The Higher Faith

The passage: Jesus told Thomas that he had believed because he had seen, and that those who have not seen and yet have believed are blessed.

The aspiring child is often checked by the dull disciple, who has learned his lessons so imperfectly he never got beyond his school-books, and perceives the principle of none of his fragmentary rules. The child comes with his heart full: some outburst of feeling, spark of hope, or wide imagination that draws nature and humanity into religion—for to the child the Father’s doings fill all space, and he has not learned to divide God from nature, Providence from grace, love from benevolence. The dull disciple answers: “God has said nothing about that in his word, so we have no right to believe anything about it. It is not revealed.” He cannot suspect that what is hidden from him may be revealed to the babe; with the authority of years and ignorance he forbids the child, for he believes in no revelation but the Bible, in which all revelation lies buried, to be exhumed and reassembled into a rigid skeleton of metaphysical and legal contrivance for letting God’s love have its way unchecked by the other perfections of his being.

But the man who would live through the whole divine form of his being, not confined to one broken corner and leaving the rest to demons, will meet a thousand questions the Bible never mentions. Has he nothing to do with them? “Leave them,” says the dull disciple. “I cannot,” says the man; “the peace of mind without which I cannot act depends on the answers, and my conduct must match them.” “Leave them till God chooses to explain.” “No. Questions imply answers. He has put the questions in my heart and holds the answers in his. I will wait, but not till I have knocked; I will be patient, but not till I have asked; I will seek until I find. He has something for me. My prayer shall go up to the God of my life.”

Sad indeed if the Bible had told us everything God meant us to believe. But the Bible is wronged here: it nowhere claims to be the Word, the Way, the Truth. It leads us to Jesus, the ever unfolding Revelation of God. All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hid in Christ, not in the Bible except as it leads to him. They are hid in him, are they not, that they may be revealed to us when we need them, his holding them the mediatorial step toward their unfolding in us? Is he not the Truth to men, the High Priest who answers all the troubled questions of their dim humanity? For his heart contains of good, wise, just, the perfect shape.

Didymus answers, “What we know not now, we shall know hereafter.” Questions that come here must be inquired into here, and if not answered here, then there, till they are. More is hid in Christ than we shall ever learn; but those who begin to inquire first will soonest be gladdened with revelation, and he will be best pleased with them, for his disciples’ slowness troubled him of old. To say we must wait for the other world to know the mind of him who came to this world to give himself to us seems to me the foolishness of a worldly and lazy spirit. The Son of God is the Teacher of men, giving them his Spirit, which is to a man the mind of Christ and manifests the deep things of God. The great heresy of the Church today is unbelief in this Spirit: most of the Church does not believe the Spirit has a revelation for every man individually, as different from the Bible’s as food becoming brain and nerve is from bread and meat. Filled with the mind of Christ, we would know the Bible had done its work and passed away for us, that the Word of God might abide. The Bible’s one use is to make us look at Jesus, that through him we may know his Father and our Father, his God and our God. Till then, let us hold it dear as the moon of our darkness, by which we travel toward the east, not as the sun from which her light comes, toward which we haste, so that walking in the sun himself we need no more the mirror of his absent brightness.

This doctrine of the Spirit is not my end now, though without it all religion would be vain, St Paul’s and Socrates’ alike. I want to show that a man will please God better by believing some things not told him than by confining his faith to what is expressly said—said to arouse in us the truth-seeing faculty, the spiritual desire, the prayer for the good things God gives to those who ask.

“But is this not dangerous? Will a man not be taught to believe, even to pray for, what he likes best? Will he not grow arrogant in his confidence?”

If the Spirit strives with our spirit and God teaches men, we may leave those dreaded results to him. A man of the Lord’s company is safer with him than those who secure their safety by hanging on the outskirts and daring nothing. If he is not taught of God in what he hopes for, God will let him know, giving something other than he prays for. If he can pray for anything not good, the answer will come in the flames of the consuming fire, which will soon bring him to some of his spiritual senses; better to be so sharply tutored than to go at a snail’s pace. And as for arrogance, I have seen nothing breed it faster or more offensively than the worship of the letter.

