The passage: Paul wants to win Christ and be found in him, with no righteousness of his own from the law, but the righteousness that comes through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith. (Philippians iii. 8, 9.)
What does the apostle mean by the righteousness that is of God by faith? He means the righteousness Christ had by his faith in God, the righteousness God himself has.
In 2 Corinthians Paul says, ‘He hath made him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him’–he gave him to be treated like a sinner, killed and cast out of his own vineyard by his husbandmen, that in him we might be made righteous like God. But if the first half means ‘he made him to be treated as if he were a sinner,’ logic makes the second half mean ‘that we might be treated as if we were righteous.’
‘That is just what Paul means,’ many insist: Jesus was treated by God as a sinner, our sins imputed to him, so that we might be treated as righteous, his righteousness imputed to us.
That is, by a legal fiction Jesus was treated as what he was not, so that we might be treated as what we are not. This is the best device the prevailing theology can find for the God of truth and mercy, whose glory is to be just to men by forgiving their sins, to save his creatures!
I thought this most contemptible of false doctrines had nearly ceased to be presented, though it would long go on doing harm; yet to my astonishment I lately found it in a quite modern commentary at a friend’s house. I say astonishment, for it was by one of the most liberal and lovely of Christians, a high dignitary of the church of England whom I know and love and hope soon to meet where there are no churches. He mentions imputed righteousness as a possible explanation of a passage, as if its truth were not in question.
Since much duplicity exists in the body of Christ, every honest member should protest against any word implying falsehood in its indwelling spirit. I protest against this so-called doctrine. It is a mean, nauseous invention, false and productive of falsehood. Call it a figure: it is a false figure, an embodiment of untruth. Say it expresses a reality: it teaches the worst of lies. Say there is a shadow of truth in it: nothing it touches could not be taught infinitely better without it. It is the meagre misshapen offspring of a poverty-stricken, mechanical legalism, unlighted by a gleam of divine imagination. No one who knows his New Testament will say the figure is once used in it.
I have already dealt with its source. They say first that God must punish the sinner because justice requires it; then that he punishes a perfectly righteous man instead, credits his righteousness to the sinner, and so stays just. What confusion, what inversion of right and wrong! Justice could not treat a righteous man as unrighteous; nor, if it required the punishment of sin, could it let the sinner go unpunished. To lay the pain on the righteous in the name of justice is monstrous. No wonder unbelief is rampant. Believe in Moloch if you will, but call him Moloch, not Justice. The righteousness that is of God is a real thing, not a contemptible legalism. Pray God I have no righteousness imputed to me. Let me be regarded as the sinner I am; nothing will serve my need but to be made a righteous man, one who will no more sin.
The word imputed occurs just once in the New Testament. Whether the evil doctrine arose from misunderstanding that passage I hardly care to ask. As Paul uses it, the word appeals to my sense of right as much as its common use arouses my abhorrence. He says a certain thing was imputed to Abraham for righteousness, or, in the revised version, ‘reckoned unto him.’ What? The righteousness of another? God forbid! His own faith. To impute one man’s righteousness to another is to act a falsehood; to call a man’s faith his righteousness is to speak the truth. Was it not righteous in Abraham to obey God? The Jews placed righteousness in keeping every particular of Moses’s law; Paul says faith in God was counted righteousness before Moses was born. Abraham was unjust in many things, you may say, and no righteous man. True: his righteousness would never have satisfied Paul, nor Abraham himself; yet such faith is righteousness, and had it not been counted so there would have been falsehood somewhere. It was no mere intellectual recognition that God exists, which is consistent with the deepest atheism; it was faith one with action: ‘He went out, not knowing whither he went.’ To believe in God so that when the time to act comes one will obey him is the highest, deepest righteousness of which man is capable, the root of all other righteousness, and it will work until the man is perfect. If righteousness, in the common-sense, which is the divine fashion–for religion is nothing if not the deepest common-sense–means giving everyone his due, then the first due is to him who makes us capable of owing, who makes us responsible creatures. This is not our first feeling of duty, but the first in reality is seldom the first perceived; it is too high and deep. Were anyone born perfect, which I count an eternal impossibility, it would come first. As we are born, it is doing, or honestly trying to do, many another duty that at length leads a man to see that his duty to God is first and deepest, and includes all the rest. A man might live a thousand years neglecting duty and never glimpse that he owed God anything. If God were what he thinks him, he would owe him little; but he thinks him such because he has not done what he knows he ought, and so has deadened his nature and not come to the light.
