasant loving his cow is more divine than a monarch whose glory is his monarchy. If God refused to punish sin, or punished it for anything but love, he would not be the Father of Jesus Christ. So what in Christ corresponds to God's creative power? It must also come from love, but in the Son the love is toward one already existing. Because of that eternal love the Father must have the Son; God could not be love without things to love. Jesus has God to love, and his love answers the Father's. The answer to self-existent love is self-giving love, and Jesus' refusal of himself corresponds to God's creating. His love creates by renouncing self: the death of self as a motive, self drowned in the life of God, where it lives only as love. What is life in a child but perfect response to his parents, oneness with them? A child at strife with them is as a child dead, stiff and contorted; see him yield to a will rightly above his own, and life flows back into his limbs and light fountains in his eyes!

Negatively, Christ does and cares for nothing for his own sake; positively, he cares with his whole soul for his Father's will and pleasure. Because his Father is his Father, he chooses to be his child. The truth in Jesus is his relation to the Father; his righteousness is fulfilling it. Born of God, he is alive, but by giving himself perfectly, choosing to die to himself and live to God, he creates in himself a new and higher life. Standing on it, he can wake in us, his brothers and sisters, a divine shadow of that life. We came from the same home, the heart of his God and ours, but without our elder brother to go first we would never have chosen the self-giving that is life. To will, not from self but with the Eternal, is to live.

This choice of his own being, made in full knowledge, this willing to be the perfectly obedient Son, is what in Jesus answers to God's self-existence. By putting himself under the Father's will as his only good, the only *reason* he exists, he rose at once to the height of his being and sat on the throne of his nature. When he died on the cross, in the wild weather of his outlying provinces, he did what he had always done at home in glory and gladness. From the infinite beginning (speaking only in contradictions) he completed the eternal circle of his being by saying, "Thy will, not mine, be done!" He made himself what he is by *deathing* himself into the will of the eternal Father, through which he was the eternal Son, plunging into the fountain of his own life, the everlasting Fatherhood. This is the life made *in* Jesus. Because he willed it, it is possible, and essential, for every man, woman and child the Father has sent into the outer world to return to the inner, his heart. As the Father's self-existent life gave us being, so Jesus' willed devotion lets him give us eternal life like his own, by enabling us to do the same. There is no other life for anyone: a disciple must live by the same absolute devotion of his will to the Father's, and so his life is one with the Father's.

We have come out of the divine nature, which chooses to be divine, so we must *choose* to be divine, one with God, loving and living as he does, or perish. People cannot originate this life; it must be shown them and they must choose it. God is the Father of Jesus and of us, of every possibility of our being, but Jesus is the father of our *sonship*: in him was made the life that is sonship to the Father, the acknowledgment in fact and life of the Father's claim on his sons and daughters. We cannot be true sons unless our will wills his, our doing following his making. Jesus was the true Son not because he couldn't help it but because he willed to be the son he was in the divine idea; so with us. We are sons and daughters by God's claim and must be so by our will, for we aren't made to be what we cannot help being. Only by choosing God as the Father he is and doing his will can we be saved into the original necessity and bliss of our being. Working this out must be painful, and handing it on to those below us always painful, but the eternal form of God's will for us is intense bliss.

"And the life was the light of men."

The life I have described became light for people when he in whom it began appeared. It became light so that they could see it and choose it for themselves, choosing to live that way.

There is always something deeper than anything said; all words, human and divine, all figures and pictures, are only outer layers through which the central reality shines more or less clearly. Light itself is the poor outer form of something deeper and better: life. Life is Christ himself; light is his body. Light is what we *see* in him; life is what we may *be* in him. Life "is a light by abundant clarity invisible," the unspeakable unknown, and it must become light people can see before they can know it. So the obedient human God appeared as an obedient divine man, humbly doing his Father's works among unfriendly brothers. The Son took form in flesh to be seen and so become the light of men---not that they might have light but that they might have life: seeing what they could never originate, they might begin to hunger for the life they are capable of, so that the life in them longs for him who is its life, as root and stem thirst for the flower they exist for. So the child of God may become the son of God by beholding *the* Son, the life revealed in light; his radiant heart may be sunlight to his fellows; the idea may be drawn out by the presence of the Ideal, the perfect Son of the Father, sent to his brothers and sisters.

The Son's devotion could never have been without the Father's, who seeks his own glory no more than the Son does and is devoted to the Son and all his sons and daughters with perfect, fathomless unselfishness. All that Jesus was and did on earth is what he has always been as the blessed Son-God of the Father-God: that life shining out so that people could see it, being like God, doing God's will and works, and so unveiling the Father in the Son. It is the Son's prayer to the other sons to come back to the Father and be reconciled. He seems to me to say: "I know your Father, because he is my Father; I have been with him from eternity. You don't know him, and I have come to tell you he is just like me, only greater and better. He alone is the true, original good; I am true because I seek nothing but his will. He alone is all in all; I am not, but he is my Father, and I am the son in whom his heart of love is satisfied. Come home with me and sit on the throne of my obedience. Together we will do his will and be glad, for his will is the only good. Do with me what you like; I won't defend myself. My witness is true, and I will stand by it whatever comes. If I held to it only until danger came close, then prayed for twelve legions of angels, I would be saying the Father will do anything for his children until it hurts him. I bear witness, in the face of death, that my Father is like me, and I dare death to prove me wrong. Kill me, do what you will: my Father is true, and I am true in saying so. Death can kill only my body; it can't take me prisoner. Father, your will be done! The pain will pass; it is only for a time. I will gladly suffer so that people know I live and that you are my life. Be with me, Father, so that it is not more than I can bear."

Friends, if you suppose anything less than this could save the world, or bring joy to a single child of God's making, you know neither the Son nor the Father.

What holds the universe together, the one active unity, reconciling every form and wandering desire and returning love, the fact at the root of every vision, showing that "love is the only good in the world" and selfishness the one hateful thing, is the Son's devotion to the Father. It is the life of the universe. What makes the universe a whole is not that God created everything, but that the one through whom he created it loves him perfectly and is content to exist because his Father is with him. Nor is it that God is all in all, but the Son's love for the Father. Unity cannot come from oneness: for unity to begin there must be two. Without Christ, then, there could be no universe. The reconciliation Jesus brought is not the first source of the world's unity and safety; it was the necessary working out of the prior eternal fact that God and Christ are one, Father and Son, each loving the other as only a Father or only a Son can. The Lord's prayer for unity between people, the Father and himself springs from love's eternal need. Without the Father and the Son, no two would care a jot for each other. It might be right for creatures to love because they exist, but what two creatures would ever have started the loving? I can't believe it would have been I; even with an inclination to love, selfishness would soon have overcome it. But if the Father loves the Son, if the music behind life's harmony lies not in a theory of love in the Father's heart but in the burning fact of it in the hearts of Father and Son, then glory to the Father, the Son and the spirit of both, who draw us up into the glory of their joy, to share their thoughts of love, of delight and rest in each other, of joy in all the little ones. The life of Jesus is the light of men, showing them the Father.

But light is not enough; it is for the sake of life. We too must have life in ourselves, and we can live only as Jesus lived, in the way life was made in him: by giving up our life, the one supreme act open to us for making life in ourselves. Christ did it of himself and became light to us so that we could do it after him. We must do it ourselves; all his help, the light and the Spirit's working in our hearts, is so that we can. Until then we are not alive. The Son's whole agony with every person is to get him to die as he died. Preaching that doesn't aim at this builds with wood and hay and stubble. If I cannot say with my whole heart, "Father, do with me as you will, only help me against myself and for you"; if I cannot say, "I am your child, a part of you, glorious in you but grown poor in me: let me be your dog, your horse, anything you will, yours in any shape, and my own or anyone else's only as yours"---if we cannot give ourselves like that, we have not yet grasped what Christ has grasped us for. The faith a person may, and must, put in God reaches beyond the farthest star the universe could hold. But the question now is not moving mountains, which will one day be easy, but waking and rising from the dead now.

When someone truly says "Thy will be done" with Jesus, as Jesus said it, he closes the everlasting circle of life, and the life of the Father and the Son flows through him as part of the divine organism. Then the Lord's prayer is fulfilled in him: "I in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one." The Christ in us is the perfect child's spirit toward the perfect Father, our true nature flowered by the Lord, whose life is the light of men so that it may become their life, for our true nature is childhood to the Father.

Friends, if you know or suspect these things are true, let us get up and live, even in our darkest spiritual dullness, when hope itself sees nothing to hope for. Let us not dwell on the cause of our earthliness, unless it is some wrong in us, but go straight to the Life. Never let us take comfort in the thought that our deadness is physical: what comfort is it that a deadened body overpowers a spirit that should master it and inspire it to obey? Let us find comfort in the Father and the Son: as long as the Son loves the Father with all the love the Father can welcome, all is well with the little ones. God is all right, so why mind standing a minute in the dark outside his window? We miss being inside, but waiting has its own bliss. Suppose the rain falls and the wind blows, and we stand alone, or with someone dear sharing our *outness*, and the window is dark behind curtains of inscrutable good. We can tell ourselves, or our friend, "God is; Jesus is not dead; nothing can be going wrong, however it looks to hearts unfinished in childness." And we can say to the Lord, "Jesus, are you loving the Father in there? Then we out here will do his will and wait patiently till he opens the door. Perhaps you are telling the Father, 'Your little ones need some wind and rain; their buds are hard and the flowers won't open; I can't make them blessed without a bit more winter.' And perhaps the Father will say, 'Comfort them, my son Jesus, by remembering your patience when you were missing me, and how sure you were of me when everything around you seemed so unlike me.'" In a word, let us be at peace, because peace is at the heart of things: perfect satisfaction between the Father and the Son, which they call us to share and promise we will, when they have had their good way with us.

Ahead lies a happiness beyond words or human invention for every child who falls in with the Father's perfect imagination. His imagination is one with his creative will: what God imagines exists. When the created one falls in with the will of him who "loved him into being," all is well, and the great creation goes on in him on ever higher levels. Your will, O God, be done! Everything else is loss and decay. There is no life but that born of the life the Word made in himself by doing your will, which is the light of men. Through that light the life of men is born, the same life that first came to be in Jesus. As he laid down his life, so must we lay down ours, that as he lives we may live. That which was made in him was life, and the life is the light of men; yet his own, to whom he was sent, *did not believe him*.

### THE KNOWING OF THE SON

*The passage:* You have never heard God\'s voice or seen his form, and his word does not stay in you, for you do not believe the one he sent (John v. 37, 38).

One day we shall know how near the New Testament comes to the Lord\'s very words. That we have them with a difference I cannot doubt. For one thing, I do not believe he spoke Greek. He was sent to the lost sheep of Israel, and the thoughts of God would have come from his heart in the mother tongue of the simple men he spoke to, not one they knew secondhand. He may have spoken Greek to the less simple Jews of Jerusalem, but I see no ground to think so.

Are we bound to believe that John, who understood him best, could give us in his gospel, after so many years, the *very* words of the simplest profundities ever heard on earth, supposing the Lord spoke Greek to his disciples? I do not say he could not; I ask whether we must believe he could. When the divine presence in their hearts made the disciples able to understand the Lord, they remembered things they had forgotten, perhaps even the very words. But must we believe the evangelists always recorded his words exactly? The small differences between their records are answer enough. John\'s gospel is the fruit of years of remembering and pondering, one understood thing recalling another; whatever memory can do at its best, with God in the man, I do not believe John always gave the very words. God has not cared that we should have assurance of his very words anywhere---perhaps because his children are prone to word-worship, but also because he would not have them oppressed by words. Being human, words are only partly capable; they could not absolutely contain what the Lord meant, and even he must rely on the spirit of his disciple to be understood. The letter cannot give life, so it should not be throned with power to kill; it should only be the handmaid that opens the door of truth to the mind that is *of* the truth.

\'Then you believe in an individual inspiration for anyone who chooses to claim it!\'

Yes---for everyone who claims it from God, not for everyone who claims from men the recognition of having it; he who has a thing does not need it recognized. If I did not believe in a special inspiration for every man who asks for the holy spirit, I would have to throw out the whole tale as an imposture, since in it the Lord promises it to those who ask. An objector without this spirit knows nothing of the words that are spirit and life; his objection is worth less than a savage\'s to a chemist\'s assertion, and his assent is an idle blowing of a horn.

\'But how is one to tell whether it is really the spirit of God speaking in a man?\'

You are not called on to tell. The question for you is whether you have the spirit of Christ yourself: Am I alive with the life of Christ? Everyone who desires to follow the Master has his spirit, and will receive more, to follow closer. He need not prove to anyone that he has the light of Jesus; he has to let it shine. That does not make him a teacher, or able to put large truths into true forms. But when the strength or joy or pity of the truth urges him, let him speak it unafraid, content to be condemned for it, and comforted that if he is mistaken the Lord himself will condemn him and save him \'as by fire.\' Men\'s condemnation, even in Christ\'s name, will not hurt him. If he speaks true, the Lord will say \'I sent him\'; for all truth is of him, and no one sees a true thing to be true except by the Lord, the spirit.

\'How am I to know that a thing is true?\'

By *doing* what you know to be true, calling nothing true until you see it to be true, and staying silent until the truth opens your mouth. If you are meant to be silent, woe to you if you speak.

\'But if I do not take the words the evangelists attribute to him as the certain, absolute, very words of the Master, how am I to know that they represent his truth?\'

By seeing in them what answers to the plainest truth he speaks and to the power working in you to make you a true man; by their appeal to your judgment and their rousing of your conscience. If they do not seem true to you, either they are not the Master\'s words or you are not true enough to understand them. Words of his that do not show their truth to you are not yet the word of God to you, for they are not spirit and life in you. They may be the nearest words can come to the truth, and may have brought many to God\'s heart, but for you they remain sealed. A true heart will revere them as probably carrying the Master\'s meaning; to you they are the rock in the desert before Moses spoke to it. If you wait, your ignorance will not hurt you; if you presume to reason from them, you are a blind man disputing about what he never saw. To reason about truth from words that do not show us they are true is to walk into the mire, the presumption of Pharisaical *hypocrisy*, which only the untrue are capable of. Humble mistake will not hurt us: the truth is there, and the Lord will see that we come to know it. Even when we think we know it with scarcely a glimpse, the error of a true heart will not be allowed to ruin it; it would not have mistaken the truth but for the untruth still in it, and he who casts out devils will cast out that devil.

In the saying before us I see enough to believe its words embody the mind of Christ. If I could not, I would say, \'I have not yet recognised his mind in this, so I have not understood it, for to understand what is true is to know it true.\' I have yet to see any words credibly reported as Jesus\' about which I dared to say, \'His mind is not in them.\' A man\'s mind can receive a word only so far as it is Christ\'s word and he is one with Christ; to him who truly receives it, it is a power, not of argument but of life. The Lord\'s words are for the spiritual logic that reasons from divine thought to divine thought, not for the logic that handles words as if they were things.

No thought, human or divine, can pass between people except through the symbolism of creation. The heavens and the earth are around us so that we can speak of the unseen by the seen, for the outermost husk of creation corresponds to the deepest things of the Creator. He is not a God who hides himself but one who made in order to reveal. An enemy has meddled with some things, but with more he could not; through these we may speak of God, for once he is revealed they show so much of his nature that we use them as spiritual tokens to carry to others what we have seen of the unseen. The words I now want to look into belong to this kind of mediation.

\'And the Father who sent me has himself testified of me. You have never heard his voice or seen his shape, and his word does not abide in you, for you do not believe the one he sent.\'

If Jesus said these words, he meant more than lies on the surface. They cannot merely assert what everybody knew, nor can their repeated negations be tautology; he was not telling the Jews a fact they would never have denied. Which of them would claim to have heard God\'s voice or seen his shape? John himself says, \'No man hath seen God at any time.\' The tone here is reproach. Then he reproaches them for not seeing God, when no man has, and Paul says no man can! Is there a paradox? There cannot be the sophism: \'No man has seen God; you are to blame for not having seen him; therefore all men are to blame.\' And if we read it, \'No man has seen God, but some ought to have seen him,\' there is no hope for the race in being told that not one who could see him ever has.

One utterance is John\'s, the other his master\'s. If they contradicted, John\'s would of course be thrown away; but there can hardly be contradiction, since the man who says the one records the other from the master he belonged to and loved as no man ever loved man.

The word *see* has one sense in one statement and another in the other: *with the eyes* in the first, *with the soul* in the second. One is said of all men; the other to certain Jews of Jerusalem about themselves. No man has seen God with bodily eyes; these Jews ought to have seen him with spiritual eyes.

No man has ever seen God in any outward, visible form of his own; he is revealed in no shape but his son\'s. But multitudes have seen something of God with the eye of the heart, and perhaps every man might and ought to. We cannot follow God into the minute workings of his spirit any more than into the life-forces beyond the microscope; he may be working in a savage\'s heart in ways no wisdom of his wisest child can see. Many who have never beheld God\'s face have caught a glimpse of the hem of his garment, or seen the vastness of his shadow; thousands who have never felt the warmth of its folds have been startled by

| No face: only the sight
| Of a sweepy garment vast and white.

Some have dreamed his hand laid on them who never knew themselves gathered to his bosom. The Lord\'s reproach is to men who ought to have had an experience they had not had. Let us look nearer at his words.

\'Ye have not heard his voice\' might mean \'*you have never listened*\' or \'*never obeyed*\'; but the next phrase, \'nor seen his shape,\' keeps us to the primary sense of *hear*: \'*You have never heard his voice so as to know it for his*,\' and \'*You do not know what he is like*.\' He plainly implies, \'*You ought to know both*.\' \'You have not his word abiding in you\' means \'*The word in you from the beginning, the word of God in your conscience, you have not kept; the scripture in which you think you have eternal life, which you accept as Moses\' witness, is not at home in you. It comes to you and goes from you; you hear, heed not and forget. You do not dwell with it, brood on it and obey it. You are not of its kind, not among those whose ears are ready and who hunger after the word of the Father*.\'

What is the sign in them of this ignorance of God, on which the Lord bases his accusation?---\'You do not believe the one he sent.\'

\'How so?\' the Jews might answer. \'Have we not asked you for a sign from heaven, and have you not flatly refused it?\'

The argument carried little weight with those it applied to most, since the more it applied the less they could see that it did; but it would carry great force with some listeners whose minds were open and whose hearts were drawn to him. His argument was this: \'If you had ever heard the Father\'s voice, imagined a God anything like him, or cared for his will so that his word was at home in your hearts, you would have known me when you saw me. The least acquaintance with God, such as any true heart has, would have shown you by the light of his word in you, by the shape you had glimpsed however vaguely, and by the likeness of my face and voice to my father\'s, that I came from him; and you would have listened. The family feeling would have been awake, the holy instinct that makes you know your elder brother. That you do not know me is because you do not know your own father, even my father: all your lives you have refused to do his will, and so have not heard his voice; you have thought of him only as a partisan of your ambitions. If you had loved my father, you would have known his son.\' I think he might have added, \'If you had even loved your neighbour, you would have known me, neighbour to the deepest and best in you.\' If the Lord appeared in England today as once in Palestine, he would not come in the painters\' halo, or in that wintry shine of effeminate beauty and sweet weakness in which they helplessly portray him; nor probably as a carpenter, mason or gardener. He would come in a form and condition bearing the same relation to England, Scotland and Ireland now as his then bore to motley Judea, Samaria and Galilee. Coming so unlooked for, who would recognize and receive him? The idea involves no absurdity; he is not far from us at any moment, if the old story is more than the best of the world\'s fables. Now as then, the first would be the childlike in heart, the truest, the least selfish---not the highest in any church\'s estimation, for the childlike are not yet the many, and perhaps not even those who know most about his former visit and have pondered every word of the Greek Testament. The first to cry \'It is the Lord!\' would be neither \'good churchman\' nor \'good dissenter,\' nor anyone who imagines him caring about stupid outside matters. It would not be the man who holds by the mooring-ring of the letter, fast in the quay of what he calls theology, and from his rotting deck abuses those who go down to the sea in ships---who lets the wind of the spirit blow where it will, but never lets it blow him out among its wonders in the deep. Nor he who obeys a command without caring to see its reason, nor he who from barrenness of soul cannot receive the Master\'s meaning and so makes his word of none effect. If anyone, it would be those likest the Master, who did the will of their father and his, who built on the rock by hearing and doing his sayings. But are there any enough like him to know him at once by voice and face? Multitudes would be taken by a false Christ fashioned after their fancy, and would reject the Lord as a poor impostor. One thing is certain: those who first recognized him would be those who most loved righteousness and hated iniquity.

