The passage: Jesus told everyone that whoever would follow him must deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow; whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses it for his sake will save it (St. Luke ix. 23, 24).
Christ is the way out and the way in: out of slavery, conscious or unconscious, into liberty; out of the unhomeliness of things to the home we desire but do not know; from the stormy skirts of the Father’s garments to the peace of his bosom. To picture him we need endless figures, some of them opposed: he is the door of the sheepfold and the shepherd of the sheep, the way and the leader in the way, the rock that followed and the captain of our salvation. We must become as little children, and Christ must be born in us. We must learn of him, and the one lesson he has to give is himself: he first does all he wants us to do and is first all he wants us to be. We must see things as he saw them, take God’s will as the very life of our being, and care neither for our own way nor for what is said of us. The world must be nothing to us.
I would not be misunderstood. By the world I mean not the world God makes and means, still less the human hearts in it, but the world man makes by choosing the perversion of his own nature, a world opposed to God’s. I mean every way of judging and thinking—political, economic, ecclesiastical, social or individual—that is not God’s: that leaves him out of account, does not set his will supreme as the one law of life, and cares for the customs of society, the practice of the trade, the usage of the time, rather than what is true and right. From everything against the teaching of Jesus, from the world in the heart of the best man in it, and above all in his own heart, the disciple must turn to follow him. The first thing in all progress is to leave something behind; to follow him is to leave one’s self behind. “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself.”
Some take this to mean that the disciple must go against his likings because they are his likings, thinking that abstaining from what is pleasant or doing what is disagreeable, thwarting the lower nature, is good in itself. I will not dare say what a man may not get good from, if he does it in simplicity and honesty. When a man, wanting to do right, mistakenly does wrong, God will see that he is shown the better way, perhaps by means of the very mistake. I allow that a mere effort of will, arbitrary and uninformed by duty, may add to a man’s power over his lower nature. But in that nature God must rule, not the man, however well he means. From a man’s ruling himself in the smallest opposition, however devout, to the law of his being, comes the huge danger of nourishing, through the pride of self-conquest, a far worse self than the unchained animal self: the demoniac self. True victory over self is God’s victory in the man; subjugation is not enough, it must be subjugation by God. In whatever a man does without God he must fail miserably, or succeed more miserably. No part of a man can rule another part, for God created it, and the part is greater than the whole. By crossing his natural and therefore rightful inclinations, a man may develop a self-satisfaction that is a root of all sin: doing what God does not require, he becomes not a law but a law-giver to himself, who commands rather than obeys. The diseased satisfaction some feel in laying burdens on themselves pampers, little as they suspect it, the most dangerous appetite of the very self they think they are mortifying. All God’s creatures are good, received with thanksgiving; a thing becomes evil only when used where a higher law forbids, or refused for self-discipline where no higher law forbids and God therefore allows it. To be his own schoolmaster is a dangerous position; the pupil cannot be expected to progress, except in the wrong direction. To enjoy heartily and thankfully, and to do cheerfully without when God wills, is the way to live with regard to the lower nature, which must not be confused with the things of the world. If anyone calls this dangerous doctrine, I answer that God’s law is enough for me; man’s laws are false and come of rebellion. God, not man, is our judge.
It is not to thwart or tease the poor self that Jesus speaks; God did not give it to us for that. He tells us to leave it altogether—yield, deny, refuse, lose it—and only so shall we save it and have a share in our own being. The self is given us to sacrifice, so that we, like Christ, may have something to offer. We are to abandon it utterly, not torment it; then it can no more be vexed.
“What can this mean? We are not to thwart, but to abandon? How abandon, without thwarting?”
It means this: we must refuse and deny self altogether as a ruling or originating element in us. It is no longer to be the regent of our action. We are no more to think, “What should I like to do?” but “What would the Living One have me do?” It is not selfish to take what God has made us desire, nor are we very good to yield it when he would take it from us; we would be very bad not to. But to yield it heartily, without struggle or regret, is to deny the Self itself, not just something it would like. The Self is God’s making, but it must be the “slave of Christ,” that the Son may make it also the free son of the same Father; it must receive all from him and follow him, with Christ as its law. The time will come when it is so possessed and enlarged by the indwelling God, its deepest self, that no enforced denial is needed: it will have learned to receive with thanksgiving, demand nothing, and no longer turn on its own centre. God’s eternal denial of himself, revealed in him who took up his cross daily in the flesh, will have developed in the man, whose eternal rejoicing will be in God and his fellows, before whom he will cast his glad self to be a carpet for their walk, a footstool for their rest, a stair for their climbing.