But while faith in God is the first duty, and may well be called righteousness in the man in whom it works, even imperfectly, there is further reason to count it righteousness. It is the one spiritual act that brings a man into contact with the original creative power, able to help every endeavour after righteousness and ensure progress to perfection; so he may well be called righteous, however incomplete. We call a woman beautiful who is not perfectly so; the Bible constantly recognizes as righteous men who are far from perfectly righteous. It never deals with impossibilities, never demands at any moment a righteousness the man cannot then yield, yet lays on him no law but perfect righteousness. When he yields what he can, content for the moment, it goes on to demand more: the common-sense of the Bible is lovely.
To the man without faith in God, faith in God cannot look like righteousness, nor can he know that it creates all other righteousness toward equals and inferiors: it is not merely the beginning of righteousness but the germ of life from which life-righteousness grows. It is not a single separate act but the action of the whole man, turning from evil to good, starting on a road he cannot stop on, growing more righteous and discovering more and more what righteousness is and what is unrighteous in himself. In the one act of believing in God–giving himself to do what God tells him–he abjures evil, both what he knows in himself and what he does not yet know. A man who has turned to obey God may still be capable of injustices to his neighbour he has not yet discovered; but as he goes on obeying, he will discover them, growing more determined to be just and more sensitive to injustice–in himself, I mean, not in others. A man who remains capable of a known injustice to his neighbour cannot be believed to have turned to God; no one can be near God, learning what is just toward him, and not be near his neighbour, learning what is unfair to him. His will, which is the man, lays hold of righteousness. If a man is to be blamed for not choosing righteousness, not turning to the light, then the man who does choose and turn is to be justified in his deed and declared righteous. He is not yet thoroughly righteous, but is growing toward it; he needs a creative God, and time for will and effort, since only he in whom God’s image is perfected can act perfectly. Born without righteousness, he cannot see or know perfect righteousness, and it would be the deepest injustice to demand of him, with a penalty, more than he knows how to yield; yet it is the highest lore constantly to demand perfect righteousness of him as what he must attain, and he must keep turning to righteousness and abjuring iniquity, aiming at God’s perfection. Such obedient faith, being all God himself can require of him, is most justly called by God righteousness in the man. It would not be enough for God, or Jesus, or any perfected saint, who know perfect righteousness and choose it; but because of its life and growth it is enough at a given moment for the disciple of the Perfect. Abraham’s righteousness was not to compare with Paul’s. He did not fight with himself for righteousness as Paul did, not because he was better but because his idea of what was required was far short of Paul’s; yet he was righteous in the same way: he had begun, and his faith, an all-embracing act recognizing God as his law, was called righteousness. A single righteous deed could hardly be imputed to a man as righteousness; a man not trying after righteousness may do many righteous acts that will not be forgotten, but neither will they count as righteousness. Abraham began at the start of the long, slow, disappointing preparation of the Jewish people, Paul at its close, with the story of Jesus behind him. Both believed and obeyed God, and both were righteous, because they gave themselves up to God to make them righteous; not to call them so would be unjust. But God is utterly just, and nowise resembles a legal-minded Roman emperor, or a bad pope formulating the doctrine of vicarious sacrifice.
What, then, is the righteousness which is of God by faith? It is simply what God wants every man to be, wrought out in him by constant obedient contact with God himself. It is not an attribute but a fact of character in God and man: God’s righteousness wrought out in us. It does not consist in obeying this or that law; even keeping every law to a hair’s-breadth would not be righteousness. To be righteous is to be such a heart, soul, mind and will as, without regard to law, would recoil in horror from the lightest breach of any law; so in love with what is fair and right that anything less than absolutely righteous is impossible. It is not love of righteousness in the abstract but such love of fair play toward everyone we meet that anything less than joyfully fulfilling our divine relation to each is impossible. God’s righteousness goes far beyond deeds, and requires love and helping mercy as our highest obligation and justice to our fellows, even those who have done us nothing but wrong. Our relations with others, God first and then our neighbour, must one day become, as in true nature they are, the gladness of our being, and nothing will seem good for us that is not in harmony with them. What heart in the kingdom of heaven would dream of constructing a metaphysical system of what we owed to God and why? The light of our life, our sole, eternal, infinite joy, is simply God–God–God–nothing but God, and all his creatures in him. He is all and in all, and the children of the kingdom know it. Not to be true to anything he has made is to be untrue to him. God is truth, is life; to be in God is to know him and need no law. Existence will be eternal Godness.
