The passage: “Children, how hard it is!” (St. Mark x. 24.)
I suspect nearly every thoughtful young rich man feels the Lord treated this young man harshly. He asks why the rich should find it hard to enter the kingdom of heaven and fare differently from everyone else in the world to come, taking a fact of nature for an arbitrary decree born of some prejudice in God or some objection to his creatures’ enjoyment. He fails to see that this is the law: they will fare like everyone else, when what they want is to fare as rich people. I can’t imagine heaven’s kingdom being easy for a rich man to enter: every earthly kingdom lets the rich in, and puts them first if they are rich enough. A rich man isn’t bound to belong to Satan’s kingdom, but he is especially welcome there, while heaven welcomes him just as it welcomes anyone.
I suspect too that many a rich man resents this story’s claim on everything he has, and that many people, rich or not, can’t believe the Lord really meant to take the poor fellow’s money. To a man born rich, wealth seems natural and essential to well-being; a man who made his own feels it is his through labour by day and worry by night. Each feels entitled to what he holds, so it seems hard that this right should collide with the necessity of entering heaven’s kingdom. Why can’t he have the best of both worlds? He would compromise if he could, serving Mammon a little and God a lot, and gaining something of heaven at the least cost to the world. But he doesn’t mean the best that comes from making the lower serve the higher, giving up this world’s treasure for heaven’s. What he wants of heaven isn’t its best, and what he won’t give up of the world is its worst.
I can easily picture an honest young man, brought up in Christian ways, reasoning like this. “Does this story apply to everyone? Must I give up everything if I become a Christian? That was easy then, and I’d have done it if the Saviour himself had asked. But wealth meant something different socially then; now I’d give up far more. Nor do I love money as he was in danger of doing; the Jews have always worshipped Mammon. I try to do good with mine. Besides, I’m a Christian already, so why ask the same of me as of a young Jew? If everyone with a conscience about money gave it all up, the irreligious would hold the power unopposed and the world would go to the devil. The Bible often mentions rich men but never tells another to part with everything. Ananias was struck dead for pretending to give all, not for keeping some, and Peter said the land was his own until sold, and the money his afterwards. How would the Lord have been buried without the rich Joseph? He did say, ‘If you want to be perfect, go and sell what you have,’ but I can’t be perfect; it’s hopeless, and he doesn’t expect it.” It would be more honest to say, “I don’t want to be perfect; I’m content to be saved.” Such people don’t care about being perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect, only about being what they call saved, and little think that perfection is salvation: the two are one. “And besides,” he concludes in triumph, “the text says, ‘How hard it is for those who trust in riches to enter the kingdom of God!’ I don’t trust in my riches. I know they can’t save me.”
Suppose I were speaking with such a young man. I would state a truth only as a siege to win his surrender to the law of liberty; if I couldn’t persuade him, I’d keep quiet. I wouldn’t labour to instruct the keenest mind; I’d rather learn. Only persuading the heart, will and actions deserves a man’s full energy, first for his own manhood, then his neighbour’s: the beam out of his own eye before the speck out of his brother’s, if that speck is more than the end of his own beam. Making someone happy as a lark might be doing him serious wrong; making him wake up, rise, look up and turn is worth the life and death of the Son of the Eternal.
So I say to the young man:
“Have you been keeping the commandments?”
“I wouldn’t dare say that,” I imagine him answering. “I should know better than that young man how much the commandments demand.”
“But does that answer mean,” I press, “that you think the Lord a hard master and so have tried less to please him? Or that you have strained toward his perfect standard and seen that the law can’t be fulfilled? Surely you’ve noticed that the shocking command to give up everything came to someone who had kept the commandments for years. Have you kept them as he did, so that it could come to you? Dissatisfied with your keeping and longing to be perfect, have you gone on your knees to the Master to learn more of the way to eternal life? Or are you so content with yourself that you’ve never hungered and thirsted for God’s righteousness, the perfection of your being? If so, take comfort: the Master doesn’t ask you to sell what you have and give to the poor. You follow him, you preach good news with him, when you don’t care about righteousness! You’re not the company he wants, and he won’t ask for your purse; it’s nothing to him whether you give or keep. Is he to be obliged for money to someone outside his kingdom, false and ignoble? Bring him a true heart and an obedient hand, which he gave his life’s blood for.”