But I would not forget that foolish forms often cover a live heart, warm toward everything human and divine; the ugliest robe may hide the loveliest form. Every covering is not a clothing. The grass clothes the fields, and the glory surpassing Solomon\'s clothes the grass; but the traditions of even the worthiest elders will not clothe a soul, much less those of the unworthy. A soul\'s true clothing must grow out of the soul itself. Some naked souls need only the sight of truth to rush to it, as Dante says, like a wild beast to its den; others, heavily clad in the scribes\' leftover garments and afraid of tearing what is fit only to be trodden underfoot, circle it warily like a shy horse that fears a hidden enemy. But let each be true in the way possible to him, and he shall have the Master\'s praise.

If the Lord appeared, the many who take the common presentation of a thing or person for the thing or person could never see the new vision as another form of the old. The Master has been so misrepresented by those who claimed to present him---above all in the relation between him and his father---that they could see no likeness. For my part, I would rather believe in no God than in the God generally offered. How far those may be to blame who, righteously disgusted, throw the idea away without asking whether something in it may be true though most must be false, on the chance that some who call themselves his prophets have taken spiritual bribes

| To mingle beauty with infirmities,
| And pure perfection with impure defeature---

how far those may be to blame, it is not my work to inquire. Some would gladly grasp the hope that this might prove a fact; others do not care to discern, on the palimpsest covered but not obliterated, a credible tale of a perfect man revealing a perfect God: they are not true enough to want that to be fact which would demand they model their lives on a perfect idea and found every hope on it.

*But all of us, beholding the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image*.

### THE MIRRORS OF THE LORD

*The passage:* All of us, with open face beholding the glory of the Lord as in a glass, are changed into the same image, from glory to glory, as by the spirit of the Lord (II. Corinthians iii. 18).

This passage shows how Paul received the Lord, and how he understands the Lord\'s life to be the light of men and so their life also.

Of all writers I know, Paul seems to me the most determinedly practical. His so-called mysticism is sometimes a power of seeing, as by spiritual refraction, truths not yet risen above the human horizon; sometimes a wide-eyed habit of noting analogies between the concentric regions of creation. It is a divinely alive poetic imagination, whose part is to foresee and welcome approaching truth, find the same principle in unlike things, and embody its discoveries in new forms and symbols that present the deeper truths they exist for.

I find in Paul the same artistic fault, with the same difficulty, that I find in Shakspere. It springs from the admirable fact that the man is much more than the artist: he tries to say too much at once, pouring a soul swelling with life and thought through the too narrow neck of human utterance. So we are sometimes bewildered between two or more equally good meanings, unsure of his line of reasoning; but the uncertainty is always intellectual, never practical. What Paul cares about is plain to the true heart, though not to the man whose wish to understand outruns his obedience, who assumes Paul meant to teach a system, to explain rather than help us see God---a God revealed only to childlike insight, never to the keenest intellect. Paul, like his master, set out to rouse men to seek the kingdom of God over them and his righteousness in them; to drop the lust of possession and passing pleasure; to look on the glory of the Father and turn to him from all he hates; to see the brotherhood of men and the hideousness of whatever is unfair, unloving or self-exalting. He taught no plan of salvation but obedience to the Lord of Life. He knew nothing of the so-called Christian systems that change the glory of the perfect God into the likeness of low intellects and dull consciences, a worse corruption than representing him in human shape. What soul would not prefer the Apollo of light, the high-walking Hyperion, to the self-cherishing monarch, law-dispensing magistrate or cruel martinet born of pagan Roman arrogance and accepted by the world in the church as the portrait of its God! Jesus Christ is the *only* likeness of the living Father.

Let us see what Paul teaches here about the life that is the light of men---his way of bringing to bear the truth John announced.

When Moses came out from speaking with God, his face was radiant, a wonder and a power to the people. The radiance began at once to fade, as was natural, since it was not Moses\'s own, so he veiled his face that they might not see it fade. Whether that was right or wise I leave aside. Entering the tabernacle he took the veil off to speak with God open-faced, and put it on again coming out. Paul says that this veil now lies on the hearts of the Jews, so that they cannot understand Moses; but when they turn to the Lord, going into the tabernacle with Moses, it will be taken away and they will see God, and understand that the glory on Moses\'s face has faded before the glory that excels it, the glory of Jesus. Here I can hardly help asking: Would not Moses have done better to let them see that his glory depended altogether on the glory within the veil, where they were not worthy to enter? Did that veil hide only his face? Did he not, however unintentionally, lay it on their hearts, where it hid God, so that they stormed at the idea that their prophet\'s glory must yield to the greater than Moses? Might they not, without it, have realized that his was a glory that must pass, whose glory was to prepare the way for a glory that must extinguish it? Moses put the veil for ever from his face, but they clutched it to their hearts, and it blinded them---a fine symbol of the wilful blindness of the old Mosaist or modern Wesleyan, who admits no light his Moses or his Wesley did not see, and so loses even what of the light he saw and reflected.

Paul says the sight of the Lord will burn that veil from their hearts. His presence gives liberty: where he is, there is no more bondage, wilderness or Sinai. The Son makes free with sonship.

Now comes the passage I want to make clearer:

\'But we all,\' having this presence and this liberty, \'with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image\'---the Lord\'s---\'from glory to glory, even as of the Lord, the spirit.\'

\'We need no Moses, no earthly mediator, to come between us and the light and bring out a little of the glory. We go into the presence of the Son revealing the Father. Our mediator is the Lord himself, the spirit of light, not sent by us to bring back God\'s will, but come from God to bring us himself. As Moses stood with uncovered face receiving the glory of God full upon it, so we---you and I, Corinthians---stand with open face in the full light of that glory, only how much more radiant! It is no reflected light we see, but the glory of God shining out of the face of Christ. Israel saw the fading reflection of God\'s glory on Moses\'s face; we see the glory itself in the face of Jesus.\'

But in what follows, the revised version misses the meaning almost as much as the authorized, when instead of \'beholding as in a glass\' it gives \'reflecting as a mirror.\' The first is wrong; the second is far from right. The figure is a poet\'s, not a scientist\'s: the poet deals with the outer show of things, which is deeper in its relation to truth, and more useful, than analysis. Paul thought of the mirror not as throwing back light but as receiving, taking into itself what is presented to it---here filling its bosom with the glory it looks on. When I see my friend\'s face in a mirror, the mirror seems to hold it in a liquid embrace; the face is *there*, down in the depth. True, it shines out, but Paul\'s thought is the *visual* fact, which Wordsworth says the poet always seizes, of the mirror holding the face.

That a poet or prophet---Paul was both---would think of it so, especially in his age, I can make more probable from a passage in Dante, whose time, though much farther from the apostle\'s than ours from Dante\'s, was in many ways liker Paul\'s than ours.

The passage is this:---Dell\' Inferno: Canto xxiii. 25-27:

| E quei: \'S\'io fossi d\'impiombato vetro,
|   L\'immagine di fuor tua non trarrei
|   Piu tosto a me, che quella dentro impetro.\'

Here Virgil says to Dante, of his power to read his thoughts:

\'If I were of leaded glass\'---glass backed with lead, a mirror---\'I should not draw thy outward image to me more readily than I gain thy inner one\'---than I now know your thoughts.

So the true, simple and most literal word for the Greek seems to me the verb *mirror*, and the sentence so far would run: \'But we all, with unveiled face, mirroring the glory of the Lord,---.\'

I must now unfold the idea at work in the apostle\'s heart. A correct translation is nothing unless it brings a deeper or fresher insight; I have nothing to do with the man who cares for words apart from what the writer meant by them, until he stops \'passing for a man\' and becomes one. The prophet-apostle seems to me to say, \'We all, with clear vision of the Lord, mirroring his glory in our hearts as a mirror takes his face into itself, are thereby changed into his likeness, his glory working our glory, by the present power in our inmost being of the Lord, the spirit.\' Our mirroring of Christ is one with the presence of his spirit in us. The idea is not the radiating of Christ\'s light on others, though that would be a lawful figure, but the taking into us, and having in us, of him working to change us.

That the thing signified outreaches the figure is no discovery; the simile is only a ladder to a higher stratum, and the climber who reaches it \'then unto the ladder turns his back.\' So what the mirror stands for has properties far beyond leaded glass or polished metal: it is a live soul understanding what it takes into its deeps, holding it and conscious of what it holds. It mirrors by its will to hold. Unlike its symbol, it holds not only the outward resemblance but the inward likeness of the person revealed, and is open to the influence of what it embraces and can co-operate with it, mirror and mirrored being of one origin and nature. Paul\'s idea is that when we take into our understanding, heart, conscience and being the glory of God, Jesus Christ as he shows himself to us, he works on us, and keeps working till we are changed into the likeness we have mirrored; for with his likeness he comes himself and dwells in us. He will work until that likeness is perfected in us, the image of the humanity of God in which we were first made, which could never develop in us except by the indwelling of the perfect likeness. By the power of Christ thus received and at home in us, we are changed: the glory in him becomes glory in us, his glory changing us to glory.

But we must beware of receiving this or any symbol *after the flesh*, of taking it in any merely physical, psychical or spirituo-mechanical way. The symbol deals with things beyond the region symbols are drawn from. The indwelling of Jesus in the soul of man, who shall declare! But let us note that his dwelling in us is the power of the spirit of God upon us; \'the Lord is that spirit,\' and with him dwelling in us we are changed \'even as from the Lord the spirit.\' When we think Christ, Christ comes; when we receive his image into our spiritual mirror, he enters with it. Our open, receiving thought is his door; when our hearts turn to him, holding up our mirror, he comes in, not by our thought only or in our idea only, but himself and of his own will, as we could not take him but as he can come, enabling us by his very coming to receive the one welcome guest of the whole universe. So the Lord, the spirit, becomes the soul of our souls, becomes spiritually what he always was creatively; as our spirit gives shape to our bodies, his soul gives shape to ours. This is nothing unnatural or at conflict with our being. It is only that the deeper soul that willed and wills our souls, the infinite Life, rises up into the Self we call *I* and *me*, which lives directly from him and is unspeakably more his than ours, and works with his creation at higher levels, making the *I* and *me* more and more his and himself more and more ours; until the glory of our existence flashes upon us, we face full to the sun that lights what it sent forth, and know ourselves alive with the Father\'s own infinite life. We know that our existence is not the moonlight of mere consciousness of being, but the sun-glory of a life justified by becoming one with its origin, thinking and feeling with the primal Sun of life, from whom it was dropped away that it might know itself and return to circle for ever in exultant harmony around him. Then indeed we *are* and have life: the life of Jesus has, through light, become life in us; the glory of God in the face of Jesus, mirrored in our hearts, has made us alive; we are one with God for ever and ever.

What less than such a splendour of hope would be worthy of the revelation of Jesus? Filled with the soul of their Father, men shall inherit his glory; filled with themselves, they cast him out and rot. Only the company of the Lord, soul to soul, his life of God-devotion, saves his brethren with life; they must receive the Son, and through the Son the Father. What it cost the Son to get so near that we could say *Come in* is the story of his life. He stands at the door and knocks, and when we open he comes in and dwells with us, and we are transformed to the same image of truth, purity and heavenly childhood. Where power dwells there is no force; where the spirit-Lord is there is liberty. By free, potent communion with their inmost being, he will change his obedient brethren till in every thought and impulse they are like him: unselfish, neighbourly, loving the Father perfectly, ready to die for the truth, caring for nothing but the will of God, which is love, harmony, liberty, beauty and joy.

I do not know if we may call this having life in ourselves; but it is the waking up and perfecting in us of the divine life inherited from our Father, who made us in his own image and whose nature remains in us, which makes it the deepest reproach to a man that he has neither heard his voice nor seen his shape. He who would thus live must, as a mirror draws an outward glory into its bosom, receive into his \'heart of heart\' the inward glory of Jesus Christ, *the Truth*.

### THE TRUTH

*The passage:* The Lord says, "I am the truth" (John xiv. 6).

The man of the five senses uses "truth" only for something historical or scientific that has been proved a fact. He may grant that a higher truth could exist, but his lower powers can't prove it, so he acts as if a wise man would ignore any appeal to the highest part of his nature. But in the word of *the* man, truth means more than fact, more than the relations of facts or persons, more than the loftiest metaphysical abstraction: it means being and life, will and action. For he says, "*I am the truth*."

I want to help whoever I can to understand what *the truth* means, not through definitions or logical distinctions but so that the right idea comes to mind when they hear the word from the Lord, and not an empty sound or a vague or false notion. If he says "I am the truth," it is good to know what he means by it. He can mean nothing merely intellectual that could be stated and left there; he means something vital, which governs all its necessary relations and includes whatever goes by the same name on any lower plane. Let us climb toward it step by step.

When something is so, the word that says it is so is the truth. But the fact may be worth nothing in itself, and so may our knowing it. Whether I walked on one side of the street or the other one morning can't matter in itself, though it might matter to someone to know. So it would sound wrong to say "It is a *truth* that I walked on the sunny side"; the right word is *fact*. Whether a statement about it is correct is still a question of fact. But when we ask whether the statement is true or false, we are looking at it as a person's assertion, and have risen to another plane. Which side I walked on may not matter, but it matters vitally to the witness, and to anyone who loves him, whether he believes what he says: whether he himself is true or false. About the thing, the question is of *fact*; about the man, it is of truth. He is either a pure soul or a false one, capable and guilty of a lie, and it makes no difference whether he stated the fact; if he meant to, he remains a true man.

I anticipate here: there are *truths* as well as *facts*, and lies against truths as well as against facts. The Pharisees who said *Corban* lied against the truth that a man must honour his father and mother.

Now let us rise from casual facts to constant ones that we cannot change, which involve what we call *law*. These have more dignity, and statements about them matter more. Whether the water in my jug froze one morning is a small matter; that water always freezes at thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit is of great importance. Is that a *truth*? I think not. No principle we can see is involved in the changeless fact. The principle at its root in God's mind must be a truth, but to us the fact is still only a fact, and the word truth should be kept for higher things. Some call the facts of nature truths, but however wide a law you make, you have gone no higher than saying that such and such is always so. Call it a law of nature, not a truth. It can't be a truth to us until we see why it exists, its relation to mind and intent and ultimately to self-existence: tell us why it *must* be so, and you state a truth. When we see that a law is what it is because it embodies an eternal thought, a fact of the being of God (and only God's facts are truths), it becomes an embodied truth to us, a way God would have us think of him. When a law of nature makes us say, "I see why it ought to be; it is just like God," it rises, not to the dignity of a truth in itself, but to the truth of its own nature: a revelation of God's character and will, a picture of something in him, far nearer a truth than anything below it. Without the solidity of matter, what notion would we have of the unchanging, or of God and truth and law?

There is a region, perhaps lower by scientific standards, where the word truth begins to apply. I believe every fact in nature is a revelation of God, there as it is because God is as he is, and I suspect all its facts impress us so that we learn God without knowing it. We can see any one fact this way only by finding its soul, its fact of God; but from our first contact with the world it has shown us God through things seen, by which we come to know the unseen. What idea of God could we have without the sky, a visible sphere that is also a formless infinity? The truth of the sky is what it makes us feel of the God who sent it to our eyes. Light, in its discovered laws, seems to me to be as it is because God is as he is: its so-called laws are the waving of his garments, waving as they do because he is thinking and loving and walking inside them.

We are now in a region far above the one commonly claimed for science, open only to the heart of the child and the childlike man and woman. The poet is at home here, and often has to go there to fetch his things. For things as they are, not as science deals with them, are God's revelation to his children. To be clear: every fact and law of science, even a tentative one, has God's will in it and may reveal him, but none is there for its own sake. Each is a means; the intent, and God in it, are found in the finished end, not in the laws except as his means. That is why human science cannot discover God: it unpicks the tapestry of God's science backward, working with its back to him, always leaving his intent, his finished work, behind. At best it reaches his back, never his face, while those who would reach his heart, who like Dante are returning to where they already are, will find the springhead of his science too. Analysis is well, as death is well; analysis is death, not life. It finds a little of the way God walks to his ends, but leaves the end behind. I don't say the scientist does so, but the process of his work does, following God's footsteps backward without, too often, appreciating what they were for. To rise from the finished work is the swifter and loftier ascent. Even if a man could find out why God worked as he did, he would discover God, but not the best and deepest of him, for means cannot be as great as ends.

Ask a man of mere science what the truth of a flower is, and he will pull it to pieces and show you its parts and how each serves its life, and tell you where it grows and what climate and insects do to it. Ask the poet, and he will say, "Why, the flower itself, the perfect flower, and what it cannot help saying to anyone with ears to hear." The truth of a flower is not the facts about it, however accurate, but the shining, gladdening, patient thing on its stalk that draws smiles and tears from child and prophet. The man of science laughs at this because he is only a man of science and doesn't know what it means; the poet and the child care as little for his laughter as the birds of God (Dante's name for angels) for his treatise on aeronautics. The children of God must always be mocked by the children of the world, in the church or out of it, who have sharp eyes and ears but dull hearts; those who hold love the only good understand them, smile, and can do without what they have to offer. In the higher state their love is leading them to, they will soon outstrip the men of science, for they have what lies at the root of science, what God's science exists to reveal. What does it profit a man to know everything and lose the bliss, the sense of well-being, that alone gives his knowledge value?

God's science in the flower exists for the flower's relation to his children. If we understand the flower, are at one with it and love it, we have what the science is for, and only that equips us to search truly for the means by which God's idea of the flower was worked out. The idea of God *is* the flower, not its botany, which is only ways and means, like canvas and brush to the picture in a painter's mind. The mere intellect can't find out what owes its being to the supreme heart; its relation to what is born of the heart is false unless humble. God thought the flower, invented its means, and sent it, a gift of himself, to the eyes and hearts of his children. That even the ignorant and degraded love flowers suggests they have a place in the history of the world, as written in heaven's archives, that science could never understand. Watch that child! He has found one of his silent, motionless brothers, with God's clothing on it and God's thought in its face. What a smile breaks out as the divine understanding passes between them! Watch his mother when he takes it home to her, no nearer understanding it than he. It is no old association that brings tears to her eyes, but God's thought, unrecognized as such, holding communion with her; she weeps with inexplicable delight. It is only a daisy! But to her it is no mere fact or law of nature; it is the truth of a flower, a perfect thought from the heart of God, a truth of God: not an intellectual truth but a divine fact, a dim revelation, a movement of the creative soul. Who but a father could think flowers up for his little ones? We are close now to the region where the Lord's word is at home: "I am the truth."

What is the truth of water? That it is made of hydrogen and oxygen? Does this precious thing exist for the sake of that fact? Did God put the two gases together only so that man could pull them apart, as a father makes toys only to be pulled to pieces? That is a school examiner's idea of a toy's best use, not a father's! Show us what in the two gases fits them to be honoured by forming this lovely thing, and you will give us a revelation about more than water, about the God who made them. There is no water in oxygen or hydrogen. It comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the living God. Water itself, which dances and sings and slakes that wonderful thirst (a picture of the draught the woman of Samaria asked Jesus for), is its own truth, and so a truth of God. Let anyone who wants to know the maker's love get painfully thirsty and drink from a brook, and then lift up his heart, not just then to the maker of oxygen and hydrogen but to the inventor and mediator of thirst and water, to foresee a little of what his soul may find in God. If he doesn't then pant like a deer for water-brooks, let him go back to his science and its husks, which will make him thirsty at last, like the Persian's victim in the dust-tower. Resolving water into its elements tells no more about it than "thirst and water" would tell about the joy of drinking. Let a man go to the hillside and let the brook sing to him until he loves it, and he will be far nearer the fountain of truth than the chemist's triumphal car will ever carry its shouting, half-understanding followers. He will draw from the brook the water of joyous tears, and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water.

So the truth *of a thing* is its blossom, what it was made for, the topmost stone set on with rejoicing. Truth in a man's imagination is the power to recognize that: wherever we see the glory of God in anything he has made, sky or flower or human face, a true imagination is seeing a truth of God. Now to a still higher plane.