To whom should a man whom God has made look for what he likes best, but God? If we have seen that God is our Father, as the Lord taught, let us go on to understand that he is far more: his nearness is beyond the highest idea of father, and fatherhood is but a step toward the Godhood for those who can receive it. What a man likes best may be God’s will, the voice of the Spirit striving with his spirit; and if it is not, there is the consuming fire. The danger is not in asking God for what is not good, nor in hoping to receive it, but in not asking him, in not having him of our council. Nor will not daring to inquire his will spare us from acting in matters we call unrevealed; and for such a disposition of mind the book itself is unlikely to hold much revelation.

The whole matter may safely be left to God.

But I doubt if a man can ask anything bad of God. One who has begun to pray is child enough to know bad from good when it comes so near, and dares not pray for that. If you point to David praying such fearful prayers against his enemies, read them by the man and his history: when his greatest enemy was delivered into his hands, this man of burning eastern heart contented himself with cutting off the skirt of his garment instead of taking an eastern’s vengeance. What he craved was justice and right, though his prayers took a wild form of words; God heard him and gave him what contented him. In a good man, “revenge is,” as Lord Bacon says, “a kind of wild justice,” and easily satisfied. The heart’s desire upon such a one’s enemies is best met when hate is changed into love and compassion.

But it is about hopes rather than prayers that I wish to write.

What should I think of my child if he limited his faith in me, and hope from me, to the few promises he had heard me utter! The faith that limits itself to God’s promises shares that paltry character: good enough for a Pagan, but for a Christian miserable and wretched. Those who rest in it would be more comfortable with God’s bond than his word, which they regard not as the outcome of his character but as a pledge of his honour. They try to believe the truth of his word but do not understand the truth of his Being; they trust his oath, but in himself they do not believe, for they know him not. Little wonder they distrust those swellings of the heart that are his drawings of the man toward him, as sun and moon heave the ocean heavenward. Brother, sister, if this is your faith, you must not stop there. Come out of this bondage of the law to which you give the name of grace, for little gracious is in it. You will yet know the dignity of your high calling and the love of God that passes knowledge. He is not afraid of your presumptuous approach; you are afraid to come near him. He is not watching over his dignity; you fear being sent away as the disciples would have sent away the children. You think so much about your souls and fear so much to lose your life that you dare not draw near the Life of life, lest it consume you.

Our God, we will trust thee. Shall we not find thee equal to our faith? One day we shall laugh at ourselves for expecting so little; thy giving will not be limited by our hoping.

O thou of little faith! “In everything”—I quote one who knew his master Christ and in his strength opposed apostles to their faces because they believed only a little in God: only for themselves, not their fellows; for the chosen few, for whom they had God’s ancient word, not for the multitude of nations, the millions of hearts God had made to search after him. “In everything,” says St Paul, “by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God.” For this everything nothing is too small: that it troubles us is enough, for there is some principle in it worth God’s notice, since he made us so that it troubles us. And nothing can be too great. When the Son of man comes and finds too much faith on the earth, may God in his mercy slay us. Meantime we will hope and trust.

Do you count it great faith to believe what God has said? To me it is little faith, and, alone, worthy of reproach. To believe what he has not said is faith indeed, and blessed, for it comes of believing in HIM. Can you not believe in God himself? Is it not so hard to believe what he has said that even that is almost beyond you, because you are not sure he said it? If you believed in God it would be easy to believe the word; you would not ask whether he had said it, but know he meant it.

Let us dare something, then, and not always be unbelieving children. The Lord, not forbidding those who insist on seeing before they believe, blesses those who have not seen and yet believed, who trust him more than that. Blessed are those to whom a wonder is not a fable, a mystery not a mockery, a glory not an unreality, who are content to ask, “Is it like Him?” A dull-hearted, unchildlike people is always putting God in mind of his promises. The promises are good to reveal what God is; if they think them good as binding God, let them have it so, for the hardness of their hearts. They prefer the Word to the Spirit; it is theirs.

Even such people will leave us, some if not all, to “the uncovenanted mercies of God.” We desire no less and hope for no better: the mercies beyond our height, depth and reach. We know in whom we have believed, and look for what has not entered the heart of man to conceive. Shall God’s thoughts be surpassed by man’s, his giving by man’s asking, his creation by man’s imagination? No. Though we climb to the height of our Alpine desires and ascend the spear-pointed Himmalays of our aspirations, still we shall find the depth of God’s sapphire above us, the heavens higher than the earth, and his thoughts and ways higher than ours.