“Please don’t be harsh. I admit I haven’t been what I should, but I want to repent and enter into life. Don’t take my reluctance to throw everything away, without knowing it’s required, as disregard for higher things.”
“Then once more: go and keep the commandments. It hasn’t come to your money yet; you aren’t yet a child in the kingdom, caring for your father’s arms and not just the shelter of his roof. Let the commandments tell you how to use your money; it is pitiable presumption to wonder whether you must sell it all. Wait until keeping them has shown you the great reward of loving what’s right, then that for all your effort you’re only an unprofitable servant; until you know that only those who need no law can keep it, and would rather cease to be than live the poor, selfish life that is all you can call your own; until you sense something beyond your mind’s thought but not your heart’s longing, something not yours, seemingly never to be yours, without which your life is worthless. When all this brings you to the Master crying, ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’, he may say, ‘Sell all you have, give to the poor, and come follow me.’ Obey then and you’ll be most honourable; refuse and you’ll be most pitiable. Until then you’d be no comfort to him and no pleasure to his friends. For the young man, selling all and following him would have meant accepting a patent of nobility from God; it isn’t offered to you. If one of the disobedient gave up every straw he owned in hope of that honour, he’d just be sent back to keep the commandments in the easier circumstances of poverty.
“Does that comfort you? Alas for you! Your relief is that the Lord has no need of you, doesn’t require your money, and doesn’t offer you himself instead! You haven’t sold him for thirty pieces of silver, but you’re glad not to buy him with all you have. How do you differ from the young man in the story? He was invited to do everything, to share the divine nature; you never had the chance to refuse, because you aren’t fit to be invited. People like you can never enter the kingdom. You wouldn’t know you were in heaven if you were there.”
“But I don’t trust in my riches. I trust in the merits of my Lord and Saviour, in his finished work and the sacrifice he offered.”
“Yes, yes! You’ll trust in anything but the Man himself, who tells you it’s hard to be saved. All the merits of God and his Christ can’t give you eternal life; only God and his Christ can, and they can’t, and wouldn’t if they could, unless you keep the commandments. Knowing the living God is eternal life; what you need is not his merits but him. As for trusting in riches, who with even half a conscience or half a head could imagine that anyone relying on them to get him in could enter? A Jew confident in his wealth might hope it signalled God’s favour that wouldn’t fail him, or be too self-satisfied to imagine being lost; but trusting in his riches? No. Saying he doesn’t trust in them to take him into life is the last refuge of the money-worshipper, the man who needs wealth for his peace. The man who thinks of nothing else does trust in it, in a fearful sense; yet hundreds who do will say, ‘I don’t trust in my riches; I trust in…’ some stock phrase.”
“You’re forgetting yourself. You’re criticizing the Lord’s own words: he said, ‘How hard it is for those who trust in riches to enter the kingdom of heaven!’”
“I’m not. I believe our Lord never said those words. The two oldest manuscripts, the Sinaitic and the Vatican, read, ‘Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!’ I’m glad Westcott and Tischendorf prefer that reading, though Tregelles and the Revisers don’t. I take it to be the Lord’s. Some copyist with a rich man’s mind, uneasy at the Lord’s view of money and eager like you to compromise, added a marginal note: it isn’t having riches but trusting in them that makes entering hard! Hard? For a man who trusts in riches it is eternally impossible; it is the man who merely has them for whom it is hard. Is the Lord supposed to teach that a man who trusts in riches can enter, that this is impossible for men but possible with God? He never said it. Mr. Facingbothways’s annotation crept into the text and stands in the English version. Our Lord didn’t explain away his hard words; he let them stand as the burning fire meant to purge us. Where simplicity meets simplicity they are understood; the double heart must mistake. It is hard for a rich man, simply because he is rich, to enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Some comfort themselves that God will take the difficulty into account, another form of the notion that a rich man, having had his good things here, must have them there too. They’ll certainly get fairness, but what good is that if they don’t enter the kingdom? It is life they need; existence without it can’t be endured, yet they think they can do without eternal life if only they live for ever! Those who know what eternal life is count it the one terror to live on without it.