When truth touches a man not as something outside him that his intellect reflects, but as a being of action, so that knowing it affects or ought to affect his sense of duty, it becomes far nobler. A fact of no value in itself becomes a matter of moral life and death when he must choose to be true or false about it. Seeing the truth of a thing, its heart and crown, brings him near the fountain of truth it came from; perceiving God in what is, he becomes more of what he was meant to be, with new relations to the universe. But doing the least duty raises him far higher; by it he begins to be a true man. A man may delight in the vision and glory of a truth and not be true himself; the man with weak sight who does what he sees, as far as he sees, and wants to see farther, is true. Knowing what is so and saying it isn't makes a liar. Whoever recognizes the truth of a human relation and neglects its duty, or knows the laws of nature and ignores them, is not a true man, and the more he teaches those laws the less true he is. He may obey every one and still be the falsest of men, because of higher and closer duties he neglects: whoever looks after himself and not his brother and sister is false. A man may be a poet, aware of the beauty that is a thing's final cause and of the creative loveliness behind it; he may refuse to lie, steal or slander; and still not be a true man: he has not come to the flower of his own being, or reached the truth of *a thing* in his own case, that for which he exists, the idea in the mind that made him, and he is not striving toward it. There are relations closer than those with the facts around him, and plainer than those that seem to bring the maker near, which he fails to see, or sees and fails to acknowledge, or acknowledges and fails to fulfil. A man is a man only in doing the truth, and a perfect man only in doing the highest truth, which is fulfilling his relations to his origin. But his relations with his fellow men are infinitely closer than with the things around him, and to many far plainer than his relation to God; the nearer is plain so that he can step on it and rise to the higher. These relations, of thought to thought, being to being, duty to duty, spring from how his being began and are one with his nature. To the intellect alone they are facts of his nature; that they belong to it makes them truths, and fulfilling them a duty. By fulfilling them he is a true man, and by fulfilling them perfectly he is himself a living *truth*. He is made to understand them at first better than he can love them, so that he can choose them purely because they are true; choosing them, he chooses to love them, and by doing them is enabled to love and truly see them. Then they stop appearing as duties and show as what they are: absolute truths, essential realities, eternal delights. The man who chooses duty is a true man; the perfect man at last never thinks of duty and forgets its name. Jesus' duty was to do in lower forms what he loved and did perfectly in the highest as well; so he fulfilled all righteousness. One who went to the truth by mere impulse would be a holy animal, not a true man. Relations, truths and duties are shown to a man as lying beyond him so that he may choose them and be a child of God, choosing righteousness as God does. Hence the whole sad, victorious human story, and the glory yet to be revealed!

The moral philosopher who treats duties only as facts in his system is essentially a liar, and so is the man who sees them as truths, essential realities of his humanity, and goes no further. Each is a man in possibility, not yet a real one. To recognize these relations is to be obliged to fulfil them. A man who doesn't undoes the right of his own existence and destroys his *raison d'être*; he makes himself a living reason why he should not live, since nothing on those terms could ever have begun. His presence is a claim on his creator for destruction.

The facts of human relation are truths indeed, and most awful: "Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and no murderer has eternal life in him." The man who hunts pleasure instead of working the fields of duty, who thinks of himself as alone on earth, is himself a lie. Instead of the man he was made to be, he lives as the beasts seem to, except that they, I trust, are rising and he is sinking. But he can't be allowed to sink beyond God's reach; that is why the holy (healing) miseries come on him, which he complains of as hard and unfair. They are a painful persuasion to be himself, to be a truth.

Suppose that a man fulfilled all the relations to his fellows that I have described, and was toward them at least a true man. He would still feel, all the more, that something necessary to his well-being was missing. Like a living flower, he would feel he had not yet blossomed and could not tell what the blossom ought to be. The Lord's words to the young man, "If you would be perfect," point this way. His existence would not yet be justified to itself. He would stay unsatisfied, because a relation in him, the deepest, closest and strongest, would not yet be a living fact, a truth in him. Not being true toward it, he would not be himself, not ripened into the divine idea that alone can content itself. He is like a child with a child's heart who doesn't know he has a father yet misses him with his whole nature, if not his awareness. The relation has not yet begun to be fulfilled in him enough for the coming blossom to send ahead the patience and hope to live by faith without sight. When the flower begins to come, the human plant begins to rejoice in the glory of God not yet revealed, the inheritance of the saints in light; with raised stem and forward-leaning bud it waits for the hour when the lily of God's field will know itself alive, with God himself for its heart and air, the hour when God and the man are one and all God cares for is the man's. But I am forgetting my plan.

To the intellect the highest truth is the abstract one: the relation man has to the source of his being, his will to the will that made his a will, his love to the love that kindled his power to love, his intellect to the intellect that lit his. If a man treats these only as objects of thought, ideas to be analysed and arranged, he deals with them as facts, not truths. He is no better for it, probably worse, for he knows something and is false to what most deserves his faithfulness.

But sooner or later the soul (or heart, or spirit, whatever you call the man himself as distinct from his body) becomes aware that it needs someone above it to obey, to rest in, and to deliver it from what in himself is despicable, disappointing and unworthy even of his own interest. He becomes aware of an opposition in him that is not harmony, something he hates that is present in him and seems to be himself. He calls it the old Adam, the flesh, his lower nature, his evil self, or sometimes sees it simply as the part of him where God is not. Then he is in the region of truth, beginning to come true. He will soon find there is no part of him he would be at strife with if God were there, if that part were true to what it ought to be in right relation to the whole. Whatever its name, the old Adam or the animal in him, it would then fulfil its part holily, subject to the higher, a good horse, dog or tiger.

When a man bows before a power that can account for him, to whom he is no mystery as he is to himself, that knows where he came from and where he is going, why he loves this and hates that, and where he began to go wrong, and that longs to set him right and make him someone he can look up to without doubt or fear, confident as a child led by the hand toward the heights of happy-making truth, knowing his father is right where he is wrong; when he feels his whole being held in the embrace of a father who takes full responsibility for him, then he is bursting into flower. The truth of his being, his real nature, his idea, born in God and answering to God's truth, begins to show itself, and his nature is almost in harmony with itself. Obeying the will that is the cause of his being, and is righteousness and love and truth, he begins to stand on the peak of his being and know himself divine. He begins to feel free. It is the truth known not to his intellect but in his own sense of being true, in his essential awareness of his divine condition, that has made him free. No abstract truth, not even truth itself held by the purest metaphysical insight, can make anyone free; only the truth done, loved and lived, the truth that is *of* the man and not merely *in* him, the honesty that makes him a child of the honest God.

When a man loves and wills the truth with his whole nature, he is a living truth. But he did not originate this in himself; he saw it and strove for it. The one living, visible source of truth, embracing all truths in all relations, is Jesus Christ. His truth, chosen and willed by him, the ripeness of his being and flower of his sonship, the crown of his one supreme relation, is complete obedience to his Father. The obedient Jesus is Jesus the Truth, the root of all truth in people and of all its growth. However far from truly human a person is, his being is the undeveloped Christ in him. His likeness to Christ is his truth, as a flower's full meaning is the truth of the flower. Every man must come to the truth of God's idea of him: as Christ is the blossom of humanity, so the blossom of every man is the Christ perfected in him. The life-force of humanity working in him is Christ, his root, who generates and perfects his individuality. The stronger a man's pure will to be true, the freer and more active his choice, and the more distinct his individuality, the more he and all he has is Christ's. Without Christ he could not exist; existing, he could not have become capable of truth; capable of truth, he could never have loved it; loving and wanting it, he could not have reached it. Only the Lord's presence in the heart, his deep human sympathy, and whatever deeper thing passes between the creating Truth and the answering soul, could keep a man hoping until he forgets himself and leaves the door open for God to come and go. Christ gives us the will to will, the power to use it, and whatever extra help we need; but we must will the truth ourselves, and the Lord waits for that, for the victory of his Father in his child's heart. Only there can he see the result of his soul's labour and be satisfied. When the blossom breaks out in us, the more it is ours the more it is his, because the Father's highest creation, above all through the Son, is a being who can, like Father and Son, will what is right of his own accord. The groaning and labour, the blossom and the joy, belong to the Father, the Son and us. The will, the power of willing, may be created, but the willing itself is begotten. Because God wills first, man wills also.

When my being is consciously and willingly in the hands of the one who called it to live and think and suffer and be glad, given back to him by perfect obedience, I share the breath and life of God himself. Then I am free, because I am true, which means one with the Father; and freedom knows itself. A true man could not be miserable even in hell, for he is right with himself, being right with the one he came from. To be right with God is to be right with the universe, one with the power, love and will of the mighty Father, the cherisher of joy and lord of laughter, who owns all glories and hopes, loves everything, and hates nothing but selfishness, which he will not have in his kingdom.

Christ, then, is the Lord of life. His life is the light of men, and that light, reflected in them, changes them into the likeness of him, the Truth; so the Truth, the Son, makes them free.

### FREEDOM

*The passage:* The truth will make you free. Everyone who commits sin is a servant of sin. A servant does not stay in the house forever, but a son does. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed (John viii. 32, 34-36).

I could not make sense of this passage as it stands. A man cannot be in the Father's house by being sin's servant, yet here the servant is in the house, and it is the Father's, not sin's. The saying looks muddled and the reasoning faulty; he must be there on some other ground. Left to myself I would have given up, suspecting the Lord's words had been misreported, or that I could not follow an argument resting on several basic truths. But most such puzzles, I am sure, began with a scribe who wrote a worthless note in the margin to explain what he did not understand. The next copyist took it for a missing line and put it into the text, corrupting the saying and obscuring its meaning. How much we owe the scholars who went back and found what was really written! Dr. Westcott's notes give another reading that he thinks reasonably likely to be the true one. The difference looks small, but it swaps doubtful ore for fine gold. Given the choice, I must hope for what is logical and bright over what is illogical and dull.

The reading I take to be true goes: 'Everyone who commits sin is a slave. But a slave does not stay in the house forever; a son does. So if the son makes you free, you will really be free.' The Authorized and Revised versions follow the reading that adds 'of sin.' That is true in itself, but I think useless for the argument that follows. I suspect my reading is what suggested to Paul the opening of Galatians 4---words of spirit and life, though misused to draw the doctrine of adoption, which is poison to a child's heart. The Lord is not saying that the sinner is sin's slave, true as that is, but that he is a slave---to God, as the argument shows. The two fit: no slavery to sin can stop a man being as much God's slave as God in his mercy chooses. Sin makes him a slave instead of a child; slavery to sin is his ruin, slavery to God his only hope. God hates slavery and wants children, but he may keep a slave in his house a long time, hoping to wake the slavish nature to the sonship that is its birthright. The slave cannot stay forever, and a father need not keep his son a slave because the foolish child prefers it.

Anyone who will not do what God wants is a slave whom God can compel, however patiently he waits. A man who obeys because he knows this, or fears punishment, is still a slave, though one within earshot of his master. Far above him are other slaves: all for whom God is not everything. They may commit no great sins and may be trying to do right, but while they 'serve' God from duty without knowing him as their father and the joy of their being, they are good slaves, but slaves, and bad ones if they stopped trying. They are far less servile than those who obey from fear, yet being slaves they can never do any duty perfectly; they must keep trying, wearily and painfully, knowing that if they stop they are lost. They prove they are slaves by being glad to be adopted by their own father! Where are the sons, then? I know no one yet wholly a son or daughter. There may be such people, but I have not known them, or was not fit to recognize them. I do know some who are enough sons and daughters to be at war with the slave in themselves. Nothing I have seen comes near the glory of sonship, but thousands, a remnant so far, side with the father of their spirits against themselves and all that divides them from the one they have never left, for in him they live and move and have their being. These are not slaves but true, if imperfect, children, fighting beside God against the evil separation and breaking down the dividing wall. Only the rings of their fetters remain. They know the dying slave in them, hate it and struggle to be rid of it. The real slave has no wish to be a child or end his slavery, thinks the child's claim presumption, clings to the traditional, approved service of forms and ceremonies, does not know the will of the maker of the seven stars and Orion, let alone care to do it, and never asks, 'Father, what do you want me to do?' Such people give themselves away by complaining. 'Do we not well to be angry?' they say, like Jonah, and being slaves I do not see how they can help it. Sons and daughters stop complaining of life's hardships---aches, poverty, hunger, rejection by what is called Society---for anyone who believes in a perfect father can hardly blame him for what he dislikes. Ah, friend, you and I may be slaves, but there *are* sons and daughters of the kind I mean.

Slaves of sin seldom grumble at that slavery. They grumble only at their slavery to God, and at the painful messengers he sends to free them from both. They must be sons or slaves; they cannot get rid of their owner. Whether they deny God, mock him by acknowledging and ignoring him, treat him as a king of whims and formalities, offer him dull services he cares nothing about without troubling to learn what pleases him, or strain to appease him with some yoke the Son never wore or asked them to wear, they are slaves, no less for being God's, and so thoroughly slaves that they do not want to become sons and daughters and find the good of life where alone it lies. Could a creator make a creature whose well-being did not depend on him? And if he could, would the creature be greater? The slave at heart says at once, like Milton's Satan, that the one furthest from his maker is freest. That makes existence itself a slavery, with a creator and as many slaves as he cares to make, whose refusal to obey is an unwitting protest against their own nature. To them creation is an injustice: God had no right to make beings less than himself, and since he could not make equals, he should not have made any! Yet they do not complain of being created, only of being expected to act justly. They refuse to obey yet take every advantage they can from the one who made them. They want a freedom unlike God's, and unknowingly seek a more complete slavery. There is no middle way between perfect harmony with the Father and slavery, obedient or rebellious; and the rebel rebels by the Father's strength in him. Divine in essence, he flings his existence in the face of his own nature.

Yet their rebellion is in a way his own spirit rising in them against their lies about him. They do not see that if they, his work, are such a joy to themselves, the life that works them could be a greater joy still, for it is nearer to them than they are to themselves and yet reaches infinitely beyond them. No bond is as close as that between creator and created. Where it is denied the split is widest; where it is lived the closeness is beyond words. The rebel's protest against slavery comes from the truth of God in him, which he cannot wholly shake off, and from a slavishness too low to love truth, a meanness that takes everything and admits nothing, as if his existence shamed him. God's liberty is in contest with the slavery of the creature who cuts his stem from its root so he can call it his own and love it, and who balances on the wobbly wall of his own being instead of the rock it is built on. He calls ruling himself---the greater governed by the lesser, since the conscious self is smaller than the whole self---a freedom beyond the whole range of God's universe. If he says, 'At least I have it my own way!' I answer: you do not know which way is yours. You have no idea where your urges and likings come from: diseased nerves, the roar of a wandering bodiless devil, an infant hatred in your heart, an ancestor's greed or lawlessness, or a far-reaching chord from a heavenly orchestra. The moment one reaches your awareness you call it your own way and glory in it! Two devils, one at each ear, could soon have that lordly *me* willing opposites from one moment to the next, then drive you mad when you found you could not choose a way and its opposite together. It all turns on the relation of creator and created, which few yet feel. To live without the eternal creating life is impossible; freedom from God can only mean blindness to the facts of existence and to the glory of a creature who joins his creator in making him, who wants the loving will that gave him life and choice to finish making him and draw him into the creating heart, so that he lives not by his own poor power but as one with the life behind his life. He knows the Father's life as the flame of his own, and rejoices that in all that is done in the universe the Father will give him as full a share as perfect generosity can. If you call that irreverent, I doubt you have seen the God revealed in Jesus. But all will be well: the little god of your poor contentment will starve your soul to misery, and terror of eternal death creeping up on you will drive you to seek a perfect father. Hidebound Christians! The Lord is not cramped; you are cramped, in your narrow, unwilling souls. Some of you need shaming; some need the fire.

A reader may cry out, like a child waking from a dream of endless seeking, 'I am bound like Lazarus in his grave-clothes! What can I do?' The Lord's answer, drawn from this saying---which, like a parable, speaks to the conscience and heart rather than the intellect---is this: 'You are a slave, and a slave has no hold on the house. Only sons and daughters have a lasting home with their father. You must be freed from your slavery, and that is why I am here. If I make you free, you will be free indeed, because the only way I can free you is to make you what you were meant to be: sons, like me. But you must become sons. You must want it, and I will help.' It is as if he said: 'You will have the freedom of my Father's universe, because once free of yourselves you will be free of his heart. Yourselves are your slavery, the darkness you loved more than light. You have honoured yourselves and sought honour from people, not from the Father, so even in his house you have been only passing slaves. We in his family are all one, with no party spirit and no self-seeking. Join us and you will be as free as we are.'

If the poor starved child cries, 'How, Lord?', the answer depends on what he means. If he means 'What is your plan for cutting my bonds?', the answer may be darker still, and the bonds tighter. If he means 'Lord, what do you want me to do?', the answer comes at once: 'Give yourself to me. Do what I tell you, understand what I say, be my good, obedient little brother. I will wake in you the heart my father put there, the same kind I have, and it will grow to love the Father completely, as mine does, until you are ready to be torn to pieces for him. Then you will know you are at the heart of the universe, of every secret, of the Father. Only then will you be free, and then free indeed.'

Christ died to save us, not from suffering but from ourselves; not from injustice, still less from justice, but from being unjust. He died so that we might live as he lives: by dying to ourselves, as he died to himself, to live to God. Without that we cannot live to God, and whoever does not live to God is dead. 'You will know the truth,' the Lord says, 'and the truth will make you free. I am the truth, and you will be as free as I am. To be free you must be sons like me, what you were created to be: answer as sons to the Father who calls you, fear nothing but evil, care for nothing but his will, and trust him absolutely, for he alone can be trusted.' Jesus showed us the Father not only by acting and loving as the Father does but by his joy in him and total obedience: the devotion of a perfect son. He is the Son of God because he and the Father are one in thought, mind and heart. The universe hangs on this truth---not the doctrine, but Jesus' truth to his Father itself---and the freedom of the children, the redemption of their whole world, hangs on their recognizing it, which means becoming true as he is. 'I and the Father are one' is the central truth of the universe, and the truth at its outer edge is 'that they also may be one in us.'

So the only free man is a child of the Father. He serves everyone but can be made the slave of none, being a son of the lord of the universe. By his own truth he is free, a king in himself. The Son rests his claim to royalty on this: he was born, and came into the world, to witness to the truth.

### KINGSHIP

*The passage:* Pilate asked, 'So you are a king?' Jesus answered, 'You say I am a king. For this I was born and came into the world: to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice' (John xviii. 37).

Pilate asks whether Jesus is a king, after hearing that his kingdom is not of this world. Jesus answers that he is indeed a king, but not as the world understands it. He could have had its rank and rule: with his disciples and twelve legions of angels he could have thrown the Romans into the abyss after the nations they had already tumbled in. He could easily have been the just king the Jews dreamed of---never seen anywhere, yet always haunting the hopes of the poor and their helpers---ruling the nations under Rome from Jerusalem, and not only handing out what people call justice but forcing atonement. But he did not care for government; it would not serve his Father's aims or satisfy his own heart. What was perfect empire to the Son of God, compared with helping one person love his neighbour and be good like his Father, for that person's joy and the Father's glory? That was where true kingship began. He would rather wash his tired brothers' feet than be the one perfect monarch the world ever had. It was empire he rejected when he told Satan to get behind him like a dog to heel.

What then is the kingdom he cares to reign over, since he says he came to be a king? A kingdom of kings and no other: only where every person is a king does he care to reign, in his Father's name. As no European king would want to rule cannibals, savages or animals, he has no wish to rule anything this world calls a nation: a king must rule his own kind. He is king not by conquest, inheritance or election but by what he essentially is, and his subjects must be kings in the same way, by nature. In his kingdom no one tries to be above another; ambition is the dirt of the world's kingdoms. He says: 'I am a king, born to bear witness to the truth. Everyone of my kind, who is of the truth, hears my voice; he is a king like me, and one of my subjects.' Pilate, like most Christians today, asks for a definition of truth, in set terms for his intellect, instead of setting about being true. But at once, whether sure the inquiry is useless or planning to resume it once Jesus is freed, he goes out and tells the people he finds no fault in him. Whatever we make of that, he is far less to blame than 'Christians' who, instead of working to be pure 'even as he is pure,' to look after their brothers and sisters, and to serve God by being honest at work, 'serve' him by going to church or chapel, condemning their neighbours' opinions, or teaching others what they ignore themselves. Neither Pilate nor they ask the one true question: how am I to become a true man, a man worth being? The Lord is a king because his whole life---thought, imagination, will and every smallest act---is true: true to God, because he is altogether his; true to himself, because he forgets himself altogether; true to others, because he will bear whatever they do to him and never stop declaring himself the son, messenger and likeness of God. They will kill him, but it doesn't matter: the truth is as he says!

Jesus is a king because his business is to bear witness to the truth: all of it, every true relation in the universe, first that his Father is perfectly good, and that the crown and joy of life is to want and do the will of the source of all will and life. That deals hell's power its death-blow. For hell has one principle: 'I am my own, my own king and subject, the centre my thoughts go out from and return to. My glory and pleasure are my chief concern; my ambition, to draw all eyes to myself. My kingdom is all I can make acknowledge my greatness; my judgment is the faultless rule of things; my right is what I want. The more I am everything to myself, the greater I am: the less I admit I owe anyone, the more I forget I did not make myself, the more self-sufficient I feel, the greater I am. I will be free to do whatever I feel inclined to do, wherever the inclination comes from. To do my own will, as long as I feel anything to be my will, is to be free, is to live.' To this principle of hell and of the world, whether preached or only lived, the king gives the flat lie. It is as if he said: 'I ought to know: I have been from all eternity the son of the one you come from, whom you call your father but will not have as one. I know all he thinks and is, and my perfect freedom, my pure individuality, rests on my having no will but his, because his will is right. He is righteousness itself, love, fairness and self-giving, and he wants his children to be like him. I was born to bear witness to the truth by being it in my own person, the likeness and visible form of the God who is true. My very being is his witness: he is the truth, and I am the truth. Kill me, but while I live I say: as I am, he is. If I said I did not know him I would be a liar, and should a king who has come to say what is true turn his back for fear of people? I say my Father is like me, and you hate to hear it because you are not like him. I look low to you because you judge by show, so you call it blasphemy; but it would be blasphemy to say he is what you imagine, since you love show, power and people's praise. I do not, and God is like me. Kill me and I will rise again; you cannot keep me dead. Death is my servant; you are its slaves, because you will not be true and let the truth make you free. Bound and in your hands, I am as free as God, because God is my father. I know I will suffer to the death, and if you knew my Father you would be ready for it too. He is my strength. My Father is greater than I.'