To deny oneself, then, is to act no longer from the standing-ground of self; to allow no private communication between the self and the will; not to let the right hand know what the left hand does. No grasping, no wish to feel worthy, no ambition, no wish to surpass another, no longing for men’s praise shall move the will. It is to shrink from no contempt of community or country that goes against the mind of the Living One, and for no love or entreaty of parent, spouse, child, friend or lover to turn aside from following him: we forsake them all as ruling powers in our lives, and do nothing to please them that would not first please him. Right deeds, not the judgment on them, and true words, not their reception, shall be our care. We shall not love money, trust in it, or seek it as the business of life; and whether we have it or not, we must think of it as the gift of God, not a windfall of circumstance. By the uplooking will we must draw our life fresh every moment from the Living One, and not glory in the mere consciousness of health and being. It is God who feeds us, warms us, quenches our thirst; we must know that even our understanding is his, and that we live and feed on him every hour. To know this in the depth of our knowing is to deny ourselves and take God instead; to try after it is to begin the denial, following him who never sought his own. So we must deny all anxieties and fears: when young, not minding what the world calls failure; when old, not being vexed that we forget, cannot do, or grow weak or ill. We have to do with God, who can, not with ourselves, where we cannot; the being we could not make is his care, and our care is to will his will, his to give us all things. This is to deny ourselves. “Self, I have not to consult you but him whose idea is the soul of you, and of which you are as yet all unworthy—the Causing of you, not the caused you. You may be my consciousness, but you are not my being; if you were, what a poor, dingy, weak wretch I should be! My life is hid with Christ in God, with you certainly, but as an obedient servant, not a master. Submit, or I will cast you from me and pray for another consciousness. God is more to me than my consciousness of myself: he is my life, and you are only so much of it as my poor half-made being can grasp at once. Because I have fooled and spoiled you, treating you as my very self, you have dwindled and lessened me till I am ashamed of myself, and I am often disgusted by your paltry, mean face. No! Let me have the company of the Perfect One, my elder brother, not of you! I will not make a friend of the mere shadow of my own being. Good-bye, Self! I deny you, and will do my best every day to leave you behind me.”
And in this we must not forget that when Jesus tells us to follow him, come to him, believe in him, he speaks first and always as the Son of the Father, in the active sense: the obedient God, not one who claims sonship as ground for further claim. He is the Son who came expressly and only to do the Father’s will. When he says Follow me, he himself is following the Father; his face is set homeward. Even this is nothing unless we believe in him, which is to do as he does. We must believe in him altogether practically, as he believed in his Father: not as one about whom we hold something, but as one we follow out of the body of this death into eternal life. To hold a theory about why he died or wherein lay his atonement is not to follow him; such things are revealed only to those who follow him in his active being, who do as he did and live as he lived. He is all for the Father; we must be too. To follow him is to learn of him, to think his thoughts, use his judgments, see and feel as he did, so that we may be of one mind with his Father. Nothing less, even working miracles and casting out devils, makes a disciple; busy from morning to night doing great things for him on any other road, we should only earn the answer, “I never knew you.” When he says, “Take my yoke upon you,” he does not mean a yoke he lays on us; it is his own yoke, the Father’s will, which he carries and would have us bear with him. Of this yoke he says it is easy, of this burden that it is light—and he says it with Gethsemane before him and the hour and power of darkness waiting. There is no magnifying of himself. He first denies himself and takes up his cross, and then tells us to do the same. The Father magnifies the Son; the Son magnifies the Father.
We must be jealous for God against ourselves, and watch the cunning, deceitful Self—always so until it is thoroughly denied, left quite empty of our will and regard, and God has come into it and made it, not indeed an adytum, but a pylon for himself. Until then even its denials and its turnings from dear things for Christ’s sake will foster its self-regard and breed a deeper self-worship. While it is only thwarted and not denied, satisfaction with conquered difficulty may minister yet more to its self-congratulation. When the Self cannot have honour for its gifts, its conquests, and the “golden opinions bought from all sorts of people,” it will please itself with its abnegations and forsakings. It may not call itself a saint, but it will soon feel itself one, a superior creature looking down on the foolish world, walking on high “above the smoke and stir of this dim spot,” and worshipping itself the more intently because it has given up the approval of others and no longer needs them to assure it of its merits. In a thousand ways Self will delude itself. Christ sought nothing but his Father’s will; we have to grow diamond-clear, true as the white light of morning. A hopeless task, were it not that he offers to come himself and dwell in us.