Take the Lord’s words, then, as he spoke them: “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!” He first has them reflect on how hard it is for anyone to enter, then restates the rich man’s difficulty more strongly: “It is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” It always has been and will be hard to enter; it is hard even to believe one must be born from above, passing into a new, unknown consciousness. The law-abiding Jew and the ceremonial Christian shrink from self-annihilation, from the life of grace and truth, from the high clear air of heavenly delight, and from the all-embracing love that fulfils the law and sets it aside; they can’t accept a state of being as itself eternal life. What is hard to believe in is hard to enter. How hard? As hard as the Master could put it: “If any man comes to me and does not hate … his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” A rich man finds this harder still, since so much is tied to his life to swell his sense of self that casting it off as the ugly shadow of the self God made is far harder.
Nobody knows how hard it is to enter the kingdom of heaven except those who have tried hard and not stopped trying. Don’t tell me one can pass at once into full assurance; I want not the certainty of eternal life but eternal life. Whatever other preachers say, in St Paul the spirit and flesh often fought. Only those who want life simply as eternal, and struggle every day and soon every hour, know how hard entering is; they see that no moment is life without the presence that strengthens. I don’t deny anyone’s testimony of peace and unspeakable joy as the instant result of the new birth; I say only that if by salvation they mean less than absolute oneness with God, it’s no salvation to me, and I wouldn’t be content with it with every joy of heaven thrown in. If they aren’t righteous as he is righteous, they aren’t saved, however glad; they are only on the way. If they don’t love their neighbour, not “as themselves” (a phrase hard to understand and not Christ’s) but as Christ loves him, I can’t count them entered into life, though life may have begun to enter them. The disciples little knew what the Lord’s “how hard it is to enter the kingdom” would ask of them.
New demands keep coming to the Christian; the Spirit’s ever-fresh calling is what works in the children of obedience. When he thinks he has arrived, he is in danger. When the mountain he has long climbed suddenly shows a distant peak, radiant white and nearly lost in heaven, that no human foot seems able to reach, then there is hope: it proves he has been climbing, since he sees what he couldn’t before. He may know little of what he is, but he learns again and again that he isn’t in the world as Jesus was; and the very wind that gives him courage as he climbs is the hope that one day he will be like him, seeing him as he is.
Possessions are things, and things, except as something to conquer and a means of spiritual gain, readily turn against the better life. Whoever depends on anything but life itself for his sense of well-being is a slave, hanging on something less than himself. A person isn’t perfect unless he could sit calmly content with every thing taken from him, aware of a well-being untouched, still possessing all things as a child of the Eternal. Things, our bodies first, are given to train us in independence of them and true possession of them: we must own them, not be owned. They are meant to mediate, as lower shapes of unseen things that belong to the unshakeable world of silence and being, not speech and showing. Those unseen things take form in time and space not to exist, since they exist in eternal Godhead, but to be known by those in training for the eternal, and God’s sons and daughters must possess them. Instead people grasp at the forms, treating the visible as what is to be owned and loving bodies rather than souls. Some good people can hardly believe that if the young man had given up his wealth, the Lord wouldn’t have told him to keep it; they think heaven’s treasure a poor substitute. “Isn’t wealth power?” they ask. It is, and so is a wolf hiding in a robe: the power of a brute machine whose levers and valves its owner hardly understands. Most readers of the story agree with the young man at his worst moment, as he turned away, except that they aren’t sorrowful.
Nobody can really possess things who can’t do without them, who wouldn’t be perfectly content in the knowledge that the cause of his being is present in his consciousness and with him. To be clear: anyone with God’s presence is content. What I mean is that only someone who has the Father, and is eternally content in him alone, can possess a sunset, a field of grass, a gold mine or a person’s love as God means him to. Whoever has God has all things, as their maker has them. To every man, woman and child I say: if you aren’t content, it’s because God isn’t with you as you need him, more than your body ever needed food or air, more than your soul ever hungered for joy or peace.