Ah Lord! be thou in all our being, not in the Sundays of our time alone, nor the chambers of our hearts alone. We dare not think that some things are not for thy beholding, some questions not to be asked of thee. Are we not utterly thine? What a man speaks not to his fellow, we speak to thee. Our very passions we hold up to thee, saying, “Behold, Lord! Think about us; for thus thou hast made us.” We would not escape our history by fleeing into the wilderness, hiding our heads in the sands of forgetfulness, the repentance that comes of pain or the lethargy of hopelessness. We take it as our very life in our hand and flee with it to thee. Triumphant is the answer thou holdest for every doubt; perhaps we could not yet understand it even if thou spoke it “with most miraculous organ.” But thou shalt at least find faith on the earth, O Lord, if thou comest to look now: the faith of ignorant but hoping children, who know they do not know and believe that thou knowest.

And our brothers and sisters who cleave to what they call thy word, thinking to please thee so, are in thy holy safe hands, who hast taught us that whoever speaks against the Son of man will be forgiven, though not he who blasphemes against the Holy Ghost.

It Shall Not be Forgiven

The passage: Whoever speaks a word against the Son of man will be forgiven; whoever blasphemes against the Holy Ghost will not be.

Whatever belongs to thought and feeling is expressed in words only imperfectly: thought and feeling are infinite, and human speech, though far-reaching and delicate, embodies them only approximately and suggestively. Spirit and Truth are like Una and the Red Cross Knight; Speech is the dwarf lagging behind with the lady’s “bag of needments.”

Our Lord did not set out to construct a system of truth in intellectual forms. He spoke The Truth, in its relation to him at the moment, out of a region of realities that can only be suggested in intellect and speech. His words invade our darkness in flashes of life, stinging us with light to will our awakening and cry for the light he gives, not in lightning words only but in indwelling presence and power.

How does the truth fare, then, with those who, lacking glow and insight, build intellectual systems on the words of our Lord or his disciples? A child would understand Plato better than they understand St Paul. The meaning in those great hearts is too great for theirs; the sense they find must be small enough to pass their narrow doors. Without sympathy to interpret them, words can mean almost anything the hearer likes. How will a man bent at best on saving his own soul understand the apostle who was ready to be banished from Christ so that his brethren might enter? To men who are not simple, simple words are the most inexplicable riddles.

If we must search for what our Lord means, we must equally refuse any interpretation that seems unlike or unworthy of him. He himself asks why we do not judge for ourselves what is right. Through ignorance or misunderstanding we may refuse the verbal form of a true interpretation, but not its spirit and truth, since we could not have seen those without being able to recognize them as Christ’s mind. Prejudice or misapprehension may make us refuse the true reading, but we are still bound to refuse and wait for more light. To accept as his will what contradicts what we already worship in him is to bring discord into the harmony meant to unite and heal our hearts.

“Is it for us,” says the objector, who by some sleight of will believes in the word apart from its meaning, “to judge the character of our Lord?” I answer that he requires this very thing of us: that we do him no injustice. He would dwell with us if we opened our chambers to him. How shall we receive him if, avoiding judgment, we hang some daub of authority or tradition on our walls as his likeness? Judging unrighteously by it while flattering ourselves that we do not judge, we may shut our doors on the Master himself as an impostor because he is unlike the picture in our oratory. And if we do not judge, humbly and lovingly, who will judge for us? Better to refuse even the truth for a time than to take into our creed what our heart cannot receive, and bring hesitation into our prayers, a jar into our praises, misery into our love. If it is the truth, we shall one day see it differently and love it as lovely, for all truth is lovely. “Not to the unregenerate mind,” you say. But at least to the mind that can love Christ Jesus; let us follow that part of us and trust its judgments, hoping for its growth in the light of the Lord, who is that Spirit. Better, I say again, to refuse the right form than by accepting it in misapprehension to refuse the truth in it. Which is liker the sin against the Holy Ghost? To mistake the Son of man’s meaning may fill a man with sadness. But to care so little for him as to receive as his what the noblest part of us rejects as low, selfish or wrong is far more like the unforgivable sin, for it is a sin against the truth itself, not merely its embodiment in him.

