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,

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.