We must get free of the tyranny of things. See how urgent it is. However tightly the young man clings to his wealth, God will do what he can: his child won’t be left in the hell of possession. When the angel of death comes, where are the things that haunted the poor soul? The world and all in it slip from his hands and feet, taking his body, eyes and ears, and every purse and coffer that deluded him into thinking he owned anything.
“If death frees a man from the rule of things, why hurry it? Shouldn’t the young man wait for the Inevitable to free him?”
Not so! I presume that only then does the man of things see their tyranny. Abstaining first shows a man his craving’s strength; having nothing left may first show him how much he made a necessity of things. If he then fights them, casting out of his soul what death tore from his hands, he will first know the full passion of possession, the slavery of prizing the worthless part of the precious.
“Then what good is Death? He removes the sting but leaves the poison!”
This: it’s not the fetters that chafe but the fetters that soothe that eat into the soul. When the golden fetters he loved to look at are gone, though they held him fast to his dungeon wall, he will first feel the soreness of their loss, in a weary indifference to earth and sea, space and stars. When it dawns on him that they were a horror and a disgrace, the good of saving death will appear, and he will begin to understand that having never was well-being: we don’t live by possessing but possess by living. So losing what he thought he had moves him, hardly toward deliverance but in its favour: it may feel like the start of slavery when it is the start of freedom. No soul was ever freed without feeling its slavery; nothing but itself can enslave a soul, nothing outside itself free it.
Take the drunkard, freed from his body but keeping his craving, unable to indulge it. With no means left to drown thought, he finally has time to think; surely a fearful hope dawns on him then! But he isn’t saved until, by God’s power and his own obedient effort, he would refuse the temptation even for an eternity of drunkenness with all its delights and none of its penalties.
So death may give a new opportunity, with some hope for the multitude who count themselves Christians yet are possessed by things as by a legion of devils: respected in their church, thought blameless, kind and generous, believers in Jesus’s redemption, yet whose care is always to heap up more, adding house to house and field to field, burying themselves deeper in the ash-heap of Things.
But things rule not only the rich man; people with no money are slaves too, if lack of it makes them unhappy. The man forever digging his grave is little better than the one already rotting in it, and the money one has and the other wants causes the same enduring stupidity in each. To both comes the word: “How is it that you do not understand?”
The Cause of Spiritual Stupidity
The passage: Why is it that you do not understand?
After feeding the four thousand with seven loaves and a few small fishes on the east side of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus crossed the lake and was met by certain Pharisees whose attitude drove him back to the boat and across again. On the way the disciples realized they had only a single loaf, probably bought by one of them while the Lord dealt with the Pharisees. Jesus, still occupied with the leaders’ antagonism and wanting to destroy their influence on his disciples, began to warn them, using a figure they had heard before, leaven as a hidden but pervading energy. Now he tells them to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees. The disciples, their minds on their lack of provisions, thought of bread at once, concluded he spoke of leaven because it was missing, and perhaps imagined a warning about defilement from Pharisaical cookery: “It is because we have taken no bread!” A leaven like the Pharisees’ was already at work in their hearts; for the sign the Pharisees sought in mockery of unbelief, they themselves had had a few hours before, and had already forgotten all that made it valuable.
It is to the man who is trying to live, who obeys the Master’s word, that the word unfolds itself. Understanding the outside of things, we think we have them; but the Lord puts his things in suggestive shapes that give no satisfactory meaning to the mere intellect and unfold themselves only to the conscience and heart as the new creation of reality advances in a man. For life, that is, action, is the only condition into which the light of the Living can penetrate; only life can assimilate life. See how the disciples here fooled themselves!
See how the Lord calls them to their senses. He does not tell them where they are wrong; he attacks the cause in themselves, always of infinitely more consequence than any mistake: the one is a live mistake, an untruth in the soul, the other a dead blunder born of it. So the connection between their blunder and his exhortation is not on the surface. Often he speaks not to the words but to the thought; here he speaks to the whole mode of thinking, the inward condition of the men.