You would not like that way of it? There is no other; but before judging it you must know a little of God as he is, not as you imagine him–for no creature can know him as he is and not desire him, until we live in and for him with all our conscious heart. That is why the Jews did not like the Lord: he cared so simply for his father’s will, and not for anything they called his will.
The righteousness which is of God by faith in the source of righteousness is the same kind of thing as God’s righteousness, differing only as the created from the creating. The righteousness of him who does the will of his father in heaven is that of Jesus Christ, God’s own. The man who has it thinks about things as God thinks, loves what God loves, cares for nothing God does not care about. Even while it is being born in him, he will say of this thing or that, ‘Does God care about it? No. Then I will not care!’ If he does not know whether God cares, he will say, ‘If God cares that I should have my desire, he will give it; meanwhile I will do my work.’ The man with God’s righteousness loves not merely what is right but the very rightness in it. He loves not only a thought but the man in his thinking it, the thought alive in the man. He does not take his joy from himself; it comes to him from others–from God first, then from somebody, anybody, everybody. He would rather, in the fulness of his content, cease to exist than that another should. He could do without knowing himself, but could not know himself and spare one of the brothers or sisters God gave him. The man who really knows God is content with what God, the very self of his self, chooses for him; he is entirely God’s, not at all his own. His consciousness of himself is the reflex from those about him, not a turning of his regard inward. His joy is in being what God has made him, and in contemplating what God is and what he has made his fellows. He wants nothing, and feels he has all things, for he is in his father’s bosom, and his father’s thoughts come to him. If he needs anything, it is his before he asks; for his father has willed him, in the might and truth of his fatherhood, to be one with himself.
This then, or something like it, for words are poor to tell the best things, is the righteousness which is of God by faith–so far from being built on the rubbish heap of legal fiction called vicarious sacrifice, or its shadow imputed righteousness, that only the child with the child-heart can understand it, so far ahead of the wise and prudent. The wise and prudent interpret God by themselves and do not understand him; the child interprets God by himself and understands him. The wise and prudent must arrange things to their mind before they can say I believe; the child sees, believes, obeys–and knows he must be perfect as his father in heaven is perfect. If an angel seeming to come from heaven told him God would be content with less, would pass by a great deal because it was so hard for him to be quite good and God loved him so dearly, the child of God would at once recognize, woven with the angel’s starry brilliancy, the flicker of the flames of hell, and say, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’ There would be no merit in it, for were the deceiver’s words imagined true for a moment, a shadow of hell would gloom over creation, hope would vanish, the glory would die out of the face of God–until a thunderous no burst from the caverns of the universe, and the truth, flashing on his soul from the heart of the Eternal, Immortal, Invisible, withered up the lie.
‘But how can God bring this about in me?’
Let him do it, and perhaps you will know; if you never know, yet it will be. Help him to do it, or he cannot. He originates the possibility of your being his son or daughter and makes you able to will it, but you must will it. If you have so far prevented him from beginning, why should I tell you, even if I knew the process, how he would do what you will not let him do? What claim have you to know? How could you, before the work has begun, when it deals with things you cannot yet know? Perhaps if you approved the plans of the glad creator, you would let him make something divine of you! To teach your intellect what has to be learned by your whole being, what cannot be understood without the whole being–if that is any man’s province, it is not mine. Let the dead bury their dead, and the dead teach their dead; I will try to wake them. To those who are awake I cry, ’For the sake of your father and the first-born among many brethren, and of those he has given us to love most dearly, let patience have her perfect work. Statue under the chisel, stand steady to the sculptor’s mallet. Clay on the wheel, let the divine potter’s fingers model you at their will. Obey the Father’s lightest word; hear the Brother who knows you, and died for you; beat down your sin, and trample it to death.