Words depend for their full meaning on their speaker. An utterance may seem commonplace until you learn it came from one you know to be always thinking, feeling and acting; knowing the mind behind it, you know the scale to read it by. So God’s words cannot mean just what man’s do. “Can we not understand them, then?” We can—more than men’s words. Whatever a good word means from a good man, it means infinitely more from God, and the thought it expresses rises higher in us as we grow able to understand him, that is, as we become like him.

I am less anxious to show what the sin against the Holy Ghost is than what the nonforgiveness means, though I think we can understand both. I cannot admit that anything in the Bible is too mysterious to look into, for the Bible is a revelation, an unveiling. Into much of it I can see only a little way, but that way is the way of life, for the depth of its mystery is God. And even if the duty were doubtful, it would be reason enough to inquire into passages like this that they often torture minds, chiefly those of holy women and children. I knew a child who believed she had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost because she had misused a pin at her toilette. Do not rebuke me for bringing a child’s diseased fancy into a weighty theological matter: “Despise not one of these little ones.” Would the theologians were as near the truth as children. Diseased fancy! The child knew, and knew that she knew, she was doing wrong because she had been forbidden; her fear had rational ground. How would Jesus have received the darling’s confession? He would not have told her she was silly and not to mind. Might he not have said, “I do not condemn thee: go and sin no more”?

To reach the position needed for our end, I will ask what divine forgiveness means, and to do that I will first ask what human forgiveness means; for if the Incarnation means anything, we must climb through the Human to the Divine.

Going back to the Greek or English word for a primary idea is of little use: the one means a sending away, the other a giving away. It is enough to look at the feelings associated with what is called forgiveness.

A man will say: “I forgive, but I cannot forget. Let the fellow never come in my sight again.” This reaches only to remitting the penalties the wronged believes he can claim.

But there is no sending away of the wrong itself from between them.

Another will say: “He has done a mean thing, but he has the worst of it himself in being capable of it. I despise him too much to want revenge. I forgive him. I don’t care.”

Here again the wrong is not sent away from between them; there is no remission of the sin.

A third: “I suppose I must forgive him; if I do not, God will not forgive me.”

This man is a little nearer, since he recognizes a ground of sympathy, though only that of common sin.

One more will say: “He has wronged me grievously. It is dreadful to me, and more dreadful to him, that he did it. He has hurt me, but nearly killed himself. I will spare him further injury from it as far as I can. I cannot yet feel the same toward him, but I will try to make him acknowledge the wrong and so put it away from him; then perhaps I can feel as before. For this I will show him every kindness I can, not forcing it on him but seizing fit opportunities—not to magnify myself through bounty, I hope, but because I love him so much I want to love him more by reconciling him to his true self. I would destroy this deed that has come between us; I send it away, and would have him destroy it too, by abjuring it utterly.”

Which comes nearest to the divine idea of forgiveness—nearest, though with the gulf between, as the heavens are higher than the earth?

For the Divine creates the Human and exceeds it in creative power. It is the divine forgiveness that, originating itself, creates ours, and so can do far more: take up all our wrongs, small and great, with their rightful griefs and sorrows, and carry them away from between God and us.

Christ is God’s Forgiveness.

Before drawing nearer to this great sight, let us look at human forgiveness in a more definite case, between father and son. God is so much more to us and nearer than any father, yet fatherhood is the last height of the human stair from which our understanding can see him afar and our hearts first know he is nigh, even in them.

Wrongdoing has various kinds and degrees, needing various kinds and degrees of forgiveness. A child’s outburst of anger scarcely needs forgiveness: the parent need only influence him toward self-restraint and rouse his will against it, and no wall is built between them. But suppose the father found in him a habit of sly cruelty to his younger brothers or the animals; how differently he would feel! Could his forgiveness be the same? Would the different evil not require a different form of forgiveness—the kind of punishment fittest to restrain, and finally root out, the wickedness? Could any other kind be true love? Passing by the offence might spring from poor human kindness, never from divine love, and would not be remission. Forgiveness can never be indifference. Forgiveness is love toward the unlovely.