He sets out to rouse in them a sense of their lack of confidence in God, the cause of their blunder. He reminds them of the two miracles of the loaves and the fragments left over; one was not a day behind them, and already they were doubting! He makes them go over the particulars, not to refresh their memories but to make their hearts dwell on them; for they had forgotten the central revelation, the eternal fact of God’s love and care. They knew the number of men, loaves, and baskets of fragments each time, but forgot the Love that had so broken the bread that its remnants twenty times outweighed its loaves.
Having questioned them like children and listened to the answers of children, he turns the light of their thoughts on themselves and demands, with an argument that overleaps its own logic’s links, “Why do you not understand?” Then they understood, and knew he did not speak of the leaven of bread but of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees. He who trusts can understand; he whose mind is at ease can discover a reason.
How otherwise than by quelling their anxiety could “How many baskets did you take up?” and “Why do you not understand?” have made them see he did not mean the leaven of bread? What had the bread miracles to do with it?
The lesson he would have had them learn from the miracle, the only lesson worthy of it, was that God cared for his children and could, did, and would provide for their needs. They had not learned it. The miracle’s love proved his mission better than its power: it was a throb of the Father’s heart. The ground of the Master’s upbraiding is not that they did not understand him but that they did not trust God, that after all they had seen they still troubled themselves about bread. Because we easily imagine ourselves in want, we imagine God ready to forsake us. The miracles of Jesus were the ordinary works of his Father, wrought small and swift that we might take them in. Their design was to show what God is: not that Jesus was God but that his Father was, and was what Jesus showed, for no other kind of God could be worth believing in. The Son’s mission was to reveal his Father as he is, that men may know him and, knowing, trust him. It would be a small boon for God to forgive men and not give himself; less than God as he is cannot comfort men for the essential sorrow of their existence. Jesus came to give them God, who is eternal life.
Those miracles of feeding gave to their eyes, hands, and mouths the lesson his words gave their ears when he told them not to seek what they would eat or drink, since their Father knew their need, and to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things would be added. So little had they learned it that they remembered the loaves but forgot the Father, as men in their theology forget the very Theou logos. Forgetting, they were troubled about provision for the day, and the moment leaven was mentioned thought of bread. What else could he mean? The connection was plain! The miracle had set forth God’s heart toward them, the loving care without which he would not be God. Had they learned this lesson, their hearts would not have been so uneasy as to mistake his word; had they but said that, though they had one loaf, they had him who makes all the loaves, they would never have made their blunder.
The answer to the Lord’s reproach is plainly this: their minds were so full of care about the day’s bread that they could think of nothing else; the mere mention of leaven threw them floundering afresh in the bog of their unbelief. When he reminded them of what they had seen, and so of what God is and of the foolishness of their care, the moment their fear was taught to look up they began to see what his former words must have meant.
The disciples’ care was for the day, not the morrow; and morrow stands for any point of the future. The next moment is as much beyond our grasp and as much in God’s care as a hundred years away; in neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything. Only those claims of the morrow that must be prepared today belong to today’s duty; the moment that coincides with work to be done is the moment to be minded; the next is nowhere till God has made it.
Their lack of bread seems to have come not from neglect but from the suddenness of the re-embarkation; and had there been a want of foresight, the Lord did not come to reprove that but the primary evil of life without God, the root of all evils. Minor virtues, prudence among them, would thus almost be superseded. If a man forgets a thing, God will see to that; man is not lord of his memory or intellect. But he is lord of his will and action, and is to blame when, remembering a duty, he puts it off and so forgets it. If a man does the immediate duty of the moment, I suspect wonderfully little forethought will be needed; only that forethought is right which determines duty and passes into action. Work done is of more consequence for the future than the foresight of an archangel.
With the disciples as with the rich youth, it was Things that prevented the Lord from being understood. Because of possession the young man had no suspicion of the grandeur of the call with which Jesus honoured him; he thought himself hardly dealt with to be offered a patent of Heaven’s nobility, he was so very rich! His soul was crowded with the meanest idols, among which his spirit crept upon its knees, wasting on them the gazes that belonged to his fellows and his Master. The disciples had left all and followed the Lord; but neither had they got rid of Things. The paltry solitariness of a loaf was enough to hide the Lord from them. Surely if he had told them to go all day without food for his sake, they would not have minded! But they lost sight of God, as if he did not see or did not care.