Remember, friends, I said 'It is as if he said.' I am daring to offer a shadow of the Lord's witness, surely cast by his deeds and words; if I am wrong, he will forgive me. I fear only that, seeing and writing these things, I may fail to witness and prove a castaway: a talker, not a king; an arguer about the truth, not a disciple ready to die with him; a hater of lies about God who is himself a liar, speaking the truth but not doing it.

So the Lord witnessed to the one God, the Truth, by standing as he was before the eyes and lies of men. The true king stands up true, speaks the truth, and will die rather than lie. His robes may be rags or purple; it makes no difference, though rags are likelier. The Lord was most royally dressed when his robes were a mockery. Of those who witnessed before Christ, some were sawn apart and some conquered kingdoms; it made no difference which.

The truth is God; the witness to it is Jesus. Its kingdom is human hearts. Human happiness is the true God. God's thought is the truth of everything, and all well-being lies in true relation to him. Whoever answers this with his whole being is of the truth. Whoever knows these things and sees them to be true, but does not run his life, actions, judgments and love by them, is the worst kind of liar: hand, foot and face scorn what his tongue confesses.

The sons of Zebedee and their ambitious mother little knew what the throne of Christ's glory was, which they begged to share. The king crowned by his witness witnessed most fully when he hung on the cross like a sin, as Paul boldly says: treated as a liar, he still gave his witness. High on the cross, the throne of his witness, he holds to it: 'I and the Father are one.' Every mockery endured is a fresh witness. He witnessed far more when Pilate brought him out for the last time, perhaps seated on the judgment seat in mock royal robes, saying 'Behold your king!', than if he had sat on the throne of the whole earth. Because of that robe, crown, sceptre and throne of ridicule, he was the only real king who ever sat on any throne.

Is every Christian expected to bear witness? Anyone content to bear none is not in the kingdom of heaven: whoever believes, whoever sees the truth, must live as its witness. Is our life, in bank, farm, home, shop and study, a witness to the truth, or are we petty, self-serving, world-flattering, fawning slaves, who smile when contempt is poured on the truth and say nothing when it is wronged in front of us? We needn't argue and defend it with logic, but we must show we are on its side. By truth I do not mean opinion: treating opinion as truth wrongs the truth. A soul that loves the truth and tries to be true will know when to speak and when to be silent, but will never look as if it does not care. We need not say all we think, but we must not even look as if we thought what we do not. The girl who said before a company of mocking companions, 'I believe in Jesus,' witnessed truly to her Master, the Truth. David witnessed to God, the Truth, when he said that mercy belongs to the Lord, who repays everyone according to his work.

### JUSTICE

*The passage:* Mercy belongs to you as well, Lord, for you deal with every man by his work. (Psalm lxii. 12.)

Some translators put *kindness* or *goodness* where our Bible has mercy, but I assume the word means essentially the same in all of them.

Yet anyone schooled in the theories still popular in the so-called religious world will find this unfamiliar. To suit those theories, the verse would have to read: "Justice belongs to you, Lord, for you deal with every man by his work."

Why I chose this striking verse as the sermon's motto I leave unexplained for now. I mean to build no logical argument on it.

Let us see clearly what we mean by *justice*, and whether we mean what we should, especially of God. His justice is the living, active justice that gives our minds and hearts the very idea of it. We can know justice, and carry the idea so deep within us, only because he is just.

What do we usually mean by *justice*? Surely applying the law and handing out the penalty it sets for an offence. A just judge applies it without bias, favour or dislike, and where guilt is plain punishes exactly as much as the law prescribes. Yet justice may still not be done: the law may be unjust, the judge mistaken, or, more likely, the law's hangers-on may twist its working to their own profit. Even a good law, fully enforced, doesn't guarantee justice.

Say my watch is stolen. I catch the thief, he is brought before the magistrate, proved guilty and given a fair prison sentence. Perhaps justice has been done to him, but where is my watch? It's gone, and I'm still wronged. Who wronged me? The thief. Who can set it right? Only the thief; God might move him to do it, but not even God can set it right without him. If the watch were recovered, would we be square? I might forgive him, but the wrong wouldn't be removed. Now suppose the thief repents. He can't return the watch, but he comes, says he's sorry, and asks me to take what little he can bring as a start on making amends. Wouldn't I feel his confession and first payment did more to repair the injury than returning the watch could? They would appeal to the best in me, to our common brotherhood, and be atonement enough between man and man. If he offered to bear whatever I laid on him, would justice require me to inflict some set suffering? I'd still have a claim on him for the watch, but I'd likely forget it. Whoever commits the offence can make up for it, and he alone.

One thing is plain: punishing the wrongdoer doesn't atone for the wrong. Does it make up for my watch that the thief was punished? The wrong stands as before. I'm not saying he shouldn't be punished, only that punishment does nothing for the man wronged. If the thief, watch in pocket, flogged himself savagely, would my sense of injury shrink, or would he gain a right to the watch? Punishment may do the offender good, but that's a different matter, and an important one.

Another thing is plain: even where the loss can't be made good, repentance removes the offence as no suffering could. I'd have no more quarrel with him, and the repentant brother he'd put into my heart would be worth far more than the watch; he owed me himself as well as the watch, but the greater more than covers the lesser. Suppose someone objects, "You may forgive, but he has sinned against God!" Then, I answer, a man can be more merciful than his maker, can do what would be too merciful for God! Mercy would then be no divine attribute, since it could overshoot; it wouldn't be infinite, and so couldn't be God's own.

"Mercy may go against justice." Never, if by justice you mean what I mean; anything against justice is cruelty, not mercy. The psalm gives mercy to the Lord because he deals with every man by his work. There is no opposition between mercy and justice. To say justice punishes sin, mercy doesn't, and God is both, splits the very idea of God. So what is divine justice?

Human justice may be a poor, warped shadow of justice, but God's must be perfect. We can't thwart it, but are we fair to it in our idea of it? Ask an ordinary Sunday congregation in England what God's justice means, and nineteen in twenty will say it is his punishing sin. But a man who punished every wrong would show little justice: a Roman emperor or a Turkish cadi could do it and be the most unjust of men, and Ahab could be just on the throne of punishment and the murderer of Naboth in his garden. God is one, and the depth of folly is a theology that gives him different offices and a different character in each, making him do as magistrate what he would never do as father. How foolish to explain God before obeying him, to map his character instead of asking, Lord, what do you want me to do? God is no magistrate; if he were, only his fatherhood would give him the right, and it covers every right he could be supposed to have. God's justice is this: he gives everything that has being, every man, woman, child and beast, *fair play* (a boy's phrase, but the best word left). He deals with each man by his work, and there lies his perfect mercy, since nothing else could be merciful to the man and nothing but mercy fair to him. God does nothing a just man wouldn't call fair if he saw it fully. A scoundrel might insist on prosecuting every offender; a just man is one who always tries to give everyone fair play in everything. When we speak of God's justice, let's mean justice. Punishing the guilty may be part of it, but it makes up God's justice no more than a man's.

"But surely nobody doubts that God gives fair play!"

"Perhaps, but that counts for little if you say God does things that aren't fair."

"If God does it, you can be sure it's fair."

"Of course, or he couldn't be God, except to devils. But you say he does such-and-such and is just; I say he doesn't and is just. You say he does because the Bible says so. If the Bible said so, the Bible would lie; but it doesn't. The Lord of life complains that men don't judge rightly. To say on the Bible's authority that God does what no honourable man would do is to lie against God, and to call it right is to lie against his very spirit. To defend a lie for God's sake is to be against him; he is the truth, and only truth is on his side. If his child can't see why something is right, God would far rather hear him say, 'God couldn't do that,' than believe he did, even if it were right; and if the man is sure God did it, he should say, 'There must be something here I don't know.' But when an evil is invented to explain a good, and a lover of God must believe the invention or be cast out, he needn't mind being cast out, for it is into Jesus' company. If the only ground for believing God does a thing is that men eager to explain him say so, no true man accepts it against his own conscience of God; I accept no explanation that asks me to believe of God what I'd scorn as false or unfair in a man. You say something may be right for God that wouldn't be right for man. Yes, because a maker's relation to his creatures differs from one creature's to another, and he has duties toward them that no man has toward his fellow. But he can have no duty that isn't just and merciful; creation asks more of him, not less: higher justice, deeper sympathy, and nothing an honest man who understood it wouldn't call right. If a thing is beyond man's understanding, he can't say whether it is right, or even know that God does *it*, since what he calls *it* may be only one facet of a composite action. His part is silence. If someone says God does something that seems unjust to me, then either I don't know what it is, or God doesn't do it. Take the saying that God visits the sins of the fathers on the children. A man who takes *visits upon* to mean *punishes* and *the children* to mean *the innocent children* must say, 'Either I don't understand this, or it isn't true, whoever says it.' God *may* do what seems wrong to a man, but only because he acts on higher, perfect principles, too right for a selfish, unfair or unloving man to grasp. Least of all should we take a low human notion of justice and argue that God is just in acting by it."

So the common idea is that God's justice consists in punishing sin. To give a larger idea of it, I ask: *why is God bound to punish sin?*

"How could he be just and not punish sin?"

"Mercy is good and right," I answer, "and without sin there would be none. We're told to forgive and be merciful as our Father in heaven is, and two rights can't conflict. If God punishes sin, punishing must be merciful; if he forgives it, forgiving must be just. Every attribute of God is as infinite as he is, so he can't be merciful only sometimes, or just only sometimes. Mercy is his own and needs no theological trickery to justify it."

"So you mean punishing sin is wrong, and God doesn't do it?"

"Not at all. God does punish sin, but punishment and forgiveness aren't opposed; one may even be necessary for the other. My question stands: why does God punish sin?"

"Because sin in itself deserves punishment."

"Then why does he command us to forgive?"

"He punishes first, and once he has punished, he forgives?"

"That hardly works. If sin demands punishment and the right punishment is given, the man is free; what is there to forgive?"

"He needs forgiveness because no punishment could ever cover what he deserves."

I set aside for now the likely expansion of this answer.

"Then why not forgive at once, if punishment isn't essential and part of it can be skipped? And can something be required that, on your own showing, is inadequate? Perhaps you'll say, 'God may choose to take what little he can get.' That brings me to the fault in the whole idea."

Punishment is no *offset* to sin. Foolish people sometimes say, with self-satisfied pity, "If I have sinned, I have suffered." Even suffering you laid on yourself did nothing to make up for the wrong, whatever good it did you. Deserved suffering is no counterweight to sin. Put it in the other scale and it won't move it a hair; the two are no more of one kind than mind and matter. We say a man deserves punishment, yet we don't always feel wrong when we forgive instead, or feel any amends made when we punish. If punishment offset wrong, God would be bound to punish for its own sake, but he forgives, so he isn't. He punishes, then, as a means to an end and not as something that in itself must be done. It isn't directly for justice, or how could he show mercy, which would be injustice?

God's first obligation is not to *punish* sin but to *destroy* it. Were he not the Maker, he might not be bound even to that; I don't know. But since he created creatures who sinned, so that sin entered the world through his act of creating, his own righteousness binds him to destroy it.

"But that leaves no room for mercy."

You're mistaken. God does destroy sin, always, and I trust he's destroying it in me; saving the sinner from his sins is destroying sin. But vengeance on the sinner, a tooth for a tooth, is not in God's heart or hand. If the sinner, with the sin in him, were the object of divine wrath, there'd be no mercy, and sin would end only with sin and sinner destroyed together. That would produce no atonement, nothing to make up for the wrong God let into being by creating man. There must be an atonement, a bringing together, and only the man who sinned can make it.

Punishment, I repeat, is not what God is bound to do; the complete destruction of sin is. What good would it do the world, the sinner, God or the truth for the sinner to suffer forever? Would it justify God in making creatures he knew would sin? If justice demands suffering as the equivalent of sin, then God must exact it and can't pardon, and making man was a tyrant's deed, a creative cruelty. But even granting that the sinner deserves to suffer, no suffering atones for his sin. Eternity of it couldn't make up for one unjust word. Does one unjust word deserve eternal suffering? Only God in my heart can cleanse me of the evil that spoke it, but did I see that evil so perfectly that eternal punishment would be just? Sorrow, confession and self-abasing love make up for the word; suffering doesn't. Evil in the abstract is eternally evil and nothing can be done about it, but I can be saved from it by learning to loathe it and shrink from it forever. The only vengeance worth having on sin is to make the sinner its executioner. In man, sin and punishment are not at odds, any more than pardon and punishment are in God; punishment is born of sin, because evil has no life of its own but lives only by the life of good, and in itself is death. The opposite of sin is not suffering but righteousness, and the way across the gulf between wrong and right is not fire but repentance. If a friend has wronged me, will it console me to see him punished? Wouldn't a shadow of repentant grief, the light of returning love in his face, heal me at once, however deep the wound? Ask how justice is served by punishing any of the wicked in Dante's hell. I'm not saying it's wrong to punish them; I'm saying justice is never satisfied by suffering. Human resentment, revenge and hatred may be. A justice like Dante's keeps wickedness alive in its most terrible forms. Isn't God defeated each time one of the lost defies him? All hell can't make Vanni Fucci say "I was wrong." Throughout the hell of his vengeance God is triumphantly defeated; though aimed at evil, it is a tyrant's vain, wasted cruelty: it destroys no evil but magnifies its horrible power amid tortures only a *divine* imagination could invent. If sin must be kept alive, hell must be kept alive; but though I count the smallest sin infinitely loathsome, I don't believe any being who was never good enough to see sin's ugliness could sin so as to *deserve* such punishment. Leaving duration aside, to condemn a creature born imperfect, with impulses to evil he never generated and couldn't help, and never shown God's true face, is a lie against God as loathsome as can find room in a heart too undeveloped to know justice and too low to look into the face of Jesus. No heart has really held it, though many a hair-splitting brain has. One thing is lower than deliberately believing such a lie: worshipping the God it is believed of. The deepest, truest suffering in the wicked must come from a true sight of how hideous their lives were and what horrors they have done. Physical pain may help rouse it, but "I would I had never been born!" must be the cry of Judas not because of the hell-fire around him but because he loathes the man who betrayed his friend, the world's friend. When a man loathes himself, he has begun to be saved. Punishment tends that way. It exists not for its own sake, nor to make up for sin, nor for divine revenge (a horrible word), nor to satisfy justice, but for amendment and atonement. God's love binds him to punish sin in order to rescue his creature, and his justice binds him to destroy sin in his creation. Love is justice, the fulfilling of the law, for God as for his children. That is why justice requires that the wicked not go unpunished: through the eye-opening power of pain they may come to see and do justice, want to make every possible amends, and become just. For Justice, who is God, must see justice done by his children in their very being, not only in outward acts, and the only way he can make up for their wrongs is to bring the wrongdoer to repent. When a man says, "I did wrong; I hate myself and what I did; I can't bear to think I did it!" atonement has begun. Without that, all the Lord did would be lost. Repentance, restitution, confession, prayer for forgiveness and righteous living afterward are the only true make-up for sin, and for nothing less did Christ die. When a man owns the right he once denied and says to the wrong, "I renounce and loathe you; I see now what you are, and couldn't see it before because I wouldn't; God forgive me; make me clean, or let me die!" then justice, who is God, has conquered, and not before.

"So what atonement is there?"

Every atonement God cares about. Jesus Christ's work on earth was the creative atonement, because it produces atonement in every heart: he is bringing God and man, and man and man, into perfect unity. "I in them and you in me, that they may be made perfect in one."

"That is dangerous teaching!"

More dangerous than you think, to many things: every evil, every lie, and not least every false trust in what Christ did instead of in Christ himself. Paul glories in the cross of Christ, but he trusts not the cross but the living Christ and his living Father.

Justice therefore requires that sin be ended and atoned for. Where punishment can help, by showing the sinner what he is guilty of or softening his heart to see his pride, wrong and cruelty, justice requires that it not be spared, and the more we believe in God, the surer we are that he will spare nothing suffering can do to save his child from death. If suffering can't serve, we should look not for more hell but for sin destroyed by destroying the sinner, which seems to me a defeat for God, blameless but a defeat.

If God is defeated, he must destroy, that is, withdraw life; how could he go on sending his life into irreclaimable souls just to keep sin alive in them forever? Even then no atonement is made, and God stays defeated, having made what sinned and wouldn't repent. Those who think many souls will defeat him can't believe he cares enough to do his best for them. He *is* their Father, who made them out of himself yet separate from himself, able to be one with him: surely he will somehow save them! Not even sin can close *all* the channels between creator and created.

The idea that suffering offsets sin, that a man can suffer his way out from under the claim his wrongdoing has put on him, comes first, I think, from the satisfaction we feel when wrong comes to grief. We hate wrong but, not being righteous ourselves, hate the wrongdoer too, so we are rightly glad to see the law's disapproval in his punishment and wrongly glad of his suffering, because his wrong has hurt us. That is how the justice born in us passes over to evil. God takes no such pleasure in the suffering of the wicked. To look on any suffering with satisfaction, except sympathetically for its power to cure, comes of evil and is inhuman because undivine. His nature is always to forgive, and just because he forgives, he punishes. Wrong is so foreign to him, and it so grieves him that one of his little ones does evil, that I believe there is no extreme of suffering he wouldn't put them through to destroy it in them. A man might flatter, bribe or coax a tyrant; from the love of God there is no refuge, for very love will insist on the last farthing.

"That isn't the kind of love I want!"

No, how could you? You can't care for it until you start to know it. But eternal love won't surrender you to the selfishness that is killing you. What lover would hand his lady over to her craving for morphia? The Son of God, who took the weight of that love and carried it through the world, is content with it, as is everyone who knows it. The Father's love is radiant perfection, and love, not self-love, is lord of the universe. Justice demands your punishment because it demands the destruction of sin and that your Father do his best for you. God, the God of justice, of fair play, who made us prone to fall and able to be raised, is bound to punish in order to deliver us; otherwise an earthly father would do better by us. Mercy belongs to the Lord, as the psalm says, because he deals with every man by his work, and a man's work is his character.

To think Jesus saves us from the consequences of our sins is false, mean and low. Christ saves us from the least leaning toward sin, into the clean air of God's way of thinking and feeling, and makes the heart pure, willing and choosing purity. To such a heart sin is disgusting: it sees things as God sees them. A soul so saved would sooner sink into hell's flames than slip into heaven and skulk there under the shadow of an imputed righteousness. No soul is saved that wouldn't prefer hell to sin. Jesus didn't die to save us from punishment; he was named Jesus because he would save his people from their sins.

If punishment is no atonement, what does that mean for the popular theology that all opponents of what they call Christianity take to represent its doctrines? Most of us were raised on it, and many have learned, thank God, to cast it out of mind and heart. Many think it dead, but it lies at the root (the intellectual root only, thank God) of most of the teaching of Christianity in this country, believed, so far as the false can be, by many who think they've left it behind and have only dropped its plainest wording. It is humbling to see how many fairly honest people think softening a falsehood's statement gets rid of it, when it only passes better both with those who hold it fully and with those who would revolt at it plainly said.

Once for all I'll ease my soul about this horrid phantasm. My opinion of it hasn't changed since I first wrote or spoke, but I have said little about it, because I didn't want to preach mere negation. My work was never to destroy the false except where it blocked the building of the true, so I tried to say what I believed, trusting the true to drive out the false and avoiding dispute. I won't take sides in doctrinal contests. But I would do all I can to stop those who think correct opinion essential to salvation from loading true men and women with any burden but their Master's yoke, and to lift such a burden where it already weighs. Let the Lord himself teach them. A man without the mind of Christ, which only the man who makes it his business to obey has, can't have correct opinions about him, and if he could they would do him no good, only harm. Our business is not to think correctly but to live truly; only then will correct thinking be possible. A chief cause of unbelief is that people who have seen something of Christ's glory theorize about him rather than obey him. They have taught about Christ rather than taught Christ. More eager for a believable theory than for doing the truth, they presumed to explain a Christ whom only years of obedience could have taught them to grasp. Their teaching offends the common sense of many with far fewer advantages, in whom, as in Nathanael, there is no guile. Such teachers press their inherited theories on others, insisting they think about Christ as they do instead of urging them to go to Christ and learn whatever he chooses to teach; they do their unintended worst to stop all growth and life. From them and their false teaching I would gladly help the true-hearted escape. Let the dead bury their dead, but I would keep them from burying the living.