Look closer at how a father might feel. One child the father would clasp to his bosom the moment the fault was committed, knowing that love in its natural working would destroy the fault and the child would soon be weeping. His hatred of the sin would burst out in pitying tenderness toward a child so wretched as to have done it, and so destroy it. Such a fault interrupts no sweet affections; the child is forgiven at once. But another child, treated on the same principle, would be quite different. If he were guilty of baseness, meanness, selfishness, deceit, or gloating over the evil he brought on others, the father might say to himself, “I cannot forgive him. This is beyond forgiveness”—and go on saying it while striving all the time to let forgiveness find its way and lift him from the gulf. His love might even grow greater because of the wandering and loss, for love is most divine when it loves by needs and not merits. But the forgiveness would still be in the making, drawing nigh to the sinner. Only when his opening heart received the divine flood of destroying affection, and his own affection burst out to meet it and sweep the evil away, could it be finished, and the son be said to be forgiven.

God forgives us every day, sending our sins with their fogs and darkness from between him and us. Witness his sun and rain, the filling of hearts with food and gladness: he loves those who love him not. When some sin has clouded our whole horizon and hidden him, he, forgiving us before we are forgiven and that we may be, sweeps a path for his forgiveness to reach our hearts, that by causing repentance it may destroy the wrong and make us able to forgive ourselves. Some are too proud to do that until God’s forgiveness has drowned their pride in tears and made their heart again like a little child’s.

Seen as the perfecting of a work ever going on, the contact of God’s heart and ours despite and in destruction of the wrong between, forgiveness is always behind God’s love. His love is the prime mover, ever seeking to perfect forgiveness, which needs the human condition for its completion. God loves where he cannot yet forgive—where forgiveness in the full sense is impossible because no contact of hearts is possible, the wrong between not having begun to yield to the besom of his holy destruction.

Some things between the Father and his children, as between a father and child, may in a sense be made comparatively light of—not in themselves, for away they must go—since, though evils or sins, they leave room for God’s Spirit to dwell in the heart, forgiving and cleansing. When a man’s evil is fading and he is growing better and better, forgiveness is coming into him more and more, perfect in God’s will and having its perfect work in the man. When he has cast away his sin with his whole nature, there is no room left for forgiveness, since God dwells in him and he in God. With Nathan’s “Thou art the man,” God’s forgiveness laid hold of David; his heart was humbled to the dust, and waking from his moral lethargy he found he was still with God: “When I awake, I am still with thee.”

But two sins, not of individual deed but of spiritual condition, cannot be forgiven—that is, they cannot be excused, passed by or made little of even by God’s tenderness, because they let no forgiveness into the soul, allow no good influence to work beside them, and shut God out altogether. The man guilty of them can receive none of the renewing, saving influences of God’s forgiveness. God is outside him in every sense except his creating relation, by which, thanks be to God, he still keeps hold of him against the man’s will. One of these sins is against man, the other against God.

The first is unforgivingness to our neighbour: shutting him out of our mercies and love, and so from the universe as far as we are part of it. It is murder, and may be infinitely worse than killing a man, which can be a moment’s passion where this is the heart’s choice. To hate, and brood on the feeling that in our microcosm kills the image of the hated, is the worst, spiritual murder. We listen to our hurt pride or hurt affection (only the latter, without the former, thinks no evil) to the injury of the evil-doer, quenching the relations of life between us and closing the passages of return. This is to shut out God, the Life. How can we receive the forgiving presence while we shut our brother out of our share of the final restoration, and refuse to let God be All in all? If God appeared and said “I forgive you” while we were unforgiving to our neighbour, his forgiveness would do us no good: it would not touch us while we were uncured of our unforgivingness, and would even hurt us, for we would think ourselves safe while disease ate out our heart. Tenfold forgiveness lies in the words “If ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your heavenly Father forgive your trespasses.” They are kindness indeed. God holds the unforgiving man with his hand but turns his face away; if, wishing to see his Father’s face, the man turns his own toward his brother, the face of God turns and seeks his, for then he may look on God and not die. With our forgiveness to our neighbour flows in the consciousness of God’s forgiveness to us; even trying to forgive makes us able to believe God can forgive us. No man who will not forgive can believe God is willing, even wanting, to forgive him, or that the dove of God’s peace hovers over a chaotic heart, fain to alight but finding no rest for the sole of its foot. For God to say to such a man “I cannot forgive you” is love as well as necessity. If God said “I forgive you” to a man who hated his brother, and (impossibly) the voice reached him, he would hear “You may go on hating. I do not mind. You have had great provocation and are justified.” God does take the provocation into account; but the more provocation and excuse, the more reason, if possible, that the hater be delivered from the hell of his hate and God’s child made the loving child he meant. The man would think God loved the sinner but forgave the sin, which God never does. Every sin meets its due fate: inexorable expulsion from the paradise of God’s Humanity. God loves the sinner so much that he can forgive him no other way than by banishing the demon that possesses him and lifting him out of the mire of his iniquity.