In the former case it was the possession of wealth, in the latter the lack of more than a loaf, that made them incapable of receiving the Lord’s word: the evil principle was precisely the same. If it be Things that slay you, what matter whether things you have or things you have not? The youth did not trust God as having given; the disciples did not trust God as ready to give. We are like them when in any trouble we do not trust him. It is hard on God when his children will not let him give, when they carry themselves so that he must withhold his hand lest he harm them. To take no care that they acknowledge whence their help comes would leave them worshippers of idols, trusters in that which is not.
Distrust is atheism, and the barrier to all growth. Lord, we do not understand you because we do not trust your Father, who is whole-hearted to us as never yet was mother to her first-born! While we who are evil would die to give our children bread, we are not certain the only Good will give us anything we desire! The things of your world so crowd our hearts that there is no room for the things of your heart, which would raise ours above all fear and make us merry children in our Father’s house! How many a whisper of the watching Spirit we miss through brooding over a need not yet come! Tomorrow makes today’s whole head sick, its whole heart faint. You do not so, Lord; were you such as we, we would have good cause to be troubled! But you know it is difficult, with things pressing on every sense, to believe that where we can see no hand directing, a will nearer than any hand is moving them from within to fulfil his word! Help us to obey, to resist, to trust.
The care filling your mind at this moment, or waiting only till you lay the book aside to leap on you, that need which is no need, is a demon sucking at the spring of your life.
“No; mine is a reasonable care, indeed an unavoidable one!”
“Is it something you have to do this very moment?”
“No.”
“Then you are allowing it to usurp the place of something required of you this moment!”
“Nothing is required of me at this moment.”
“Yes, there is: the greatest thing that can be required of man.”
“Pray, what is it?”
“Trust in the living God. His will is your life.”
“He may not will that I have what I need!”
“Then you only think you need it. Is it a good thing?”
“Yes, it is a good thing.”
“Then why doubt you will have it?”
“Because God may choose to have me go without it.”
“Why should he?”
“I cannot tell.”
“Must it not be to give you something instead?”
“I want nothing instead.”
“I thought I was talking to a Christian!”
“I will consent to be called nothing else.”
“Do you not know, then, that when God denies a child of his anything he values, it is to give him something he values?”
“But if I do not want it?”
“You are none the less miserable for not having it. Instead of his great possessions the young man was to have the company of Jesus and treasure in heaven. When God refused to deliver a certain man from a sore evil, though he asked three times, he gave him instead his own graciousness, consoling him in person.”
“Ah, but that was St Paul!”
“True; what of that?”
“He was one by himself!”
“God deals with all his children after his own father-nature. No scripture is of private interpretation, even for a St Paul. It sets forth God’s way with man. If you are not willing that God should have his way with you, then in God’s name be miserable, until your misery drives you to the Father’s arms.”
“I do trust him in spiritual matters.”
“Everything is an affair of the spirit. If God has a way, it is the only way. Every little thing in which you would have your own way has a mission for your redemption; and he will treat you as a naughty child until you take your Father’s way for yours.”
There will be this difference between the rich who love their riches and the poor who hate their poverty: at death the heart of the one will still be crowded with things and their pleasures, the heart of the other relieved of their lack; the one has had his good things, the other his evil. But the rich man who held his things lightly, a channel and no cistern, ever forsaking his money, starts in the new world beside the man who accepted, not hated, his poverty. Each will say, “I am free!”
For the only air in which the soul can breathe and live is the present God and the spirits of the just: that is our heaven, our home. Cleansed of greed, jealousy, vanity, pride, possession, and all the forms of the evil self, we shall be God’s children in the fields of that heaven, none desiring to be before another or to cast him out; for ambition and hatred will then be seen to be one spirit. “What you have, I have; what you desire, I will; I give to myself ten times in giving once to you.” But let me be practical: you are ready to be miserable over trifles and do not believe God good enough to care for your care; I would reason with you to rid you of troubles that hide from you the thoughts of your God.