I have wondered whether “take up his cross” was already a common phrase when the Lord said it, since he had not yet told them he would be crucified. I can hardly believe crucifixion so common that bearing the cross had passed into ordinary speech. As the Lord’s idea was new to men, so I think was its image. I grant that, being so hateful to the Jews, it might have come to stand for the worst human misery, but would they use as a figure something that so sorely showed their slavery? I hardly think so. Certainly it had not come to stand for the self-abnegation he had just brought to light, hardly yet to the light, only the twilight; and nothing less, it seems to me, can have suggested the terrible symbol.
But although the denial of self is an entire and absolute idea, it has to be done daily. It is deeper and harder than any single effort of the most herculean will, for the will itself is not pure or free until the Self is absolutely denied. The water of life from the well within us takes long to permeate every part of our spiritual frame, until at last, reaching the outermost folds of our personality, it casts out disease, our bodies are redeemed by indwelling righteousness, and creation is delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. Every day till then we must take up our cross, and every hour see that we are carrying it. A birthright may be lost for a mess of pottage, and what Satan calls a trifle must be a thing of eternal significance.
Is there not many a Christian who, having begun to deny himself, spends much strength in the vain and evil effort to accommodate matters between Christ and the dear Self, seeking to save what he must so certainly lose, and in how different a way from the Master’s! It is one thing to have the loved self devoured of hell in hate, horror and disappointment, another to yield it to the conscious possession of the living God, who will then first raise it to its true individuality, freedom and life. With its cause within it, it shall indeed be saved. Here is the promise to those who leave all and follow him: “Whosoever shall lose his life, for my sake, the same shall save it”—in St. Matthew, “find it.” What speech of men or angels can shadow this dimly glorious hope! To lose ourselves in the salvation of God’s heart! To be no longer a care to ourselves, but to know God taking divinest care of us! To be a resting-place for divine love, a branch of the tree of life for the dove to alight on, an open air of love, a thoroughfare for the thoughts of God and all holy creatures! To know one’s self by the reflex action of endless brotherly presence, yearning for nothing from anyone, pouring out love by the natural motion of the spirit! To revel in the hundredfold of everything good we left for his sake, above all in the unsought love of those who love us as we love them! To know that God and we mean the same thing, that we are pleasing to the Father; to live nestling at his knee, climbing to his bosom, blessed in the simple being that is one with God! What a self to receive again for the one we left! We left it paltry, low and mean; he took up the poor cinder of a consciousness, carried it back to the workshop of his spirit, made it a true thing, radiant, clear, fit for eternal companying and indwelling, and restored it to us for ever!
All high things can be spoken only in figures, which cannot fit intellectually matters too high for them; they can be truly interpreted only by those who have the spiritual fact in themselves. Speaking of a man and his soul implies a self and a self reacting on each other, and we cannot divide ourselves so; the figure suits imperfectly. The Lord never meant to explain things to our understanding; what we need is a word to think with about high things, and a true figure, though far from perfect, gives us that. But the imperfection of his figures cannot lie in excess: any symbol falls short of the meaning it holds. It is the low stupidity of an unspiritual nature that reads his meaning as less than his symbols; the true soul sees that his words always represent more than they present. There is no joy belonging to human nature as God made it that will not be enhanced a hundredfold for the man who gives up himself, though he may seem to yield the very essence of life. To yield self is to give up grasping at things in their second causes, as men call them, which are merely God’s means, and to receive them from their source, seeing where they come from. The careless soul takes the Father’s gifts as if things had a way of dropping into his hand. So he is a slave of chance and his own blundering: for the good that comes he gives no thanks, for who is there to thank? At his disappointments he grumbles, for there must be someone to blame! What power would not be worse than squandered in sustaining him in his paltry, low-aimed existence? No world could be built on such an idea. It is the children who shall inherit the earth; those who will not be children cannot possess it. The hour is coming when all that art, science and nature can give, in ennobling subjugation to the higher as man is subject to the Father, shall be the endless delight of the sons and daughters of God. To the man to whom God is all in all, God can give these things; another cannot receive them. We are not to love God for what he can give; we cannot love him except because he is our God and altogether good and beautiful. But neither may we forget what the Lord does not forget: in the end, when truth is victorious, God will answer his creature in the joy of his heart. For what is joy but the harmony of the spirit? The good Father made his children to be joyful; only, before they can enter his joy they must be like him, ready to sacrifice joy to truth. No promise of such joy appeals to selfishness; every reward Christ holds out enters the soul only as a death to selfishness. His heaven is a loving of all, a forgetting of self, each dwelling in all and all in each. A joyful child is rarely selfish, even in the nursery; it is not selfish to be joyful. What could keep him who sees the face of God from joy? That bliss lies behind all other bliss. The one bliss of the universe is the presence of God, which is God being to the man, and felt by him as being, what in his own nature he is: the indwelling power of his life. God must be to his creature what