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.