The things readiest to be done, those lying on the very table of a man’s mind, are in general the most neglected, even by the thoughtful. May a man become strong in righteousness without learning to speak the truth to his neighbour, or climb the last flight of the stair without setting foot on the lowest step? Truth is one: he who does it in the small thing is of the truth; he who postpones the small thing near him for the great thing farther off is not. Consider the parallels between ourselves and the disciples maundering over one loaf with the Bread of Life beside them. We too dull our understandings with trifles and waste heavenly time with hurry; to those who possess their souls in patience come the heavenly visions. When I trouble myself over a trifle, hunting the house for some little lost article not from need but from dislike of loss, or fretting over a borrowed book not returned while thousands on my shelves could give me treasure that neither moth, rust, nor thief touches, am I not like the disciples? Am I not a fool whenever loss troubles me more than recovery would gladden? God would have me wise and smile at the trifle; this losing of things is his mercy, teaching us to let them go. Or have I forgotten a thought that seemed a truth revealed to my heart? I keep trying to call it back, feeling a poor man till it is recovered, though it might be far more lost in a notebook I would never look into again. I forget that God cares about live truths, not things set down in a book or memory or embalmed in the joy of knowledge, but things that lift up the heart and are active in an active will. Had I faith in God, the maker of thought and memory, I would know that if it was a truth it must come again; it is in God, and so, like the dead, not beyond my reach: kept for me.
“These are foolish illustrations, not worth writing!”
If such things do not happen, mentioning them is foolish; if they do, he is foolish who treats them as if they did not. I choose them for their smallness, appealing to all who keep house about the size of trouble that suffices to hide the word and face of God.
With every haunting trouble, great or small, go to God and ask him, the God of your life, to deliver you, his child, from what is unlike him and antagonistic to your nature. If your trouble is such that you cannot appeal to him, the more need! Where one cannot go to God, something is specially wrong. If you let thought for tomorrow or next year distress you, if the chatter of the public peering purblind into the sanctuary of motive annoys you, or you greatly heed the judgment of men, capable or incapable, you open your windows to the mosquitoes of care, to drown with their buzzing the voice of the Eternal!
If you tell me that but for care the needful work of the world would be ill done, I ask, “What work is better done by the greedy or anxious than by the free, fearless soul? If the work is not God’s, care may help it, for its success is loss. Is he worthy the name of man who for fear of starvation does better work than for the joy that his labour is not in vain in the Lord? You are not likely to get rich that way, but you will not block the gate of heaven against yourself.”
Ambition in every shape has to do with Things, with outward advantages for the satisfaction of self-worship; it is the form of pride that usurps the place of aspiration. The sole ambition of God is to rise above oneself; all other is of the devil. Yet it is nursed in many a soul that thinks itself devout, filling it with petty cares and disappointments that shut out the glory of God. We must get rid of the love of men’s praise, the desire of fame, the pride that takes offence, the puffing-up of knowledge, and every other form of self-worship. We must be free. A man whom another enslaves may be free as God; but God will not enter, or sup with, a man who is a slave in himself, for he cannot be his friend; he will not eat in a lumber-room, though the lumber be thrones and crowns. Cannot, I say rather than will not: men full of things would not partake with God were he by them all day.
Nor will God force any door. He may send a tempest to burst doors and windows and shake the house to its foundations; but not so will he enter. The door must be opened by a willing hand before the foot of Love will cross the threshold. He watches to see the door move from within. Every tempest is an assault in the siege of love; the terror of God is the other side of his love, love outside the house that would be inside, that knows the house is no home, only a tent, until the Eternal dwells there. Things must be cast out to make room for their souls, the eternal truths which in things find shape and show.
But who is sufficient to cast them out? A man who attacks the army of bats and demon-snakes infesting the place of the Holy finds the task too great: the temple will not be cleansed by him, and the very dust he raises is full of corruptive forces. Let those who would do what they cannot remember, with hope, that he who knows all about our being once told a parable to the effect that people ought always to pray and not lose heart.