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:

—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.