he is in himself, for only by his essential being can he create; his presence is the unceasing call and response of father to child. Where is the selfishness in being so made happy? It may be deep selfishness to refuse to be happy. Is there selfishness in the Lord’s seeing the travail of his soul and being satisfied? Selfishness is taking bliss from another; finding one’s bliss in another’s is not selfishness, and the greater the joy so reaped, the farther from it. The one bliss next to the love of God is the love of our neighbour. If anyone says, “You love because it makes you blessed,” I deny it: we are blessed because we love. No one could reach the bliss of loving his neighbour who was selfish and sought it from love of himself. Love is unselfishness. In the main we love because we cannot help it; there is no merit in it, but neither is it selfish. Many confound righteousness with merit and say, “If it makes you happy to love, where is your merit? It is only selfishness!” There is no merit, I reply, yet the love born in us is our salvation from selfishness and the very essence of righteousness. That a thing is joyful does not mean I do it for the joy of it, and when the joy is in others it is pure. That certain joys should be joys is the very denial of selfishness; the man whom love itself did not make joyful would be demoniacally selfish. It is selfish to enjoy content while beholding others lack; even in the highest spiritual bliss, to sit careless of others would be selfishness, and the higher the bliss, the worse. But that bliss is surely right of which a great part is labour that others may share it, and I do not doubt such labour will be a great part of our heavenly gladness; the redeeming Father will find plenty of like work for his children. Those who think that where all are good things must be dull have little Christian imagination; it is because there is so little good in them yet that they know so little of the beauty of life divine. There will be interest and variety enough, not without pain, in helping those still wearily toiling up the heights of truth, perhaps unwilling to part with the miserable self which, while they cherish it, they are not yet worth being or capable of having.
Some of the things a man may have to forsake in following Christ are not forsaken because of what they are in themselves. Nature, art, science and fit society are not among the things he loses in forsaking himself: they are God’s and have no part in the world of evil, false judgments, low wishes and unrealities that make up the conscious life of the self that must be denied; that life will never be restored to him. But in forsaking himself to do his true work in the world, a man may find he must for a time leave some of God’s things—not as bad things, but because they draw his mind from the necessities of the true life in himself or others, and there is no room for them until those of paramount claim have been so heeded that these no longer impede but further them. Then he who knows God will find that knowledge opens his understanding to all else; he will behold things from within instead of searching wearily into them from without. This gave King David more understanding than all his teachers. Then the things he left will be restored a hundredfold. So it is in forsaking friends. To forsake them for Christ is not to forsake them as evil or to cease to love them—“for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?”—but to let their love cast not even a shadow between us and our Master, and to be content to lose their approval, company, even affection, where the Master says one thing and they another. It is to learn to love them in a higher, tenderer, truer way, which keeps all that was genuine in the former and loses all that was false. We shall love their selves, and disregard our own.
I do not forget the Lord’s word about hating father and mother. I have a glimpse of its meaning, but dare not try to explain it now. It is all against the self, not against the father and mother.
There is another kind of forsaking that may fall to some, and may be very difficult: forsaking the notions of God and his Christ they were taught in youth, which they held, and could not help holding, when they began to believe. They have begun to doubt whether they are true, but casting them away feels like parting with every assurance of safety.
There are so-called doctrines long accepted by good people which I find hard to understand how any man can hold and love God, except by closing the spiritual eyes tight. If a man cares more for opinion than for life, it is not worth persuading him to renounce his opinions; he would only put others in the same place of honour, a place that can belong to no opinion. What such a man believes matters nothing, for he is not a true man: holding with a school he supposes right, he props himself up with the worst unbelief of all, opinion calling itself faith. But for him who is in earnest about God’s will it is of endless consequence to think rightly of God; he cannot come close to him or truly know his will while his notion of him is in any point that of a false god. If he seems to himself to give up even his former assurance of salvation by yielding ideas of God unworthy of God, he must nonetheless take up that cross also. He will come to see that he must follow no doctrine, however truly man’s word could state it, but the living Truth, the Master himself.
Many good souls will one day be horrified at what they now believe of God. If they have not thought about it but have given themselves to obedience, they may have done little harm so far; but they can make little progress in knowing God while, even passively, holding evil things true of him. If they do think about them and find no obstruction, they must be far from any true knowledge of God. But some find them a terrible obstruction and yet imagine, or fear, them true. These must take courage to forsake the false in any shape, to deny their old selves in the most seemingly sacred prejudices, and follow Jesus not as the tradition of the elders presents him but as he presents himself, with his apostles and the spirit of truth. There are “traditions of men” after Christ as well as before him, and far worse, as “making of none effect” higher and better things; we have to look to it how we have learned Christ.