If merely punishing the wrongdoer can't satisfy justice, what of the idea that justice is satisfied when someone else suffers, and that being perfectly innocent makes his suffering perfect satisfaction? That he consents makes it worse; their own claim was that the *sinner* must be punished, and here is one far more than innocent. They have changed ground: now the law requires not punishment but mere suffering! I reject this utterly, in any form. Rather than believe in a justice, that is a God, who could be satisfied by an innocent man suffering for a guilty man's wrong, I would live with the wild beasts, who lack reason enough to be unreasonable. God, the Father of Jesus Christ, content with direst injustice? God forbid! The fancy swaps punishment for the suffering least like it, when even the severest punishment satisfies nothing. How did anyone imagine it? From a fearful distrust that can't believe in the Father's forgiveness or trust him without a legal arrangement binding him (failing to trust God, they fall back on a *text*), and from the pride that insists on understanding what it can't before obeying what it sees. Whoever must understand *first* will believe a lie, and only obedience will free him. If you say, "But I believe what you despise," I answer that believing it is your punishment for being able to; call it your reward if you like. You ought not to be able. It is the poorest, most shameless fiction, invented by someone who didn't see he was inventing. It also satisfies many a humble soul content to let another think for him and tell him his Father's mind. Let him be satisfied; that he can be shows he isn't ready for better, and how much blame attaches, God knows. Opinion, right or wrong, won't save him. I wish he'd stop thinking about opinions and do the Master's work. What gives me a right to speak is that people like him force evil things on others from seats of authority or influence, to their agony, paralysis, unbelief, indignation and stumbling. I would save my fellows from having whatever notion of God they can reach blotted out by a lie.

Asked how a false doctrine of substitution has stayed an article of faith so long for so many, I answer: by the principle on which God took up and used the sacrifices men, lacking faith, invented to please him. Some children lie to please parents who hate lying, even confessing wrongs they haven't done because they think confession is what the parents want. God accepted men's sacrifices until he could bring them to see, and with many in church and out he hasn't yet, that he doesn't care for such things.

"But then," someone may ask, "where does that teaching get its undeniable power?"

From containing a notion of God and his Christ that is poor and faint, but suited by that very poverty and untruth to the weakness and unbelief of the men who invented it to ease their own. The truth is there: it is Christ, the glory of God. But the ideas poor, cringing souls form of that glory the moment the darkness begins to lift are another matter. Truth is too good for men to believe; they must dilute it before they can take it or dare give it. Unable to believe in the love of the Lord Jesus, they invented a mediator in his mother to come a little nearer; unable to believe in their Father's readiness to forgive, they invented a way of being forgiven that asked less of him and spared them believing outright in the tenderness of his father's heart, which they found impossible. They thought he had to punish for punishing's sake, as an offset to their sin; clear forgiveness didn't seem divine and needed justifying; so, to justify it, they invented a satisfaction for sin that insults God, a horrible injustice taking in all that was bad in sacrifice, even human sacrifice. He sought no satisfaction but an obedient return to the Father; what satisfaction was needed he made himself, in what he did to turn them from evil and back to him. I would gladly help their followers loathe such thoughts of God, but that needs them to become better people; until then, intellectual conviction would be worthless, and I won't speak a word to bring it about. When the heart recoils at the horror of such an unreality for God, it will begin to ask whether it must accept such statements and to search for a real God to free it from the terrible idol. I write for those so moved, not to dispute with people who love a lie they may not be to blame for holding, and who like the Jews of old would expel from the synagogue anyone who doubts their caricature of God, their travesty of the atonement of Jesus Christ, branding him an unbeliever in it. But a lie for God is against God and carries its own death sentence.

Instead of doing God's will, men of power have built a system to explain why Christ had to die and what God needed and intended in allowing it. In our own day they have discarded much of the good in Roman teaching yet clung to its morally and spiritually vulgar idea of justice and satisfaction, held by pagan Rome, propped up by the Jewish notion of sacrifice, and, alas, still sheltered by the mother of all western churches. The reformers would have done better to keep purgatory and drop vicarious sacrifice.

Their system, briefly: God is bound to punish sin to the uttermost, because his justice requires it. But he loves man and would rather not. Jesus Christ says, "I'll take his punishment on myself." God accepts and lets man go unpunished, on one condition. His justice is more than satisfied by punishing an infinite being, God's own everlasting son, perfect in love and truth, in place of a world of worthless creatures; his suffering outweighs that of all generations through endless ages. The condition is that man believe in this atonement. He must say, "I have sinned and deserve to be tortured forever, but Christ has paid my debts by being punished in my place, so he is my Saviour, and gratitude binds me to turn from evil." Some would demand more, but this is enough for my purpose.

Enough has been said on whether justice requires the sinner's punishment, and on how little satisfaction his suffering gives it. If it is required, let it be given. But what can we say to the base picture in which what is required is not the sinner's suffering but suffering as such? And, as if that were not baseness enough to crown every heathen picture of God's ways, that the suffering of the innocent is far preferable in his eyes to the wicked's, as a make-up for wrong? And lower yet: that the suffering of the holy, the loving, the eternally and perfectly good is supremely satisfying to the pure justice of the Father of spirits! All the suffering heaped on the wicked couldn't buy them a moment's respite; under this law of equivalents, this *lex talionis*, millions of years of it couldn't pay off one farthing of the debt. But the suffering of the innocent is so much more precious and satisfying to God's *justice* that in return for it another wrong is done: the sinners who deserve punishment are set free.

I know the root of all that can be said on this subject; the notion is embedded in the gray matter of my Scotch brain, and when I reject it I know what I reject. For the love of God my heart rose early against this low invention. It is strange that in a Christian land anyone must say that punishing the innocent and letting the guilty go free is unjust: it wrongs the innocent, God himself, and the guilty worst of all, by treating them as innocent. The whole device is spiritual charlatanry, fit only for a fraudulent jail-delivery. If the wicked ought to be punished, it would be the worst perversion of justice to punish a righteous being, however strong, in place of the sinner, however weak; even the poorest idea of just punishment requires that the sinner, and no one else, receive it. The strong one willing to bear it might be worshipped, but what of the God whose so-called justice he defeats? If you say it is justice, not God, that demands the suffering, I say justice can't demand what is unjust. God is absolutely just, with a justice one with his mercy and impossible to escape. To make the living God a party to this is to hide behind a mask of cruelty and hypocrisy the face whose glory is seen only in Jesus, and to put a tirade of vulgar Roman legality into the mouth of the Lord God merciful and gracious, who will by no means clear the guilty. Rather than believe such folly of the God whom those who know him long for like the deer for water, I would say, "There is no God; let us neither eat nor drink, that we may die! This is not our God!" But I have seen his face and heard his voice in Jesus Christ, and this is our God, whose being makes it an infinite gladness to be his creature. I will not have the God of the scribes and Pharisees, whether Jewish or Christian, Protestant, Roman or Greek, but your Father, O Christ! He is my God. If you say, "That is our God, not yours!" I answer, "Your portrait of your God is an evil caricature of the face of Christ."

To believe in vicarious sacrifice is to take refuge with the Son from the Father's righteousness: with his work instead of the Son, with a theory of it instead of the work, behind a false legal quirk instead of in the eternal heart of the unchanging, righteous Father, who is merciful in that he deals with every man by his work and compels obedience, with no legal dodge. God will never let a man off with any fault; he must have him clean. He will excuse him to the very limit of the truth and no further, for he is his true father and will have his child true as Jesus is true. He will credit him with nothing he lacks and overlook no smallest good he has, will quench no smoking flax and break no bruised reed, but bring judgment to victory. He is God beyond all that a heart hungry for love and righteousness could desire.

If you say the best of men have held the opinions I condemn, I answer: some of the best have, and some of those I have loved and honoured, for what they *were*, not what they *thought*. They were what they were through obedient faith, not through these theories. By knowing God through obeying his Son, they rose above theories they had never looked in the face and so never recognized as evil. Many have reached, in their growth, the point where they must give them up; the man of whom I knew the most good gave them up gladly. A man may be good to the point of worship and hold them, and I hate them the more for it: they are lies that, hiding under the truth mixed in with them, burrow as near the good man's heart as they can. Whatever the holder's blindness, a lie is a lie, fit only for the pit of hell, and no falsehood may enter the justice we deal it. Yet until a man sees it is a lie, how can he help holding it, with shadows of the best truth mixed in? While he can love a lie he can't see it for one; the thoroughly true know untruth at once, and to that sight we must all come. I don't write for those who make or heartily accept any lie; when they see God's glory they will see the eternal difference between false and true, and not before. I write for those whom such teaching has wrapped in a cloud, so that they can't see the stars of heaven and some doubt there are any. For the holy ones of earlier days who believed and taught these things, all is well: many of the holiest threw the lies off long before today's teachers were born, and many who would never have invented them took them humbly as established truths, sealed by so many good men, and, overawed by the authority of lesser men, ordered their lives by the truths they found with them, so that the reward of obedience, knowing God, broke for them the net of a presumptuous, self-styled orthodoxy. Everyone who tries to obey the Master is my brother, and I revere him, whether he counts me one or not; but dare I spare what I see to be a lie because my brother believes it? The lie is not of God, whoever holds it.

"If you toss vicarious sacrifice aside so casually," many will say, "what theory will you put in its place?"

"In the name of the truth," I answer, "none." I'll send out no theory of mine to stir up fresh whirlwinds of argumentative dust that hide the Master behind talk about him. If I have one, I won't scatter it along the road but offer it on a clean plate to whoever I think should see it; only eyes opened by the sun of righteousness and made single by obedience can judge even the dim, moonlike pearl of a formulated thought. Call me afraid to show my opinion; is a man a coward who won't throw his child to the wolves? Whatever faith of that kind I have I'll keep to myself before God until I see better reason to speak.

"So will you take away my faith and give me none in its place?"

Your faith! God forbid. Your theory is not your faith, nor anything like it. Your faith is your obedience; your theory I don't know what. Yes, I'll gladly leave you without any of what you call faith. Trust God. Obey every word of the Master. That is faith, and believing that way, your opinion will grow out of your real life and be worthy of it. Peter says the Lord gives his spirit to those who obey him, and only the Master's spirit can guide you to a theory worth holding. Jesus is lord of our minds as well as our hearts: nothing he doesn't think is worth thinking, and no one can think as he does without being pure like him, which means going with him and learning from him. To put off obeying until we find a believable theory about him is to push aside the medicine we know we should take, to study the schools of medicine. You know that much of what Christ asks is right and your duty, whether he said it or not. *Do it.* If you don't do what you know of the truth, I'm not surprised you look for it with your mind; as Milton shows, that can comfort even fallen angels. But don't call whatever you gain that way *The Truth*. How can you, not caring to *be* true, judge the one whose life was doing, out of love, the very things you admit are your duty and don't do? Obey the truth and let theory wait. Theory may spring from life, but life never springs from theory.

So I won't tell you what I think, but I'll tell anyone who cares to hear it what I believe, and I'll do so now. What I say must share this much with theory: I can't prove it, only try to order my life by it.

I believe in Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, my elder brother, my lord and master. I believe he has a right to my absolute obedience wherever I know or come to know his will; that obeying him is climbing to the summit of my being, and not obeying him would be denying him. I believe he died that I might die as he did: die to every ruling power in me but God's will, and live ready, as he was, to be nailed to a cross if God wills. I believe he is my Saviour from myself and from all that has come of loving myself, from all that God doesn't love and wouldn't have me love; that he died so that God's justice and mercy might have their way with me, making me just as God is just, merciful as he is merciful, perfect as my Father in heaven is perfect. I believe, and pray, that he will give me whatever punishment I need to set me right or keep me from going wrong. I believe he died to free me from all meanness, pretence, falseness, unfairness, poverty of spirit, cowardice, fear, anxiety, every form of self-love and all trust or hope in possessions; to make me merry as a child of our Father in heaven, loving only what is lovely and wanting nothing I'd be ashamed for the universe of God to see. I believe God is just like Jesus, only greater, for Jesus said so; that he is absolutely, grandly beautiful, as the highest human soul counts beauty but infinitely beyond it, with the beauty that creates beauty and doesn't merely show it; that he has always done, and is always doing, his best for every man, so that no one is miserable because God has forgotten him; and that he is not a God to cringe before but our Father, to whom the child's heart cries out in joy, "Do with me as you will."

I believe nothing is good for me or any man except God, and more and more of him, and that we can come near him only by knowing Christ.

I believe no one is ever condemned for any sin but one: refusing to leave his sins and come out of them and be the child of his own father.

I believe justice and mercy are one and the same thing: without full justice there is no mercy, and without full mercy no justice. Such is God's mercy that he will hold his children in the consuming fire of his distance until they've paid the last farthing, dropped the purse of selfishness with all its dross, and rushed home to the Father, the Son and the many brothers, inside the heart of the life-giving fire whose outer rings burn. I believe no hell will be lacking that could help God's just mercy redeem his children.

I believe that to the man who obeys, and so opens his heart to the eternal gift, God gives the spirit of his Son, his own spirit, to enlighten him by teaching righteousness and lead him into all truth; that the true disciple will therefore always know what he ought to do, though not necessarily what another ought to do. I believe no teacher should try to make men think as he does, but lead them to the living Truth, the Master himself, from whom alone they can learn anything and who will make them know in themselves what is true by seeing it. I believe only the inspiration of the Almighty gives understanding. I believe that being Christ's disciple is the purpose of existence, and persuading men to be his disciples is the purpose of teaching.

"So in sum, you don't believe in the atonement?"

I believe in Jesus Christ. Nowhere am I asked to believe *in* any thing or statement, but everywhere to believe in God and in Jesus Christ. In what you mean by *the atonement* I do not believe. God forbid I should, for it would be to believe a lie, and a lie to blame for much refusal of the gospel here and elsewhere. But the word as the best English writers used it when the Bible was translated, I believe in with all my heart, soul, strength and mind, whether you spell it *a-tone-ment* or *at-one-ment*. I believe Jesus Christ *is* our atonement; through him we are reconciled to God and made one with him. The New Testament never speaks of reconciling God to us; we are the ones to be reconciled. I'm not writing a treatise, since my business is to persuade people to be atoned to God, but I'll go this far with my questioner, whose *opinion* is worth nothing to me, though his truth is worth endless good: even in the sense of a making up for the evil men have done toward God, I believe in the atonement. Did the Lord not throw himself into the eternal gulf of evil between the children and the Father, and bring us the Father in the face of his true Son, giving us the sight of him that alone could make us love him? Did he not hold to the one saving truth, that God was just what he was, to the last, against contradiction and death, laying down his life to persuade us to lay down ours at the Father's feet? Has the life by which he died not passed into those who received him and made theirs new, so that they now live with the only life that is life? Did he not defeat evil by letting every wave of its horrid sea break over him and die without rebound, its rage spent? He made atonement, truly! *We* sacrifice to God? It is God who has sacrificed his own Son to us; there was no other way to get the gift of himself into our hearts. Jesus sacrificed himself to his Father and to the children to bring them together, all the love on the side of the Father and the Son, all the selfishness on the side of the children. If the joy that alone makes life worth living, the joy that God is like Christ, is true in my heart, how can I not believe in the atonement of Jesus Christ? I believe it wholeheartedly, as God means it.

And as the power that makes up for wrong done by one man to another, I believe in the atonement too. Who that believes in Jesus, like a repentant child who has wronged his father, doesn't long to make amends to his brother? Who moves us to repentance, to the passion that pays back fourfold? Jesus, our propitiation, our atonement, the head and leader, the prince of atonement. He couldn't do it without us, but he leads us up to the Father's knee and makes us make atonement. Learning Christ, we are not only sorry for our wrong and turn from it and hate it; we become able to serve God and man with an infinitely high and true service, a soul-service, and to offer our whole being to God, to whom it belongs by deepest right. Have I injured anyone? With him to help my sense of justice, newly risen with him from the dead, shall I not make good amends? Have I failed to love my neighbour? Shall I not now love him with an infinitely better love? Thanks be to him who is my atonement, making me one with God and my fellows, that I will and can make atonement! He is my life, my joy, my lord, my owner, who perfects my being by his own perfection. I dare not say with Paul that I am Christ's slave, but my highest hope is to be it.

"But you don't believe that Christ's sufferings, as sufferings, entitled the supreme ruler to do anything he would otherwise not have been free to do?"

I do not. I think the notion as unworthy of man's belief as it is dishonouring to God. It began, no doubt, in a healthy sense of sin; but a sense of sin is not inspiration, though it may lie not far from the temple door. It opens the eyes, but to our own defilement, not to heavenly truth. The theory has another ingredient too, unbelief: the inability to accept the freedom of God's forgiveness, to believe that forgiving is his chosen nature and that his own divinely willed nature binds him to it. He needs no atonement except that men leave their sins and come back to his heart. But men can't believe in his forgiveness, so they need, and he has given them, a mediator, and still they won't know him. They think of the Father of souls as if he had given up his fatherhood because of their sins and taken on the judge. If he put off his fatherhood, which he can't, since it is an eternal fact, he would put off all relation to us with it; he can't throw out the essential and keep what follows. Men can't or won't see that nothing but his being our father gives him any right over us; they treat him as their governor! They give up the Ancient of Days, "the glad creator," for a wretched, puritanical martinet of a God who cares not for righteousness but for his rights, not for eternal purities but for respectable proprieties. The prophets of such a God drain the glow, hope, colour and worth from life on earth and offer instead what they call eternal bliss, a pale, tearless hell. Above all, turn from a mean, impoverished faith. But if your own mammon-worshipping soul is cramped, how will you believe in any God bigger than can stand up in that prison cell?

I want to start no quarrel and will quarrel with no one, but for the sake of those troubled by certain *believers* I have spoken my mind. I love the one God seen in the face of Jesus Christ. From every copy of Jonathan Edwards's portrait of God, however faded by time or softened with gentler colours, I turn in loathing. He is not the God of whom John heard the message from Jesus, *that he is light, and in him is no darkness at all*.

### LIGHT

*The passage:* This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all. And this is the condemnation: light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. (1 John i. 5; John iii. 19.)

We call the story of Jesus, told so differently yet to my mind so consistently by four narrators, *the gospel*. What makes it *good news*? Not everything in it is: it is hardly good news that the one good man was cast out of the world in torture and shame, or that he came to his own and his own did not receive him. If we asked a theologian, and he answered as a true man from his own heart and not from the tradition of the elders, we would see what was good news to him, though it might be anything but good news to some of us; the deliverance he finds may rest on notions of God that to not a few of us contain as little good as news. Some apply the word not to the tale itself but to deductions from the epistles and their own sense of evil, and to share the deliverance they find we would first have to believe in an unjust God from whom we must seek refuge: a message from hell, not an evangel. They call him just, but say he does what seems to the best in me the essence of injustice. They will say I judge after the flesh; is it to the flesh the Lord appeals when he asks why we do not judge for ourselves what is right? Is he not the light that lights every man who comes into the world? They tell me I was born in sin, and I know it is true; they tell me also that I am judged as severely as if I had been born in righteousness, and that I know to be false. They make God's purity and justice require that he judge us, born in evil for which we were not accountable, by our sinfulness instead of our guilt, and treat every wrong I have done, perhaps scarcely recognizing it as evil, as if I had done it freely with no taint of evil in me. Is there any gospel in telling me God is unjust, but that there is a way of deliverance from him? Show me my God unjust, and you wake in me a damnation from which no power can deliver me, least of all God himself. It may be good news to those content with a God capable of unrighteousness, if only he is on their side!

Who would not rejoice to hear from Matthew, Mark or Luke, in a few words, what in the story made him call it *good news*! With John we have his answer, and in one sentence of two members he gives us not the gospel according to John but the gospel according to Jesus Christ himself. His gospel gives us all *about* Jesus, the message *concerning* him; now he tells us the soul of that message, what makes it good news: the news Jesus brought concerning the Father and gave the disciples to deliver. All through the story Jesus, in all he does, is and says, is telling this news; here John says in so many words what he has heard from The Word, what in sum he has gathered from Jesus as the message he must declare. He received it in no systematic form; it is what a life, *the* life, a man, *the* man, taught him. The Word is the Lord; the Lord is the gospel. The good news is no bundle of sticks gathered by a man on the Sabbath.

Every man must read the Word for himself, one in one shape, another in another; all will be right if it is indeed the Word they read, and they read it by the lamp of obedience. He who is willing to do the Father's will shall know the truth of Jesus' teaching; the spirit is given to those who obey him.

But let us hear how John reads the Word, in what is his version of the gospel.