Brother, when thou sittest at home in thy house, the temple of the Lord, open all thy windows to breathe the air of his approach; set the watcher on thy turret to listen into the dark, thy hand on the latch to open at his first knock. If thou openest and seest no one, do not say he did not knock; understand that he is there and wants thee to go out to him. He may have something for thee to do. Do it, and perhaps thou wilt return with a new prayer, to find a new window in thy soul.
Never wait for a fitter time or place to talk to him; to wait till thou goest to church or closet is to make him wait. He listens as thou walkest in the lane or the crowded street, on the common or in the place of shining concourse.
Remember, if thou art able to know it, that the service he requires is not done in any church. He will say to no man, ‘You never went to church: depart from me,’ but, ‘Inasmuch as you never helped one of my father’s children, you have done nothing for me.’ Church or chapel is not the place for divine service. It is a place of prayer and praise, of feeding on good things and learning of God, as what place is not? It is a place to look in your neighbour’s eyes and love God along with him. But the world where you live and love and labour, not the church you go to on your holiday, is the place of divine service. Serve your neighbour, and you serve him.
Do not heed much if men mock you and speak lies of you, or defend you unworthily out of goodwill. Heed not much if even the righteous turn their backs on you; only take heed that you do not turn from them. Take courage that there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.
The Final Unmasking
The passage: Nothing is covered that will not be revealed, and nothing hidden that will not be known (Matthew x. 26; Luke xii. 2).
God is not a God who hides but one who reveals. All his work with his creatures is revelation: giving them truth and showing himself, so that they may know him, draw nearer, and become more and more his companions. If we are in the dark about something, it is never because he hides it, but because we are not yet able to receive it.
We may say without irreverence that God could not do at once what he takes time to do. His will cannot finally be thwarted, and where it is thwarted for a time, that serves a higher part of it. He gave man the power to thwart him so that man might in the end do his will in a higher way than otherwise possible: God sacrifices his will to man, and lets him do wrong, so that man may become like God, give all to the truth, and choose and love righteousness.
The Lord puts the fact that all things are slowly coming into the light of human knowledge, so far as creatures can know, to three uses. One we leave aside (Mark iv. 22; Luke viii. 16): it presses those who have light to let it shine and help bring everything out. In Luke xii. 2 he turns it against hypocrisy, to show its futility; in Matthew x. 25 he uses it to urge fearlessness about our words and actions being misread.
However the Lord means it to be worked out, he gives us to understand, as a fixed principle of the universe, that whatever the unrighteous want hidden, and whatever pains the righteous to have hidden, will come out into the light.
‘Beware of hypocrisy,’ says the Lord, ‘for nothing is covered that will not be revealed, nothing hidden that will not be known.’ What is hypocrisy? Wanting to look better than you are, hiding what you do because you would be ashamed to have it known. The doing is foul; hiding it to seem better is fouler. Whoever does not live in his own consciousness as under the open sky is a hypocrite, and for most of us the question is whether we are growing less of one or more: ashamed of our lack of openness, and fighting the temptation. The Lord has nothing to be ashamed of before God and the universe, and will not rest until he has us in the same freedom. To encourage us he says that those who hunger and thirst after righteousness will be filled, as righteous as the spirit of the Father and Son in them can make them desire.
The Lord says also: ‘If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more will they call his household that! So do not fear them, for nothing is covered that will not be revealed.’ For anyone who loves righteousness and his fellow men, being misunderstood is always painful, and unavoidable when he acts on principles beyond those around him: half-hearted Christians, who think themselves lawgivers of righteousness, accuse him of the very things his life aims to destroy. The Lord himself was called a drunkard and a keeper of bad company, and might be so judged today by not a few who bear his name and preach temperance and virtue. He lived on a spiritual height they cannot see from where they stand. He bore their slander unshaken, and comforts his messengers, who must fare as he did. While people count themselves Christians on any ground other than being slaves of Jesus Christ, children of God, free from themselves, they will treat his servants badly. ‘Do not hesitate to speak the truth that is in you,’ he says. ‘Never mind what they call you; proclaim it from the housetops; fear nobody.’