No one supposes that a man who has once refused to forgive his brother is condemned to endless unforgivingness. The meaning is that while he stays in that mood God cannot be with him as friend: not that God will not be his friend, but a friendship all on God’s side must take forms the man cannot recognize as friendship. Forgiveness, as I said, is not love merely but love conveyed as love to the erring, establishing peace toward God and forgiveness toward our neighbour.

To return to our text: does the refusal of forgiveness in it condemn a man to irrecoverable impenitence? Strange righteousness, to decree that because a man has done wrong so often that he is wrong, he shall remain wrong for ever! Do not tell me the condemnation is only negative, leaving him to the consequences of his own will or withdrawing the Spirit he despised. God will not shelter behind such jugglery of logic; he is neither schoolman nor theologian but our Father in heaven, and he knows this would be the very unforgivingness for which he refuses to forgive man. The only tenable ground for such a doctrine is that God cannot do more: that Satan has overcome, and Jesus, among his brothers and sisters in God’s image, has been weaker than the adversary. What shall I say to a doctrine of devils which holds that even if a man did repent, God would not or could not forgive him?

Let us look at “the unpardonable sin,” as this mystery is called, and see what we can understand of it.

All sin is unpardonable: no compromise is possible; we shall not come out until clean, having paid the uttermost farthing. But the special unpardonableness of these two sins lies in shutting God out from his genial, especially spiritual, influence on the man. Perhaps I said this too strongly of the first: perhaps God’s love may have some part even in the man who will not forgive his brother, though it must decrease and die away if he continues so; perhaps resentment might for a while leave room for some divine influence, though one or the other must soon yield. But the man who denies truth, who consciously resists duty, who says there is no truth or that the truth he sees is not true, who calls the good of Satan or the bad of God while knowing which is which, denies and shuts out the Spirit and cannot be forgiven. Without the Spirit no forgiveness can enter the man to cast out the satan, and without the Spirit to witness with his spirit he could not know himself forgiven even if God appeared and said so. Full forgiveness is when a man feels God forgiving him, and that cannot be while he opposes the very essence of God’s will.

As far as we can see, those this was spoken of resisted the truth with some perception that it was the truth: men not led astray by passion, nor wholly blinded by prejudice, nor moved to condemn one form of truth by love of another, but so set, from selfishness and love of influence, against one they saw to be good that they denied the goodness of what they knew was good, to put him down, because he spoke against them and was ruining their authority with the people by declaring them no better than they knew themselves to be. Is this not to be Satan, to be in hell, damned? Was this condition not unpardonable? How could God’s pardon reach the essential humanity within through such a mass of falsehood? Crying as it was for forgiveness, these men had almost separated their humanity from themselves and sided with the powers of darkness. Forgiveness while they were such was impossible; they must come out of it, else there was no word of God for them. But the very word that told them of their unpardonable state was the form the voice of mercy could take in calling them to repent. They must hear and be afraid. I dare not think they refused the truth knowing all it was; but I think they refused it knowing it was true, moved not by wild passion but by cold self-love, envy, avarice and ambition, setting their whole natures knowingly against the light. The sin against the Holy Ghost must be of this nature. “This is the condemnation”—not the sins men have committed but the condition of mind in which they choose to remain—that light has come into the world and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. In this sin I see no single act alone, though it must find expression in many, but a wilful condition of mind,

For this there could be no excuse that even a little light might work beside it: light could find no entrance, for light was just what such a mind was set against, almost because it was what it was. The condition was utterly bad.

But can a man really fall into such a spiritual condition?