"This then is the message," he says, "which we have heard of him, and declare to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." Ah, my heart, this is indeed good news for you! If God is light, what more can I seek than God himself! Away with your doctrines, your salvation from the "justice" of a God it is a horror to imagine, your iron cages of false metaphysics! I am saved, for God is light! That you should be yourself, my God, is enough for time and eternity. Whatever seems to me darkness, I will not believe of you. If I mistake light for darkness, will you not reveal the matter, showing me I saw only the husk and not the kernel, and letting your thought stream out upon me? It will not hurt me to mistake light for darkness so long as I do not take darkness for light; the one comes from blindness of intellect, the other from blindness of heart and will. Where would the good news be if John said, "God is light, but what he means by light is not what you mean; it may be horrible darkness to you"? The light of God may be so bright that we see nothing, but that is infinite hope of light, not darkness. To the wicked, it is true, "the day of the Lord is darkness, and not light"; but that is not because their conscience judges good and evil oppositely to the good man's. When a man says, "Evil, be thou my good," he means by *evil* what God means by it, and by *good* he means *pleasure*; he cannot make the meanings change places. To say that what our deepest conscience calls darkness may be light to God is blasphemy; to say light in God and light in man differ in kind is to speak against the spirit of light. God is light far beyond what we can see, but what we mean by light, God means; what is light to God is light to us, or would be if we saw it, and will be when we do. He means us to be jubilant that he is what his children, made in his image, mean by *light*; whatever in him looks dark to them is dark only by excellent glory. Living Light, you will not have me believe anything dark of you! You will have me so sure of you as to dare to say that what I see as dark, as unlike the Master, is not of God! If my eye is not single enough to see your light, you will punish me, and I thank you, and purge my eyes of their darkness, that I may become, with your other children, an heir of that light which is your Godhead and makes your creatures need to worship you. "In your light we shall see light."

In our present imperfection not everyone will see the same light; but light is light, and what each does see is his safety if he obeys it. As Christ's image is mirrored in us, we shall know what is and is not light. But nothing will prove to be light that is not of the same kind as what we mean by light. The darkness still in us sometimes makes us doubt whether a thing is light or darkness; but when the eye is single, the whole body will be full of light.

To fear the light is to be untrue, or at least comes of untruth. No one needs fear the light of God; nothing in it can be inimical to our nature, which is of God, or to anything worthy in us. All dread of danger in the light comes of the darkness still in us who do not love the truth with all our hearts, and will vanish as the light fills us more. There is no way of thought or action we count admirable in man in which God is not altogether adorable, and no loveliness that makes man dear to his brother that is not in God, only infinitely better. He is God our saviour; Jesus is our saviour because God is. He will soothe and satisfy his children better than any mother her infant. The only thing he will not give them is leave to stay in the dark. If a child cries, "I want the darkness," or "Let me die!", he will not give it; he gives what his child needs, often by refusing what he asks, saying in effect, "I have the right to content you, not by giving you your will but mine, which is your one good. You know what you ask, but not what you refuse." There are good things God must delay giving until his child has a pocket to hold them, and gets him to make it. No part of our nature shall go unsatisfied, not by lessening it but by enlarging it to embrace an ever-enlarging enough.

Come to God, then, my brother, my sister, with all your desires and ideals, your longing for purity and unselfishness, your aspiration after child-life in the breath of the Father; come with all your weaknesses, shames, futilities and failures, even the sick sense of having missed the tide of true affairs; come with your doubts, fears, dishonesties and meannesses. Be sure he will take you and all your miserable brood, whether of draggle-winged angels or covert-seeking snakes, into his care, the angels for life, the snakes for death, and you for liberty in his limitless heart! For he is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If he were a king, a governor, *The Almighty*, you might well doubt whether there could be light enough in him for you and your darkness; but he is your father, and more your father than the word can mean in any lips but his who said, "my father and your father, my God and your God"; and such a father is infinite, perfect light. If anything seems to be in him that you cannot be content with, be sure that the ripening of your love to your fellows and to him will make you know that anything else than just what he is would have been an endless loss to you. Do not be afraid to build on the rock Christ, as if your holy imagination might build too high for that rock. Let no one persuade you there is a little darkness in him because of something he has said which his creature interprets into darkness; the interpretation is the work of the enemy, a handful of tares of darkness sown in the light. Nor let your cowardly conscience receive any word as light because another calls it light while it looks dark to you. Say either the thing is not what it seems, or God never said or did it. Of all evils, to misinterpret what God does and then say it must be right because God does it is of the devil. Do not try to believe anything that affects you as darkness; even if you thereby refuse something true, you will do less wrong to Christ than by accepting as his what you can see only as darkness. But let your words be few, lest you say with your tongue what you will afterward repent with your heart. Above all, believe in the light, that it is what you call light, though the darkness in you may at times make you doubt whether you are really seeing it.

"But there is another side to the matter: God is light indeed, but there *is* darkness; darkness is death, and men are in it."

Yes; darkness is death, but not death to him that comes out of it.

It may sound paradoxical, but no man is condemned for anything he has done; he is condemned for continuing to do wrong, for not coming out of the darkness to the light, the living God, who sent his son, the light, into the world to guide him home. Let us hear what John says about the darkness.

Here too we have, I think, the apostle's own word; from the 13th verse he begins, I think, to speak in his own person. In the 19th he says, "This is the condemnation"; not that men are sinners, not that they have done what they were ashamed of even at the time, not that they have murdered, betrayed, or ground the faces of the poor, making money by their fellows' groans. They are condemned for no hideous thing but that they will not leave such doings behind: light is come into the world, and men would not come out of the darkness to the light, but "loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil." Choosing and clinging to evil, loving the darkness because it suits their deeds, turning their backs on the inbreaking light, how can they but be condemned, if God is true, if he is light and darkness alien to him! Whatever honesty is in man must allow that their condemnation is in the very nature of things, and must rest on them and abide.

But if one utters some individual truth which another man has made a cog in his system, he risks being supposed to accept all the toothed wheels of that system. I therefore go on to say that it does not follow, because light has come into the world, that it has fallen on this or that man. He has his portion of the light that lights every man, but the revelation of God in Christ may not yet have reached him. A man might pass the Lord in a crowd and not be to blame, as the Jews of Jerusalem were, for not knowing him; a Nathanael might have stopped at the merest glimpse, but not all growing men are yet without guile like him. Not everyone who has not yet come to the light is keeping his face turned away from it. We dare not say that this or that man would not have come had he seen it; we do not know that he will not come the moment he does. God gives every man time. The condemnation is of those who, having seen Jesus, refuse to come to him, or pretend to come but do not do what he says. They have excuses at hand; but as soon as a man begins to make excuse, the time has come when he might be doing what he excuses himself from. How many believe there is something somewhere with the claim of light upon them, and go on and on to get more out of the darkness! This neglected consciousness gives broad ground for the Lord's expostulation, "You will not come to me that you might have life!"

"All manner of sin and blasphemy," the Lord said, "shall be forgiven unto men; but the blasphemy against the spirit shall not be forgiven." God speaks, as it were, like this: "I forgive you everything. Not a word more about your sins; only come out of the darkness of your exile into the light of your home and birthright, and do evil no more. Lie, cheat, oppress, slander and envy no more; love your neighbour as I love you; be my good child; trust in your father. I am light; come to me, and you shall see things as I see them, and hate the evil thing. I will make you love what you now call good and do not love. I forgive all the past."

"I thank you, Lord, for forgiving me, but I prefer staying in the darkness: forgive me that too."

"No; that cannot be. The one thing that cannot be forgiven is the sin of choosing to be evil, of refusing deliverance; to forgive it would be to take part in it. What is past I pass over, but he who goes on doing the same annuls my forgiveness. Whatever sin a man has committed, I forgive him; but to choose to go on sinning, how can I forgive that? It would be to nourish evil and let my creation go to ruin. Shall I keep you alive to do things hateful in the sight of all true men? If a man refuses to come out of his sin, he must suffer the vengeance of a love that would be no love if it left him there."

There is no excuse for this refusal. If we were punished for every fault, there would be no respite and no quiet in which to repent; but God passes by all he can, forgetting tens of thousands of sins; only we must begin to be good. He who refuses must be punished and punished, through all the ages, until he yields and comes to the light, that his deeds may be seen by himself for what they are, and the Father at last have his child again. For the man who resists to the full in this world there may be a whole age during which his sin shall not be forgiven; but *never* can it be forgiven until he repents. How can they who will not repent be forgiven, except in the sense that God does all he can to make them repent? Who knows but such sin may need for its cure the continuous punishment of an aeon?

There are three conceivable kinds of punishment: mere retribution, which I take to be entirely human, or rather inhuman, since what is not divine is not essential to humanity but an intrusion of evil; that which works repentance; and that which refines and purifies, working for holiness. The punishment that falls on those whom the Lord loves because they have repented is very different from that which falls on those he loves indeed but cannot forgive because they hold fast to their sins.

The word *forgive* can also be used in various ways. A man might say to his son, "I forgive you. You did not know what you were doing. I will say no more about it." Or, "I forgive you; but I must punish you, for you have done the same thing several times, and I must make you remember." Or, "I am seriously angry. I cannot forgive you. I must punish you severely; the thing was too shameful to pass by." Or, "Unless you change entirely I will have nothing more to do with you or answer for you, and must warn my friends not to trust you. Never, till I see a greater change than I dare hope for in this world, will I forgive you. I would die to save you, but there is nothing in you now on which to rest forgiveness; to say I forgive you would be to say, Do what you like; I do not care." So God may forgive and punish; and he may punish and not forgive, that he may rescue. To forgive the sin against the holy spirit would be to damn the universe to the pit of lies, and make it impossible for the man so forgiven ever to be saved. He cannot forgive the man who will not come to the light because his deeds are evil. Against that man his fatherly heart is *moved with indignation*.

### THE DISPLEASURE OF JESUS

*The passage:* When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her weeping too, he groaned in his spirit and was troubled. (John xi. 33.)

Grimm's lexicon gives the pagan senses of the Greek \[Greek: embrimaomai\] as "I am moved with anger," "I roar or growl," "I snort at," "I am vehemently angry or indignant with someone," but says that in Mark i. 43 and Matthew ix. 30 it means "I command with severe admonishment." I doubt he has any authority for that; I think it a blunder. The Translators and Revisers still render it that way there, and in our passage, where a true version matters more, they write "groaned." The Revisers' margin gives what I believe is its true meaning: "was moved with indignation."

Let's look at every place the word is used of the Lord and learn what we can. The only gospel passage where it is used of anyone else is Mark xiv. 5, where both versions say the disciples "murmured at" the waste of ointment by one of the women who anointed him. That can hardly be strong enough, since "they had indignation among themselves."

A word carries different moral weight in different mouths: a good man's anger is not a bad man's, nor the displeasure of Jesus a tyrant's. But both are anger, both displeasure. We have no right to change a root meaning, saying a word means "he was indignant" in one place, "he strictly charged" in another and "he groaned" in a third. If a word seems unworthy of the Lord, let us refuse it, saying "I don't believe that," or "There must be something here I can't see into, and I must wait; it can't be what it looks like and be true of the Lord." To accept the word as used of the Lord yet say it means something quite different from what the same writer means by it of anyone else seems to me untruthful.

Take Mark i. 43 first, which the authorized version renders "And he straitly charged him" and the revised "strictly charged him," with "sternly" in the margin. Literally, I think, it reads: "And being angry"—or "displeased," or "vexed"—"with him, he immediately dismissed him." "Dismissed" also seems to carry dissatisfaction; it is the word of John ix. 34, "they cast him out," only slightly stronger.

This adds to the story and raises the question why Jesus was angry. If we find no reason, we must leave it obscure, since I know no other meaning for the word short of an interpreter's despair.

Jesus cured the leper not by word alone, which would have sufficed for the cure but not for his heart, but with his touch (the Sinaitic version says "hands"). In Jewish thinking that touch defiled Jesus, but how cleansing it felt to the leper, who seems not to have deserved such delicate tenderness! The Lord, reading his heart, saw no true response and no faith awakened; he had not drawn the man's soul to his own. The leper was jubilant to be free of pain, uncleanness, isolation and scorn, and probably proud that a miracle had been done for *him*; he was so full of himself that he gave his deliverer no true thought.

The Lord saw this, or something like it, and was dissatisfied. He had wanted to give the man something far better than clean skin, and had only roused an unseemly delight in being clean, unseemly because it led the man to ignore the Lord and at once disobey a plain order. That attitude angered him: he saw rampant self-will and impertinent self-assurance. Filled not with gratitude or childlike joy but with gratification, all the keener for having been so long loathed, and with arrogance at the great prophet's favour to him of all people, he left the healer to thwart his will. Told to tell no one, he began at once, the frothy, talkative soul, to spread the story everywhere, until Jesus could no longer enter a town openly but stayed out in lonely places.

Next, the two blind men in the ninth chapter of Matthew. Both versions translate the word as in the leper's story: "straitly," "strictly," "sternly charged them." I read: "And Jesus was displeased"—or perhaps "much displeased"—"with them, saying, See that no man know it."

"But they went forth, and spread abroad his fame in all that land." Surely this shows why he was displeased: like the leper, they were bent on their own way and didn't care for his. No doubt they partly wanted to spread his fame as the best thanks they could give. They never suspected that a great man might want to avoid fame, knowing it a foolish thing, or that someone out to help others might shun a crowd as an obstacle. "What is a prophet without honour?" they virtually ask, not understanding the answer: one the more likely to be a prophet. He objected out of modesty, but they would see he got his reward, and the praise of men! "Not tell?" they cry. "Of course we'll tell!" Too grateful not to talk of him, not grateful enough to obey.

No wonder they were so self-sufficient. How many people seem ready to do anything for the church or Christianity except the one thing their Lord cares about: what he tells them! He would free them from themselves into the liberty of God's children, make them his brothers and share his bliss with them, but they worship from a distance and boast of their church. His commands aren't burdensome, yet they invent commands for him and load them on their brothers. I think what angered the Lord wasn't the obstruction to his work or any inconvenience, but that they wouldn't be his friends, do what he said, be his father's children and help him save their brothers. When Peter later opposed the Father's will in much the same way, saying "Far be it from you, Lord!", Jesus called him Satan and ordered him behind him.

If anyone thinks less of the Master for ever being angry, I ask whether he knows only one kind of anger. There is good anger and bad: a wrath of God, and a wrath of man that doesn't work God's righteousness. Anger is as varied as the rainbow. God's anger can only be Godlike, divinely beautiful, one with his love, helping, healing and restoring, yet truly anger. The anger of one who loves differs from that of one who hates, yet anger is anger: human anger can be degraded, or grand and eternal. Ours is usually degrading because usually impure.

I find it an especially glad thought that the Lord came near enough to be angry with us. The more I think of it, the more I feel we must press closer to him, within the circle of his wrath, out of the sin that angers him and near him where sin cannot come. His anger doesn't quench his love; it is his recognition that we are to blame. If we weren't, we wouldn't be his kind and he could never be angry with us. To say we are to blame is to say we ought to be better and can do right if we choose, can turn from darkness to light. The Lord will see to our growth.

It is a serious thought that the disobedience of men he had freed from blindness and leprosy could hinder his work for his father. His closest friends did the same: horrified at his crucifixion, they would have made him a king and ruined his father's work. He preferred his enemies' cruelty to his friends' kindness, since the first, with evil intent, did his father's will and the second, with good intent, would have thwarted it. His disciples troubled him with their unbelieving objections. The poverty of our idea of Jesus, and much more our disobedience, delays his victory and the kingdom of heaven. Many a man valiant for Christ without understanding him, who loads himself and others with burdens against nature, is practising self-willed worship and self-appointed service for which Christ will give little thanks, and which may be moving his holy anger even now. Be angry with us, holy brother, where we do wrong we could have avoided; don't treat us as not worth being displeased with. Where we don't understand, be patient, open our eyes and give us strength to obey until we are children of the Father as you are. You are lord, master and saviour of those who are growing, but perfect lord only of the true, the safe and the free, who live in your light and are divinely glad; we hold back your perfect lordship. Make us able to be angry without sinning, without the least revenge, and full of forgiveness. We won't be content until even our anger is love.

The Lord neither summoned the leprosy back to seize the disobedient man, though he may have deserved it, nor wrapped the formerly blind men in darkness again for wrapping themselves in disobedience. He let them go. They lost their well-being by it, of course; to say a man can disobey and be none the worse would be to say that no can be yes, light darkness, and God's will not man's bliss. But he didn't punish them directly, any more than he does tens of thousands of wrongs in the world. Many wrongs punish themselves against armed law, and many wrongdoers slash themselves with the knives of their own injustice, as the priests of Baal did; he means it so. Whether he punishes directly or indirectly, he is always working to rescue. I think his anger is sometimes followed, even accompanied, by an astounding gift from his heart of grace. He knows what to do, being love: love when he gives and when he withholds, when he heals and when he kills. Lord, if this is how you look on people in your anger, what must your full gaze of love be!

Now the last case of this word \[Greek: embrimaomai\] in our Lord's story, in the form we have it down here (surely they have a fuller gospel in the Father's house, without a spot of error). Let us use what we have so well that we may at last look inside the leaves of that other!

John xi. 33 in the authorized version says Jesus "groaned in the spirit, and was troubled" when he saw her weeping and the Jews weeping with her. The revised margin has "he was moved with indignation in the spirit, and troubled himself." And in verse 38 it has "Jesus therefore again being moved with indignation in himself cometh to the tomb."

Indignation, at the very tomb, among hearts torn by the loss of a brother four days dead, whom he loved too! It was eternally right for Jesus's heart to be stirred with such anger at such a time and place. I can hardly doubt he is stirred the same way now by the deathbeds and graves of many who are no enemies of his, yet seem no better than pagans in death's presence. What have they gained by being the Christians they claim to be? They stare at a grisly phantom called Death and never look up at the radiant Christ standing by the bed or grave. For them Christ has not conquered Death:

Thou art our king, O Death! to thee we groan!

They would shudder to say so aloud, but they say it in their bitter tears, despairing eyes, black clothes and quick retreat from daylight to burrow in darkness. "What, would you have us not weep?" Weep freely, friends, but let your tears be those of expectant Christians, not hopeless pagans. Now to the story.

All this time the Lord had been teaching his friends about his father, how blessed and perfect he was, who sent him so that people could see his likeness and know him greater than any likeness; yet when death touched them, none of it consoled them. He told Martha and Mary hundreds of things not in our few earthly pages, but that God loves them and has Lazarus meant nothing because they didn't have Lazarus; even his bodily presence couldn't make up for their brother's bodily absence. I don't mean that God would have even his closest presence make us forget our friend or stop wanting him. God forbid! His love perfects every love; he is the God of eternal remembrance, with whom there is no past and no shadow of turning. Far from the jealousy people attribute to him, he is determined that his sons and daughters love each other perfectly. He gave us to each other for ever, and doesn't give in order to take away. But if my son or daughter has gone from me for a while, shouldn't their mother's coming comfort me? Is it nothing that he who is life is here, assuring me that the vanished life is well, and the love that misses it too? Why did the Lord come at all, if his friends could take no more good from him than this? All they could say was, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn't have died!" You may say they didn't yet know Christ well enough. True, but he expected more of them and was disappointed. You may ask how, when he knew what was in man; but I doubt you realize how much he gave up in coming to us, how much the Son could let the Father take from him without touching his sonship, except to deepen it. That he didn't know everything here is plain from his own words, and I would scorn to think that harms his Godhead; to me it raises my idea of it. I can't help thinking he was disappointed with Martha and Mary: was this how his best friends treated a father doing everything a father can for his children? He cared so much for their hearts that he couldn't bear to see them weep in a way that shut his father out. His love was vexed that they sat in ashes when they should have been out in his father's sun and wind, and all for a lie, since their weeping came from a false idea of loss, not from love. To believe in death and the grave, and not in him, the Life! Why should death trouble them, or why begrudge the friendly elements a body Lazarus, gone home to God, no longer needed? I suspect he saw them, in their hearts, feeling and acting as if Lazarus had ceased to exist.

"Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask of him."

"Your brother will rise again."

"I know he will rise again at the resurrection on the last day."

"I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die."

I won't try now to plumb this saying. It is enough for my purpose that the sisters must surely have known he had raised Jairus's daughter and the widow of Nain's son. Even if "Your brother will rise again" seemed too good to mean he'd raise him now, the sisters, believing he could, might at least have known that if he didn't, his reasons would be as lovely as any he might have had for doing it. If he could and didn't, must that not be as good as, even better than, if he had?

Martha had gone, a little comforted for the moment. Now came Mary, who knew the Lord better, with alas the same bitter tears and hopeless, almost reproachful words. Seeing her and the Jews with her weeping, the Lord's spirit was stirred to indignation. They wept as people who believe in death, not life; Mary wept as if she had never seen or touched the Word of life. He was troubled by their unbelief and by their trouble. What was he to do with these brothers and sisters who *would* be miserable and wouldn't believe in his father? What a world, that wouldn't free itself from death's grip even now that death was dead, but would weep for thousands of years more, clasped to the breast of dead Death! Was existence, his father's glorious gift, to be the worst of miseries because some must go home before others? All this because they wouldn't know his father! Then his indignation gave way, and his labouring heart found relief in tears.