He spoke these words to those he counted on first to spread the news of the kingdom, but they apply to all who obey him. Few who have tried to do their duty escape being annoyed, disappointed, even enraged by the hostility, misunderstanding and misrepresentation they meet, mostly from people they have helped by being neighbours to all, and from those people’s friends. Tales of heartlessness and ingratitude show how low humanity can sink without willed effort after righteousness. Judgments from imagined superiority are hard to bear too: the rich man who squeezes his workmen to the last penny lectures his poor relation on extravagance over some tiny generosity! If someone trying to live more truly merely lives differently from his neighbours, odd motives will be invented for it. The honest soul can take comfort that the truth will one day be known, and no one will believe what dull heads and hearts reported of him. More satisfying still will be the unveiling for a man misunderstood by those who ought to know him better, who, not even grasping the issue, assume he is about to do wrong while he is crying for courage to heed only the Lord. How many accept ‘Be not conformed to this world’ without seeing that what they call Society, and bow to as supreme, is the World itself, and that those who care what people say are conformed to it, taking its shape! The true man owes Society no deference as judge or lawgiver: the law of Jesus Christ frees him from the law of the World. Let him do right and ignore worthless opinion; the less he heeds tongues, the easier it is to love people. He will not carry the brand of ignorant or malicious judgment through eternity; he will find his peers and be judged by them.
But you who look to the light to vindicate you: are you ready for the exposure the general unveiling must bring, and willing to have the truth whatever it is? I do not mean: is your conscience so clear that you fear no exposure to men and angels? God knows it all already. I mean: do you so love the truth and the right that you would welcome, or at least willingly accept, the exposure of what in you is still unknown to yourself, even if it shames and humbles you and so serves the truth? You may have been wrong about the people whose wrongs to you you wait for God’s judgment to right. Would you welcome any discovery that made you more true by showing what in you was false, even if it excused them? If you can face the revelation of hidden things like that, you are of the truth and need not be afraid; whatever comes can only make you more true, humble and pure.
Does the Lord mean that everything anyone has ever done or thought will be laid bare to the universe?
As far as is needed for those who have known him, or have reason to know him, to understand him. From then on, a true man will be transparent to everyone able to read him. He may not be understood by those below him, then any more than now, but everything will work toward revelation, nothing toward concealment or misunderstanding. A man will hold his door open to anyone who wants to walk in, because his house is a temple of the living God, with things worth seeing and nothing to hide. In the true world nothing needs covering, and there will always be more to uncover. Everyone’s light will shine for his neighbour’s good and glory.
‘Will all my weaknesses, evil habits, pettiness, the wrong thoughts I cannot help—will all of it be set out before the universe?’
Yes, if they dominate you so far that they are you. But if you have come out of the darkness and are honestly fighting to walk in the light, you may hope in God your father that what he has cured, is curing and has forgiven will be heard of no more, since it is no longer part of you. If some of your evil must still be seen, it will be seen for what it is: things you are at war with, not things you cherish. God will be fair to you—so fair!—with a father’s fairness: he wants you clean, and will neither spare you any shame you need nor expose you to any you don’t. What we have risen above is dead and forgotten, or if remembered, God is there to comfort us: ‘If any man sin, we have a comforter with the Father.’ We can trust God with our past as with our future: it will not hurt us as long as we do not try to hide things and are ready to bow our heads in honest shame where we should. To be ashamed is a holy and blessed thing. Shame shames only those who want to appear good, not those who want to be. In God’s name let us have nothing to be ashamed of, and meet any shame on its way, for to be humbly ashamed is to be plunged in the cleansing bath of the truth.
I need not speak of the revelation of God’s ways, which he has always made, and always will, to his prophet and his child. But let me say a word about another kind: the revelation of their own evil to the evil.
The only truly terrible revelation is that of a man to himself. What a horror for a vile man—above all one whose pleasure has been heightened by others’ suffering, whom decent people would shun but who has never seen what he is—when his eyes open and he sees himself as the pure see him, as God sees him! Imagine him waking all at once to the eyes of the universe fixed on him in loathing astonishment, and seeing himself as they see him: what a waking, into the full glare of fact and awareness, of truth and its violation!
To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself!
Or think what it must be for a man who counts himself religious, orthodox and exemplary to see suddenly that he had no religion, only love of self; no love of the right, only love of being in the right. He was simply a hypocrite, loving to appear and not to be. If I understand the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the sharpest reversals will come among the rich. Who has not seen the rich treat the poor with appalling, insolent meanness while counting themselves among the elect? Mammon, the most contemptible of gods, is the most worshipped, in church and out, and for many religious rich people the damning revelation will be how they treated the poor they thought themselves so kind to. ‘He flatters himself in his own eyes until his iniquity is found to be hateful.’ A man may loathe a thing in the abstract for years and find he has been guilty of it all along. Many a man might agree with this who cages a carrion bird in his own chest, never knowing it for what it is because its plumage differs a little from the bird he calls by an ugly name.