That is my chief difficulty. But I think it may be, as wiser people than I have thought. I find it hard to believe, yet I think it must be so. But I do not believe it is a fixed, final condition, any more than that of the man who does not forgive his neighbour. If it is a worse offence, is it too bad for God’s forgiveness?

But can God do anything more with such a man? How is he ever to get out of this condition? If God’s Spirit is shut out of his heart, how is he to become better?

The Spirit of God is known by witnessing with our spirit. But may there not be other powers and means of the Spirit preparing for this highest office? God who made us can never be far from any man who draws breath; he must be in him, if not in his heart. May not some terrible convulsion from the centre of his being, some earthquake from the hidden gulfs of his nature, so shake such a man that the still small voice that follows tempest and earthquake may be faintly heard through all the deafness of his death? May there not be a fire even such a man can feel? Who shall set bounds to the consuming of our God’s fire, and the purifying in it?

The only argument I can think of that would weigh with me against this is that a man who had so sinned, once brought to acknowledge it, would feel a revulsion so terrible that life would never be endurable again, and the kindest thing God could do would be to put him out of being, since it had been better for him never to have been born. But he who could make such a man repent could make him so sorrowful, lowly and glad he had repented that he would wish to live for ever to repent and worship the glory he now saw. When a man gives up self, past sins no longer oppress him. It is enough for the good of life that God lives, that the All-perfect exists and we can behold him.

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” said the Divine, excusing his murderers not after it was over but while dying by their hands. Then Jesus had already forgiven them. The Father must have heard, for he and the Son are one; and when he succeeded in answering the prayer, his forgiveness in the murderers’ hearts broke out in sorrow, repentance and faith. A dreadful sin, but easy for our Lord to forgive. All that excuse for the misled populace—Lord Christ be thanked; that was like thee! But must we believe that Judas, who repented to agony, so that his high-prized life and self became worthless in his eyes and met no mercy from his own hand, could find none from such a God? I think that when Judas fled from his hanged and fallen body he fled to the tender help of Jesus and found it—I say not how. He was now in a more hopeful condition than ever before, for he had never repented. I believe Jesus loved Judas even while he kissed him with the traitor’s kiss, and was his Saviour still. If any remind me of the words “It had been good for that man if he had not been born,” I have not forgotten them, though I offer only a conjectural explanation: Judas had got none of the good of the world he was born into. He lived an evil life out of harmony with the world and its God, and its love was lost on him. Brought to the very Son of God and living with him as friend, he loved him less, not more, than himself. So it had all been useless, and was all to try over again, in some other way, perhaps inferior, in some other world, in a lower school; he had to be sent down the scale of creation, which is ever ascending toward its Maker. But I will not, cannot believe, O my Lord, that thou wouldst not forgive thy enemy when he repented and did thee right, or that thy holy death was powerless to reach Judas. Have we not heard of those taught of thee who could easily forgive their betrayers in thy name? And if thou forgivest, will thy forgiveness not find its way at last in redemption and purification?

The clause before my text says: “He that denieth me before men shall be denied before the angels of God.” Does that mean “You are mine but not my sort; you denied me; away to the outer darkness”? No. Whoever speaks against the Son of man shall be forgiven, for he may be only the truth revealed without him; but he must be ashamed before the universe of the loving God, and may need the fire that burns and does not consume.

But he who speaks against the Spirit of Truth, the Son of God revealed within him, is beyond that Spirit’s teaching now. How can he be forgiven? Forgiveness would touch him no more than a wall of stone. Let him know what it is to be without the God he denied. Away with him to the Outer Darkness! Perhaps that will make him repent.

My friends, I offer this only as a contribution to understanding our Lord’s words. If we ask him, he will lead us into all truth. Let us not fear to think, for he will not take it ill.

But what I have said must be at least part of the truth.

No discovery in his words can tell us more than we have discovered and seen to be true; the best of his disciples can only help us see for ourselves. Beyond our discoveries lie depths within depths of truth we cannot understand yet shall ever go on understanding. Even now we sometimes glimpse regions from which we receive no word to bring away.

That some things have become so much simpler to us, and great truths have come out of what once looked common, is ground for hope that this will go on through the ages. Our advance from ignorance measures only a small part of the distance between our childishness and his manhood, our love and his, our dimness and his vision. To him may we all come ere long, all children, more children than ever, to receive from his hand the white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.