The Lord stood on the watershed of life. On one side lay what Martha and Mary called the world of life, on the other what he, his father and Lazarus called more abundant life. He saw both: the sisters weeping on one side, Lazarus waiting in peace on the other. He would do his best for the sisters, not for Lazarus. It was hard on Lazarus to be called back into the winding-sheet of the body, a sacrifice to their faithlessness, but it would be done: through him they would be forced to believe in the Father and escape death's dominion.

He was vexed with them, as I said, for not believing in God, their father and his, and troubled at the same time by their trouble. His loving anger and disappointed sympathy broke in tears, which eased his heart of its divine grief. He turned not to punish their unbelief or scold their sorrow, but to his father, to thank him.

He thanks his father for hearing a prayer; whether he made it a moment before or earlier, before he left the far side of the Jordan, I can't tell. What was it? Surely he had spoken of bringing Lazarus back, and his father had shown he agreed. "I knew that you always hear me, but I said it for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe you sent me." Said what? Something for the crowd's sake: the thanks he had just spoken. He didn't usually thank his father in so many words, since he was always speaking to him and being heard; he did it this time to be heard doing it, and for holy honesty's sake he tells us so, speaking so the people could hear, with nothing hidden or double: "I thank you, father, for hearing me. I say it not because I doubted you hear me, but so these people may understand that I'm not doing this on my own but as your messenger. It's you, father, who are going to do it; I am doing it as your right hand. Lazarus, come out."

The Lord's trouble, as I said, was that his friends wouldn't trust his father. He wanted no welcome for himself that wasn't a welcome for his father, who did the works, not he. From that disappointment came, I think, his sorrowful sigh: "When the Son of man comes, will he find faith on the earth?"

Here the Lord is thinking not of his own vindication but of his father's reception by his children. When he asks to be received as a true man, it is so that those who receive him receive the one who sent him. What he was about to do would have proved his own claim, but he needed them to see that the Father was one with him in it: they acted together, by the Father's will, because the Father had sent him.

Lazarus must come and help with these sisters he couldn't get to believe! He had tasted death and must testify. "They've lost sight of you, Lazarus, and imagine you gone to the nowhere of their unbelief. Come out of the unseen; we'll set them at rest." It was hard on Lazarus, better off where he was, but he would keep the Lord company a little longer, then be left with his sisters, that they and millions like them might know God is the God of the living, not of the dead.

The Jews said, "See how he loved him!" But can any Christian believe Jesus wept from love for Lazarus? It was love for God, and for Martha and Mary. He hadn't lost Lazarus; they had strayed from their father in heaven. "Come, my brother; be my witness!" he cried, and Lazarus came out, bound hand and foot. "Unbind him and let him go," he said: a living truth walking about the world, never dead yet come forth, never lost yet restored. He came through a strange door, known to only one, but there he was! Surely the Lord was repaid for his trouble by seeing their joy.

| Any Christian woman who has read thus far, I now beg to reflect on what
| I am going to put before her.

Lazarus had to die again, and we may be sure he thanked God for it. Suppose his sisters, left behind a second time, fell into the same passion of grief, wailing and refusing to be comforted: what would you say of them? Something like this, I imagine: "How unworthy, to be no better for such a favour, behaving like the naughtiest, most faithless children! Didn't they know he wasn't lost? He was with the Master, who himself had seemed lost for a few days but came back. Couldn't they trust that the one who brought him back once would make sure they had him for ever in the end?" Wouldn't you speak that way, remembering that the shepherd will see that sheep who love each other get their own again, in whatever pastures they graze for a time? You would hardly believe they ever acted so; they must have felt he had only "gone for a minute ... from this room into the next," and that however much they missed him, it would be shameful not to be patient when there was nothing to fear.

"Yes," I imagine you saying, "that's exactly how they would have felt."

"Then why are *you* so miserable?" I ask. "Or is it only the cold frost of habit and forgetting that makes you less miserable than a year ago?"

"Ah," you answer, "but no such miracle was done for me! If there were, you would see then!"

"You mean that if your husband, son, father, brother or lover had been taken from you once and given back, you wouldn't, when he had to go again, dream of calling him back from the good heaven? You couldn't be so cruel, or wail and sadden the Lord's heart with hopeless tears. Don't you see that, in truth and reason, you're exactly where those sisters were after Lazarus was taken from them again? You know everything they knew then; his recall gave them no more revelation than it gives you. You say you believe the story, though your neglect of its very soul makes that doubtful. As far as you're concerned, Lazarus might as well not have risen. Your friend has gone as Lazarus went twice, and you act as if you knew nothing of Lazarus, making a pitiful fuss and vexing Jesus because you won't be reasonable and trust his father. When Martha and Mary acted as you do, Lazarus hadn't been raised; for you he has been, and you carry on as they did.

"You give every reason to think that if it were done for you, you'd call it a cataleptic fit and say he was never raised. Or do you think God isn't unchangeable, but acts one way one day and another the next, on a whim, so that he might give a brother back to favourite sisters but such a gift can't be counted on? Then why do you worship such a God?"

"But you know he doesn't do it! That was a mere exception."

"If it was, it's as worthless as your behaviour makes it. You're as dull of heart as Martha and Mary. Can't you see that he restores as constantly as he takes away, that every bereavement is a restoration, that while you weep with empty arms, others who love as much as you are holding theirs in joyful reunion?"

"Alas, we know nothing of that!"

"If that's all you've learned, I must leave you; my words have no soil to fall on. You deceived me by calling yourself a Christian. If you had been doing the Father's will, you wouldn't be like this."

"Ah, you little know my loss!"

"It is great indeed; it seems to include God! If you knew what he knows about death, you'd clap your idle hands. But why try in vain to comfort you? You must be made miserable so you'll wake from your sleep and see you need God. Without finding him, endless life with the living ones you mourn would be unbearable. Your own heart will teach you this, through the knowledge now coming to you by way of suffering. Then you'll feel that existence itself is the worst of evils without *the righteousness which is of God by faith*."

### RIGHTEOUSNESS

*The passage:* Paul wants to win Christ and be found in him, with no righteousness of his own from the law, but the righteousness that comes through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith. (Philippians iii. 8, 9.)

What does the apostle mean by the righteousness that is of God by faith? He means the righteousness Christ had by his faith in God, the righteousness God himself has.

In 2 Corinthians Paul says, 'He hath made him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him'--he gave him to be treated like a sinner, killed and cast out of his own vineyard by his husbandmen, that in him we might be made righteous like God. But if the first half means 'he made him to be treated as if he were a sinner,' logic makes the second half mean 'that we might be treated as if we were righteous.'

'That is just what Paul means,' many insist: Jesus was treated by God as a sinner, our sins imputed to him, so that we might be treated as righteous, his righteousness imputed to us.

That is, by a legal fiction Jesus was treated as what he was not, so that we might be treated as what we are not. This is the best device the prevailing theology can find for the God of truth and mercy, whose glory is to be just to men by forgiving their sins, to save his creatures!

I thought this most contemptible of false doctrines had nearly ceased to be presented, though it would long go on doing harm; yet to my astonishment I lately found it in a quite modern commentary at a friend's house. I say astonishment, for it was by one of the most liberal and lovely of Christians, a high dignitary of the church of England whom I know and love and hope soon to meet where there are no churches. He mentions imputed righteousness as a possible explanation of a passage, as if its truth were not in question.

Since much duplicity exists in the body of Christ, every honest member should protest against any word implying falsehood in its indwelling spirit. I protest against this so-called *doctrine*. It is a mean, nauseous invention, false and productive of falsehood. Call it a figure: it is a false figure, an embodiment of untruth. Say it expresses a reality: it teaches the worst of lies. Say there is a shadow of truth in it: nothing it touches could not be taught infinitely better without it. It is the meagre misshapen offspring of a poverty-stricken, mechanical legalism, unlighted by a gleam of divine imagination. No one who knows his New Testament will say the figure is once used in it.

I have already dealt with its source. They say first that God must punish the sinner because justice requires it; then that he punishes a perfectly righteous man instead, credits his righteousness to the sinner, and so stays just. What confusion, what inversion of right and wrong! Justice could not treat a righteous man as unrighteous; nor, if it required the punishment of sin, could it let the sinner go unpunished. To lay the pain on the righteous in the name of justice is monstrous. No wonder unbelief is rampant. Believe in Moloch if you will, but call him Moloch, not Justice. The righteousness that is of God is a real thing, not a contemptible legalism. Pray God I have no righteousness imputed to me. Let me be regarded as the sinner I am; nothing will serve my need but to be made a righteous man, one who will no more sin.

The word *imputed* occurs just once in the New Testament. Whether the evil doctrine arose from misunderstanding that passage I hardly care to ask. As Paul uses it, the word appeals to my sense of right as much as its common use arouses my abhorrence. He says a certain thing was imputed to Abraham for righteousness, or, in the revised version, 'reckoned unto him.' What? The righteousness of another? God forbid! His own faith. To impute one man's righteousness to another is to act a falsehood; to call a man's faith his righteousness is to speak the truth. Was it not righteous in Abraham to obey God? The Jews placed righteousness in keeping every particular of Moses's law; Paul says faith in God was counted righteousness before Moses was born. Abraham was unjust in many things, you may say, and no righteous man. True: his righteousness would never have satisfied Paul, nor Abraham himself; yet such faith *is righteousness*, and had it not been counted so there would have been falsehood somewhere. It was no mere intellectual recognition that God exists, which is consistent with the deepest atheism; it was faith one with action: 'He went out, not knowing whither he went.' To believe in God so that when the time to act comes one will obey him is the highest, deepest righteousness of which man is capable, the root of all other righteousness, and it will work until the man is perfect. If righteousness, in the common-sense, which is the divine fashion--for religion is nothing if not the deepest common-sense--means giving everyone his due, then the first due is to him who makes us capable of owing, who makes us responsible creatures. This is not our first feeling of duty, but the first in reality is seldom the first perceived; it is too high and deep. Were anyone born perfect, which I count an eternal impossibility, it would come first. As we are born, it is doing, or honestly trying to do, many another duty that at length leads a man to see that his duty to God is first and deepest, and includes all the rest. A man might live a thousand years neglecting duty and never glimpse that he owed God anything. If God were what he thinks him, he would owe him little; but he thinks him such because he has not done what he knows he ought, and so has deadened his nature and not come to the light.

But while faith in God is the first duty, and may well be called righteousness in the man in whom it works, even imperfectly, there is further reason to count it righteousness. It is the one spiritual act that brings a man into contact with the original creative power, able to help every endeavour after righteousness and ensure progress to perfection; so he may well be called righteous, however incomplete. We call a woman beautiful who is not perfectly so; the Bible constantly recognizes as righteous men who are far from perfectly righteous. It never deals with impossibilities, never demands at any moment a righteousness the man cannot then yield, yet lays on him no law but perfect righteousness. When he yields what he can, content for the moment, it goes on to demand more: the common-sense of the Bible is lovely.

To the man without faith in God, faith in God cannot look like righteousness, nor can he know that it creates all other righteousness toward equals and inferiors: it is not merely the beginning of righteousness but the germ of life from which life-righteousness grows. It is not a single separate act but the action of the whole man, turning from evil to good, starting on a road he cannot stop on, growing more righteous and discovering more and more what righteousness is and what is unrighteous in himself. In the one act of believing in God--giving himself to do what God tells him--he abjures evil, both what he knows in himself and what he does not yet know. A man who has turned to obey God may still be capable of injustices to his neighbour he has not yet discovered; but as he goes on obeying, he will discover them, growing more determined to be just and more sensitive to injustice--in himself, I mean, not in others. A man who remains capable of a known injustice to his neighbour cannot be believed to have turned to God; no one can be near God, learning what is just toward him, and not be near his neighbour, learning what is unfair to him. His will, which is the man, lays hold of righteousness. If a man is to be blamed for not choosing righteousness, not turning to the light, then the man who does choose and turn is to be justified in his deed and declared righteous. He is not yet thoroughly righteous, but is growing toward it; he needs a creative God, and time for will and effort, since only he in whom God's image is perfected can act perfectly. Born without righteousness, he cannot see or know perfect righteousness, and it would be the deepest injustice to demand of him, with a penalty, more than he knows how to yield; yet it is the highest lore constantly to demand perfect righteousness of him as what he must attain, and he must keep turning to righteousness and abjuring iniquity, aiming at God's perfection. Such obedient faith, being all God himself can require of him, is most justly called by God righteousness in the man. It would not be enough for God, or Jesus, or any perfected saint, who know perfect righteousness and choose it; but because of its life and growth it is enough at a given moment for the disciple of the Perfect. Abraham's righteousness was not to compare with Paul's. He did not fight with himself for righteousness as Paul did, not because he was better but because his idea of what was required was far short of Paul's; yet he was righteous in the same way: he had begun, and his faith, an all-embracing act recognizing God as his law, was called righteousness. A single righteous deed could hardly be imputed to a man as righteousness; a man not trying after righteousness may do many righteous acts that will not be forgotten, but neither will they count as righteousness. Abraham began at the start of the long, slow, disappointing preparation of the Jewish people, Paul at its close, with the story of Jesus behind him. Both believed and obeyed God, and both were righteous, because they gave themselves up to God to make them righteous; not to call them so would be unjust. But God is utterly just, and nowise resembles a legal-minded Roman emperor, or a bad pope formulating the doctrine of vicarious sacrifice.

What, then, is the righteousness which is of God by faith? It is simply what God wants every man to be, wrought out in him by constant obedient contact with God himself. It is not an attribute but a fact of character in God and man: God's righteousness wrought out in us. It does not consist in obeying this or that law; even keeping every law to a hair's-breadth would not be righteousness. To be righteous is to be such a heart, soul, mind and will as, without regard to law, would recoil in horror from the lightest breach of any law; so in love with what is fair and right that anything less than absolutely righteous is impossible. It is not love of righteousness in the abstract but such love of fair play toward everyone we meet that anything less than joyfully fulfilling our divine relation to each is impossible. God's righteousness goes far beyond deeds, and requires love and helping mercy as our highest obligation and justice to our fellows, even those who have done us nothing but wrong. Our relations with others, God first and then our neighbour, must one day become, as in true nature they are, the gladness of our being, and nothing will seem good for us that is not in harmony with them. What heart in the kingdom of heaven would dream of constructing a metaphysical system of what we owed to God and why? The light of our life, our sole, eternal, infinite joy, is simply God--God--God--nothing but God, and all his creatures in him. He is all and in all, and the children of the kingdom know it. Not to be true to anything he has made is to be untrue to him. God is truth, is life; to be in God is to know him and need no law. Existence will be eternal Godness.

You would not like that way of it? There is no other; but before judging it you must know a little of God as he is, not as you imagine him--for no creature can know him as he is and not desire him, until we live in and for him with all our conscious heart. That is why the Jews did not like the Lord: he cared so simply for his father's will, and not for anything they called his will.

The righteousness which is of God by faith in the source of righteousness is the same kind of thing as God's righteousness, differing only as the created from the creating. The righteousness of him who does the will of his father in heaven is that of Jesus Christ, God's own. The man who has it thinks about things as God thinks, loves what God loves, cares for nothing God does not care about. Even while it is being born in him, he will say of this thing or that, 'Does God care about it? No. Then I will not care!' If he does not know whether God cares, he will say, 'If God cares that I should have my desire, he will give it; meanwhile I will do my work.' The man with God's righteousness loves not merely what is right but the very rightness in it. He loves not only a thought but the man in his thinking it, the thought alive in the man. He does not take his joy from himself; it comes to him from others--from God first, then from somebody, anybody, everybody. He would rather, in the fulness of his content, cease to exist than that another should. He could do without knowing himself, but could not know himself and spare one of the brothers or sisters God gave him. The man who really knows God is content with what God, the very self of his self, chooses for him; he is entirely God's, not at all his own. His consciousness of himself is the reflex from those about him, not a turning of his regard inward. His joy is in being what God has made him, and in contemplating what God is and what he has made his fellows. He wants nothing, and feels he has all things, for he is in his father's bosom, and his father's thoughts come to him. If he needs anything, it is his before he asks; for his father has willed him, in the might and truth of his fatherhood, to be one with himself.

This then, or something like it, for words are poor to tell the best things, is the righteousness which is of God by faith--so far from being built on the rubbish heap of legal fiction called vicarious sacrifice, or its shadow imputed righteousness, that only the child with the child-heart can understand it, so far ahead of the wise and prudent. The wise and prudent interpret God by themselves and do not understand him; the child interprets God by himself and understands him. The wise and prudent must arrange things to their mind before they can say *I believe*; the child sees, believes, obeys--and knows he must be perfect as his father in heaven is perfect. If an angel seeming to come from heaven told him God would be content with less, would pass by a great deal because it was so hard for him to be quite good and God loved him so dearly, the child of God would at once recognize, woven with the angel's starry brilliancy, the flicker of the flames of hell, and say, 'Get thee behind me, Satan.' There would be no merit in it, for were the deceiver's words imagined true for a moment, a shadow of hell would gloom over creation, hope would vanish, the glory would die out of the face of God--until a thunderous *no* burst from the caverns of the universe, and the truth, flashing on his soul from the heart of the Eternal, Immortal, Invisible, withered up the lie.

'But how can God bring this about in me?'

Let him do it, and perhaps you will know; if you never know, yet it will be. Help him to do it, or he cannot. He originates the possibility of your being his son or daughter and makes you able to will it, but you must will it. If you have so far prevented him from beginning, why should I tell you, even if I knew the process, how he would do what you will not let him do? What claim have you to know? How could you, before the work has begun, when it deals with things you cannot yet know? Perhaps if you approved the plans of the glad creator, you would let him make something divine of you! To teach your intellect what has to be learned by your whole being, what cannot be understood without the whole being--if that is any man's province, it is not mine. Let the dead bury their dead, and the dead teach their dead; I will try to wake them. To those who are awake I cry, 'For the sake of your father and the first-born among many brethren, and of those he has given us to love most dearly, let patience have her perfect work. Statue under the chisel, stand steady to the sculptor's mallet. Clay on the wheel, let the divine potter's fingers model you at their will. Obey the Father's lightest word; hear the Brother who knows you, and died for you; beat down your sin, and trample it to death.

Brother, when thou sittest at home in thy house, the temple of the Lord, open all thy windows to breathe the air of his approach; set the watcher on thy turret to listen into the dark, thy hand on the latch to open at his first knock. If thou openest and seest no one, do not say he did not knock; understand that he is there and wants thee to go out to him. He may have something for thee to do. Do it, and perhaps thou wilt return with a new prayer, to find a new window in thy soul.

Never wait for a fitter time or place to talk to him; to wait till thou goest to church or closet is to make *him* wait. He listens as thou walkest in the lane or the crowded street, on the common or in the place of shining concourse.

Remember, if thou art able to know it, that the service he requires is not done in any church. He will say to no man, 'You never went to church: depart from me,' but, 'Inasmuch as you never helped one of my father's children, you have done nothing for me.' Church or chapel is *not* the place for divine service. It is a place of prayer and praise, of feeding on good things and learning of God, as what place is not? It is a place to look in your neighbour's eyes and love God along with him. But the world where you live and love and labour, not the church you go to on your holiday, is the place of divine service. Serve your neighbour, and you serve him.

Do not heed much if men mock you and speak lies of you, or defend you unworthily out of goodwill. Heed not much if even the righteous turn their backs on you; only take heed that you do not turn from them. Take courage that *there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known*.

### THE FINAL UNMASKING

*The passage:* Nothing is covered that will not be revealed, and nothing hidden that will not be known (Matthew x. 26; Luke xii. 2).

God is not a God who hides but one who reveals. All his work with his creatures is revelation: giving them truth and showing himself, so that they may know him, draw nearer, and become more and more his companions. If we are in the dark about something, it is never because he hides it, but because we are not yet able to receive it.

We may say without irreverence that God could not do at once what he takes time to do. His will cannot finally be thwarted, and where it is thwarted for a time, that serves a higher part of it. He gave man the power to thwart him so that man might in the end do his will in a higher way than otherwise possible: God sacrifices his will to man, and lets him do wrong, so that man may become like God, give all to the truth, and choose and love righteousness.

The Lord puts the fact that all things are slowly coming into the light of human knowledge, so far as creatures can know, to three uses. One we leave aside (Mark iv. 22; Luke viii. 16): it presses those who have light to let it shine and help bring everything out. In Luke xii. 2 he turns it against hypocrisy, to show its futility; in Matthew x. 25 he uses it to urge fearlessness about our words and actions being misread.

However the Lord means it to be worked out, he gives us to understand, as a fixed principle of the universe, that whatever the unrighteous want hidden, and whatever pains the righteous to have hidden, will come out into the light.