The worst off among those who will one day stand in dismay, aware that their very existence is a shame, will be those who knowingly betrayed their fellows, pretending friendship to use their neighbours for their own ends, and especially those who divided friends. Dante put such people in the lowest hell. If God hates one thing, it must be treachery. Do not imagine Judas is the only man of whom the Lord would say, ‘Better were it for that man if he had never been born!’ Did he speak in anger at his apostle’s treachery to him, or in pity and horror at what it is to be such a man? What is more pitiful than to know you yourself are that false one? ‘O God,’ we think, ‘how terrible if it were I!’ It is just as terrible that it should be Judas. And have I not done things with the same germ in them, which brought to its evil perfection would be treachery? Unless I love my neighbour as myself, I may one day betray him! Let us be compassionate and humble, and hope for every man.
A man can sink so slowly that long after he is a devil he may still pass for a good churchman or dissenter, and think himself a good Christian. Sin repeated against even the faintest conscience must bring a dreadful awakening. Some never wake to how wicked they are until a self-righteous crowd is staring at them, one doing similar things itself but not yet found out, sinning in another style and so judging hardest, hoping to escape judgment by condemning. What if the only way to wake the treacherous, money-loving Judas to himself was to let it run to the end, and his kiss betray the Master? He did not hate the Master when he kissed him; but not being a true man, his very love betrayed him.
The good man, aware of his own evil and wanting no refuge but the purifying light, will chiefly rejoice that exposing evil serves the victory of the truth, the kingdom of God and his Christ. In the unmasking of the hypocrite he sees God stepping in, for him and for everyone, between them and the lie.
The only triumph the truth can ever have is its recognition by the heart of the liar. Its victory is in the man who, not content with saying ‘I was blind and now I see,’ cries: ‘Lord God, just and true, let me perish, but you endure! Let me live because you live, because you save me from the death in myself, the untruth I have fed and even called righteousness! Hallowed be your name, for you alone are true, loving, holy, humble and unselfish, seeking never your own but the good of your children! Father, be true, and every man a liar!’
The injured can have no satisfaction of revenge. The severest punishment a wrongdoer can suffer is simply to be made to know what he is, because his nature is from God and the deepest thing in him is divine. Nothing less than the sinner’s seeing the enormity of his injury can satisfy the injured. While he admits no wrong, mocks amends, or rejoices in the wrong he admits, no suffering could satisfy revenge, far less justice. So satisfied justice is bound to come, and satisfied revenge is impossible for ever. The moment the only adequate punishment, a vision of himself, begins to work on the sinner, he has begun to grow righteous, and the brother he wronged has no choice but to take him to his heart, the more tenderly because he is repentant, was lost and is found. Here the divine extremes meet, the extreme of punishment and the embrace of heaven. I venture to think a created soul can know no agony like seeing itself vile by its own choice, and no delight, short of oneness with the Father, like seeing the heaven of forgiveness open, with its shining stair to the natural home where the Father has waited all along for his child’s return.
So, friends, however angry we may be, however justly, no revenge is possible for us in the Father’s universe. I may say to myself, ‘I would love to make that man see what a wretch he is, and what every honest person thinks of him!’ But when the moment comes he will loathe himself ten times more than anyone else could, and my heart will bury his sin, swamped by an ocean of pity from its divine source. Let us try to forgive in advance. Does anyone dare suppose Jesus wants him to hate the traitor through whom he came to the cross? Has he been pleased, through all these ages, with how his nation has been treated, and still is, by those who bear his name? We have not yet sounded the depths of forgiveness required of his disciples!
Our friends will know us then. Will their hearts sink at our real likeness, or will they be glad to find us less to blame than they thought in this or that which troubled them?
Let us remember, though, that not only evil will be unveiled: many a misunderstanding will turn out to hide a face radiant with the loveliness of the truth. Whatever disappointments come, every true heart has one sufficient joy: it stands on the border of the kingdom, about to enter ever fuller possession of the inheritance of the saints in light.