'Beware of hypocrisy,' says the Lord, 'for nothing is covered that will not be revealed, nothing hidden that will not be known.' What is hypocrisy? Wanting to look better than you are, hiding what you do because you would be ashamed to have it known. The doing is foul; hiding it to seem better is fouler. Whoever does not live in his own consciousness as under the open sky is a hypocrite, and for most of us the question is whether we are growing less of one or more: ashamed of our lack of openness, and fighting the temptation. The Lord has nothing to be ashamed of before God and the universe, and will not rest until he has us in the same freedom. To encourage us he says that those who hunger and thirst after righteousness will be filled, as righteous as the spirit of the Father and Son in them can make them desire.

The Lord says also: 'If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more will they call his household that! So do not fear them, for nothing is covered that will not be revealed.' For anyone who loves righteousness and his fellow men, being misunderstood is always painful, and unavoidable when he acts on principles beyond those around him: half-hearted Christians, who think themselves lawgivers of righteousness, accuse him of the very things his life aims to destroy. The Lord himself was called a drunkard and a keeper of bad company, and might be so judged today by not a few who bear his name and preach temperance and virtue. He lived on a spiritual height they cannot see from where they stand. He bore their slander unshaken, and comforts his messengers, who must fare as he did. While people count themselves Christians on any ground other than being slaves of Jesus Christ, children of God, free from themselves, they will treat his servants badly. 'Do not hesitate to speak the truth that is in you,' he says. 'Never mind what they call you; proclaim it from the housetops; fear nobody.'

He spoke these words to those he counted on first to spread the news of the kingdom, but they apply to all who obey him. Few who have tried to do their duty escape being annoyed, disappointed, even enraged by the hostility, misunderstanding and misrepresentation they meet, mostly from people they have helped by being neighbours to all, and from those people's friends. Tales of heartlessness and ingratitude show how low humanity can sink without willed effort after righteousness. Judgments from imagined superiority are hard to bear too: the rich man who squeezes his workmen to the last penny lectures his poor relation on extravagance over some tiny generosity! If someone trying to live more truly merely lives differently from his neighbours, odd motives will be invented for it. The honest soul can take comfort that the truth will one day be known, and no one will believe what dull heads and hearts reported of him. More satisfying still will be the unveiling for a man misunderstood by those who ought to know him better, who, not even grasping the issue, assume he is about to do wrong while he is crying for courage to heed only the Lord. How many accept 'Be not conformed to this world' without seeing that what they call Society, and bow to as supreme, is the World itself, and that those who care what people say are conformed to it, taking its shape! The true man owes Society no deference as judge or lawgiver: the law of Jesus Christ frees him from the law of the World. Let him do right and ignore worthless opinion; the less he heeds tongues, the easier it is to love people. He will not carry the brand of ignorant or malicious judgment through eternity; he will find his peers and be judged by them.

But you who look to the light to vindicate you: are you ready for the exposure the general unveiling must bring, and willing to have the truth whatever it is? I do not mean: is your conscience so clear that you fear no exposure to men and angels? God knows it all already. I mean: do you so love the truth and the right that you would welcome, or at least willingly accept, the exposure of what in you is still unknown to yourself, even if it shames and humbles you and so serves the truth? You may have been wrong about the people whose wrongs to you you wait for God's judgment to right. Would you welcome any discovery that made you more true by showing what in you was false, even if it excused them? If you can face the revelation of hidden things like that, you are of the truth and need not be afraid; whatever comes can only make you more true, humble and pure.

Does the Lord mean that everything anyone has ever done or thought will be laid bare to the universe?

As far as is needed for those who have known him, or have reason to know him, to understand him. From then on, a true man will be transparent to everyone able to read him. He may not be understood by those below him, then any more than now, but everything will work toward revelation, nothing toward concealment or misunderstanding. A man will hold his door open to anyone who wants to walk in, because his house is a temple of the living God, with things worth seeing and nothing to hide. In the true world nothing needs covering, and there will always be more to uncover. Everyone's light will shine for his neighbour's good and glory.

'Will all my weaknesses, evil habits, pettiness, the wrong thoughts I cannot help---will all of it be set out before the universe?'

Yes, if they dominate you so far that they are you. But if you have come out of the darkness and are honestly fighting to walk in the light, you may hope in God your father that what he has cured, is curing and has forgiven will be heard of no more, since it is no longer part of you. If some of your evil must still be seen, it will be seen for what it is: things you are at war with, not things you cherish. God will be fair to you---so fair!---with a father's fairness: he wants you clean, and will neither spare you any shame you need nor expose you to any you don't. What we have risen above is dead and forgotten, or if remembered, God is there to comfort us: 'If any man sin, we have a comforter with the Father.' We can trust God with our past as with our future: it will not hurt us as long as we do not try to hide things and are ready to bow our heads in honest shame where we should. To be ashamed is a holy and blessed thing. Shame shames only those who want to appear good, not those who want to be. In God's name let us have nothing to be ashamed of, and meet any shame on its way, for to be humbly ashamed is to be plunged in the cleansing bath of the truth.

I need not speak of the revelation of God's ways, which he has always made, and always will, to his prophet and his child. But let me say a word about another kind: the revelation of their own evil to the evil.

The only truly terrible revelation is that of a man to himself. What a horror for a vile man---above all one whose pleasure has been heightened by others' suffering, whom decent people would shun but who has never seen what he is---when his eyes open and he sees himself as the pure see him, as God sees him! Imagine him waking all at once to the eyes of the universe fixed on him in loathing astonishment, and seeing himself as they see him: what a waking, into the full glare of fact and awareness, of truth and its violation!

To know my deed, \'twere best not know myself!

Or think what it must be for a man who counts himself religious, orthodox and exemplary to see suddenly that he had no religion, only love of self; no love of the right, only love of being in the right. He was simply a hypocrite, loving to *appear* and not to *be*. If I understand the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the sharpest reversals will come among the rich. Who has not seen the rich treat the poor with appalling, insolent meanness while counting themselves among the elect? Mammon, the most contemptible of gods, is the most worshipped, in church and out, and for many religious rich people the damning revelation will be how they treated the poor they thought themselves so kind to. 'He flatters himself in his own eyes until his iniquity is found to be hateful.' A man may loathe a thing in the abstract for years and find he has been guilty of it all along. Many a man might agree with this who cages a carrion bird in his own chest, never knowing it for what it is because its plumage differs a little from the bird he calls by an ugly name.

The worst off among those who will one day stand in dismay, aware that their very existence is a shame, will be those who knowingly betrayed their fellows, pretending friendship to use their neighbours for their own ends, and especially those who divided friends. Dante put such people in the lowest hell. If God hates one thing, it must be treachery. Do not imagine Judas is the only man of whom the Lord would say, 'Better were it for that man if he had never been born!' Did he speak in anger at his apostle's treachery to him, or in pity and horror at what it is to be such a man? What is more pitiful than to know you yourself are that false one? 'O God,' we think, 'how terrible if it were I!' It is just as terrible that it should be Judas. And have I not done things with the same germ in them, which brought to its evil perfection would be treachery? Unless I love my neighbour as myself, I may one day betray him! Let us be compassionate and humble, and hope for every man.

A man can sink so slowly that long after he is a devil he may still pass for a good churchman or dissenter, and think himself a good Christian. Sin repeated against even the faintest conscience must bring a dreadful awakening. Some never wake to how wicked they are until a self-righteous crowd is staring at them, one doing similar things itself but not yet found out, sinning in another style and so judging hardest, hoping to escape judgment by condemning. What if the only way to wake the treacherous, money-loving Judas to himself was to let it run to the end, and his kiss betray the Master? He did not hate the Master when he kissed him; but not being a true man, his very love betrayed him.

The good man, aware of his own evil and wanting no refuge but the purifying light, will chiefly rejoice that exposing evil serves the victory of the truth, the kingdom of God and his Christ. In the unmasking of the hypocrite he sees God stepping in, for him and for everyone, between them and the lie.

The only triumph the truth can ever have is its recognition by the heart of the liar. Its victory is in the man who, not content with saying 'I was blind and now I see,' cries: 'Lord God, just and true, let me perish, but you endure! Let me live because you live, because you save me from the death in myself, the untruth I have fed and even called righteousness! Hallowed be your name, for you alone are true, loving, holy, humble and unselfish, seeking never your own but the good of your children! Father, be true, and every man a liar!'

The injured can have no satisfaction of revenge. The severest punishment a wrongdoer can suffer is simply to be made to know what he is, because his nature is from God and the deepest thing in him is divine. Nothing less than the sinner's seeing the enormity of his injury can satisfy the injured. While he admits no wrong, mocks amends, or rejoices in the wrong he admits, no suffering could satisfy revenge, far less justice. So satisfied justice is bound to come, and satisfied revenge is impossible for ever. The moment the only adequate punishment, a vision of himself, begins to work on the sinner, he has begun to grow righteous, and the brother he wronged has no choice but to take him to his heart, the more tenderly because he is repentant, was lost and is found. Here the divine extremes meet, the extreme of punishment and the embrace of heaven. I venture to think a created soul can know no agony like seeing itself vile by its own choice, and no delight, short of oneness with the Father, like seeing the heaven of forgiveness open, with its shining stair to the natural home where the Father has waited all along for his child's return.

So, friends, however angry we may be, however justly, no revenge is possible for us in the Father's universe. I may say to myself, 'I would love to make that man see what a wretch he is, and what every honest person thinks of him!' But when the moment comes he will loathe himself ten times more than anyone else could, and my heart will bury his sin, swamped by an ocean of pity from its divine source. Let us try to forgive in advance. Does anyone dare suppose Jesus wants him to hate the traitor through whom he came to the cross? Has he been pleased, through all these ages, with how his nation has been treated, and still is, by those who bear his name? We have not yet sounded the depths of forgiveness required of his disciples!

Our friends will know us then. Will their hearts sink at our real likeness, or will they be glad to find us less to blame than they thought in this or that which troubled them?

Let us remember, though, that not only evil will be unveiled: many a misunderstanding will turn out to hide a face radiant with the loveliness of the truth. Whatever disappointments come, every true heart has one sufficient joy: it stands on the border of the kingdom, about to enter ever fuller possession *of the inheritance of the saints in light*.

### THE INHERITANCE

*The passage:* We give thanks to the Father, who has made us fit to share in what the saints inherit in the light. (Colossians 1:12.)

With an earthly inheritance, each additional heir shrinks everyone else's share. In the saints' inheritance, what each person has adds to what all the others have. Here is what Dante's guide tells him in Purgatory:

| Perche s\'appuntano i vostri desiri
|   Dove per compagnia parte si scema,
|   Invidia muove il mantaco a\' sospiri.
| Ma se l\'amor della spera suprema
|   Torcesse \'n suso \'l desiderio vostro,
|   Non vi sarebbe al petto quella tema;
| Che per quanto si dice piu li nostro,
|   Tanto possiede piu di ben ciascuno,
|   E piu di caritade arde in quel chiostro.

| Because you point and fix your longing eyes
|   On things where sharing lessens every share,
|   The human bellows heave with envious sighs.
| But if the loftiest love that dwelleth there
|   Up to the heaven of heavens your longing turn,
|   Then from your heart will pass this fearing care:
| The oftener there the word *our* they discern,
|   The more of good doth everyone possess,
|   The more of love doth in that cloister burn.

Dante asks how a good that is handed out can make each receiver richer, the more receivers there are. Virgil answers:

|             Perocche tu rificchi
|   La mente pure alle cose terrene,
|   Di vera luce tenebre dispicchi.
| Quello \'nfinito ed ineffabil bene,
|   Che lassu e, cosi corre ad amore,
|   Com\' a lucido corpo raggio viene.
| Tanto si da, quanto trova d\' ardore:
|   Si che quantunque carita si stende,
|   Cresce sovr\' essa l\' eterno valore.
| E quanta gente pin lassu s\' intende,
|   Piu v\' e da bene amare, e pin vi s\' ama,
|   E come specchio, l\' uno all\' altro rende.

|            Because thy mind doth stick
|   To earthly things, and on them only brood,
|   From the true light thou dost but darkness pick.
| That same ineffable and infinite Good,
|   Which dwells up there, to Love doth run as fleet
|   As sunrays to bright things, for sisterhood.
| It gives itself proportionate to the heat:
|   So that, wherever Love doth spread its reign,
|   The growing wealth of God makes that its seat.
| And the more people that up thither strain,
|   The more there are to love, the more they love,
|   And like a mirror each doth give and gain.

So in this inheritance a person can seek his share without harming anyone; indeed, if we fail to take ours, we deprive others of part of theirs. Let us look closer at what it consists of.

I won't insist that "the inheritance of the saints in light" can only mean possessing the light they inherit; that would strain the wording. But the phrase literally says "in the light," which makes me more confident that Paul saw the light itself as the substance of the inheritance. Consider that God is light, that the Lord's highest prayer for his friends was that they be one in him and his Father, and that Paul told the Ephesians "in him we live and move and have our being." Even if Paul did not mean "light" to cover every side of the inheritance (I think he did), the idea fits his teaching. What makes existence good is that nothing stands between our life and the life it comes from. Knowing that God is our life is not enough; we need to be aware, in some vast consciousness beyond imagining, of our maker present while he keeps us alive. So the inheritance we can claim as his twice-born children, and he wants nothing more than for us to claim it, is simply the light: God himself. Among ten thousand good things, what makes any of them good except the God in them? I am not content to say that the world's beauty merely originates in God's will; it is his own beauty, his lovely thought, and shows what lives in him. If you could convince me that God no longer cared for the daisy but cared for something else, my interest in its beauty would vanish; the soul would be gone from it. Some flowers lead me back to God's heart, and as his child I hope I feel, in my small way, what he felt when he brooded over them and said, "They are good," meaning "They are what I intended."

If we saw everything as coming from God, I am arguing, the saints' inheritance, in whatever form, would be seen as light. All things are God's not merely because he rules them but because they come from him. Even darkness turns to light around him once we remember he created it; there could be no darkness without light. Without God there would not even be nothing, or any idea of nothing, unless he existed and called something into being.

Even nothingness owes its name and nature to God's reality: there is no word for what is not God, for a *where* without him, because such a place does not exist and could not. So I take the saints' inheritance to be each person's share in the Light.

But how can there be shares when everything is open to everyone?

In the heavenly kingdom a real share is not what you keep but what you give away. What is truly mine is what I have the power to give; whatever I cannot share with everyone cannot be essentially mine. In the fifth canto of the "Paradiso," Dante sees a thousand splendours gliding toward him on the planet Mercury, crying:

Ecco chi crescera li nostri amori!

Lo, here comes one who will increase our loves!

All the light is ours. All of God is ours, even the part we cannot understand; if any of him were not ours, he would not be one God. We will never fully grasp him, even in eternity. But he is our Father, so he must think of us with all of himself, knowing us and whatever in himself we cannot know in a single thought. That is how we can claim everything and still each have a share. God's infinity can be revealed only through endlessly different creatures, each able to wonder at, admire and love the others, so that all are joined in him and show him to each other. Each human being is a facet cut in the great diamond to which I might dare compare the Father of the man who compared his kingdom to a pearl. Every man, woman and child reveals God; even the unfinished show him still at work on his creation. I have my message from my great Lord, and you have yours. Your dog or horse tells you something of the one who cares for all his creatures. Perhaps coal, diamonds, iron, clay and gold came from his hands, but living things came from his heart, near where we came from. What my horse knows of God in its horse's way I cannot tell, and we are at best only horsemen to horses. God's ways go down into microscopic depths as well as up to telescopic heights, and more marvellously, since life begins in the small and the vast stars and worlds exist for the sake of lesser things. So with minds: God knows his horses and dogs as we cannot, because we are not yet fully his sons. When our sonship brings, as Paul teaches, the redemption of these lower brothers and sisters, we will understand each other better. For now the Lord of life must watch multitudes of his creatures being tortured on purpose. Offences must come, but woe to the one who causes them; the Lord may seem not to notice, but he sees and knows.

Each of us is something no one else is, and so knows something no one else does, perhaps without realizing it. As heirs in the kingdom of light, each of us should give his share to the rest. We are one family, with God as head and heart and Jesus Christ our elder brother teaching us about the Father, whom he alone knows.

Whatever is a source of joy or love, whatever is pure and strong, whatever awakens aspiration or lifts us out of selfishness, whatever is beautiful or admirable, in short whatever belongs to the light, is part of the saints' inheritance in it, however small. James says every good and perfect gift comes from above, from the Father of lights, in whom there is no change and no shadow of turning.

Children fear heaven because of the dismal pictures given them by unimaginative adults, who accept without question what other unimaginative people say about it. I see no need to make it sound appealing. If I convinced a man heaven was everything he could wish for, what would he or the truth gain? If he knows the Lord he won't worry about heaven; if he doesn't, heaven won't draw him to the Lord. I would not try to persuade a weak Christian that heaven is worth going to, but that no place in space and no hour in eternity is worth anything to someone who stays as he is. I wish nobody would presume to teach little ones what they know nothing about themselves, or push them to want what they cannot love. I remember being distressed that I was not pleased at the prospect of being made a pillar in the house of God and never going out again. Those words were not spoken to little ones, and taken literally they are a blessed promise compared with the idea of going to church forever. Perhaps nobody teaches this outright, but unintended teaching is stronger than words. What boy, however much he longs to follow Christ, would choose a sermon over his glorious kite, with God himself as playmate in the blue wind that tossed it about? He might give up kite, wind and sun and die for his brothers, but surely not so they could join an everlasting prayer meeting! I rejoice that there will be no church or chapel in the high countries, nothing called religion, and no law but the perfect law of liberty. There every heartbeat says *God*, every throat sings eagerly with thanks, and the universe's tears of joy pour forever from beneath God's throne like glad waters. Where is the room for religion, when God is the heart of every thought; for law, when everything it could forbid is too foul to think of; for honesty, when love more than fills the law and a man would sooner fall into the abyss than wrong his neighbour by a hair?

Heaven will be unbroken contact with God, and the sense of being alive will itself be bliss. Real life requires conscious contact with its source, so life itself, as good as God's own life, will be a bliss so intense that I think it needs tempering to be bearable: by the loftiest joys of fellowship with our blessed companions, by art in every form, and by countless services to those still unfinished and hard work for people who do not yet know their neighbour or their Father.

To people who care only about things and not about their souls, their truth and reality, the prospect of inheriting light has no appeal. Their comfort, a false one, is that nobody will ask them to claim it yet. Perhaps they will go on sucking things dry and missing their loveliness until they loathe the husks their false imaginations have made ugly. Loving only the body of Truth, they end up, even now, calling it a lie and moaning over life's illusions. They lost the soul of Truth because they never loved her. What purifying fires might they have to pass through before they can even see her?

What so-called Christians imagine about the state their dead friends have entered, which they call blessedness, is bad enough to justify their bitter grief and their heathen doubt whether they will know those friends again. No wonder, since after a year or two of such a fate their friends would be unrecognizable. Nirvana is grand beside their heaven. The early Christians sometimes pestered Paul with a foolish question whose answer still troubles us, but did any of them doubt he would find his friends again? This is unbelief in another shape: they say God is love, yet cannot quite believe he does not make the love in which we are most like him a mockery or a torture. A promise of heaven would mean little to me if I could not hope to say, "I am sorry; forgive me; let what I did in anger or coldness count for nothing, in the name of God and Jesus!" Can someone not ready to pour out a heart full of regrets be an heir of the light? Saying "I was wrong; I am sorry" is the joy of a true heart, a child of the God who loves an open soul, and of anyone who hates the wrong more for having done it. Oh, the sweet winds of repentance, reconciliation and atonement that will blow from garden to garden of God in the tender twilights of his kingdom! Whatever the place is like, there will be endless atonement and growing love, and whatever the divinely human heart desires, it will not desire in vain; the light that is God, our inheritance as his children, guarantees it, for the heart that desires was made to desire. God is, so let the earth be glad, and the heaven, and the heaven of heavens! Whatever a father can do to bless his children, God will do for his, so let us expect good things from him, their father and everlasting saviour. If what I have here comes from him and is so plainly only a beginning, shouldn't I take it as a pledge of better to come? Amid this world's good things I have never felt quite at home or seen anything lovely or grand enough to satisfy me. Perhaps my eyes are too dim to see what he has given; but whether the fault is in the world or in me, both being incomplete, matters little: God is, and all is well. All it takes to set the world right enough for me, and no highest heaven could be right without it, is that I care for God as he cares for me; that my will and desires keep time with his music; that no thought of mine springs from myself apart from him; that my individuality has the freedom that belongs to it as born of his, in no slavery to body, ancestry, prejudice or any unknown impulse; and that I am free by obeying the law of my being, the life-giving will by which life is life and my life is myself. What springs from myself and not from God is evil, a twisting of something of his. Whatever is not of faith is sin: a stream that cuts itself off from its source and thinks it can run on without it. But light is my inheritance, through the one whose life is the light of men, to awaken in them the life of their Father in heaven. Praise to the Lord, who in himself brought forth that life!