The passage: You have never heard God's voice or seen his form, and his word does not stay in you, for you do not believe the one he sent (John v. 37, 38).
One day we shall know how near the New Testament comes to the Lord's very words. That we have them with a difference I cannot doubt. For one thing, I do not believe he spoke Greek. He was sent to the lost sheep of Israel, and the thoughts of God would have come from his heart in the mother tongue of the simple men he spoke to, not one they knew secondhand. He may have spoken Greek to the less simple Jews of Jerusalem, but I see no ground to think so.
Are we bound to believe that John, who understood him best, could give us in his gospel, after so many years, the very words of the simplest profundities ever heard on earth, supposing the Lord spoke Greek to his disciples? I do not say he could not; I ask whether we must believe he could. When the divine presence in their hearts made the disciples able to understand the Lord, they remembered things they had forgotten, perhaps even the very words. But must we believe the evangelists always recorded his words exactly? The small differences between their records are answer enough. John's gospel is the fruit of years of remembering and pondering, one understood thing recalling another; whatever memory can do at its best, with God in the man, I do not believe John always gave the very words. God has not cared that we should have assurance of his very words anywhere—perhaps because his children are prone to word-worship, but also because he would not have them oppressed by words. Being human, words are only partly capable; they could not absolutely contain what the Lord meant, and even he must rely on the spirit of his disciple to be understood. The letter cannot give life, so it should not be throned with power to kill; it should only be the handmaid that opens the door of truth to the mind that is of the truth.
'Then you believe in an individual inspiration for anyone who chooses to claim it!'
Yes—for everyone who claims it from God, not for everyone who claims from men the recognition of having it; he who has a thing does not need it recognized. If I did not believe in a special inspiration for every man who asks for the holy spirit, I would have to throw out the whole tale as an imposture, since in it the Lord promises it to those who ask. An objector without this spirit knows nothing of the words that are spirit and life; his objection is worth less than a savage's to a chemist's assertion, and his assent is an idle blowing of a horn.
'But how is one to tell whether it is really the spirit of God speaking in a man?'
You are not called on to tell. The question for you is whether you have the spirit of Christ yourself: Am I alive with the life of Christ? Everyone who desires to follow the Master has his spirit, and will receive more, to follow closer. He need not prove to anyone that he has the light of Jesus; he has to let it shine. That does not make him a teacher, or able to put large truths into true forms. But when the strength or joy or pity of the truth urges him, let him speak it unafraid, content to be condemned for it, and comforted that if he is mistaken the Lord himself will condemn him and save him 'as by fire.' Men's condemnation, even in Christ's name, will not hurt him. If he speaks true, the Lord will say 'I sent him'; for all truth is of him, and no one sees a true thing to be true except by the Lord, the spirit.
'How am I to know that a thing is true?'
By doing what you know to be true, calling nothing true until you see it to be true, and staying silent until the truth opens your mouth. If you are meant to be silent, woe to you if you speak.
'But if I do not take the words the evangelists attribute to him as the certain, absolute, very words of the Master, how am I to know that they represent his truth?'
By seeing in them what answers to the plainest truth he speaks and to the power working in you to make you a true man; by their appeal to your judgment and their rousing of your conscience. If they do not seem true to you, either they are not the Master's words or you are not true enough to understand them. Words of his that do not show their truth to you are not yet the word of God to you, for they are not spirit and life in you. They may be the nearest words can come to the truth, and may have brought many to God's heart, but for you they remain sealed. A true heart will revere them as probably carrying the Master's meaning; to you they are the rock in the desert before Moses spoke to it. If you wait, your ignorance will not hurt you; if you presume to reason from them, you are a blind man disputing about what he never saw. To reason about truth from words that do not show us they are true is to walk into the mire, the presumption of Pharisaical hypocrisy, which only the untrue are capable of. Humble mistake will not hurt us: the truth is there, and the Lord will see that we come to know it. Even when we think we know it with scarcely a glimpse, the error of a true heart will not be allowed to ruin it; it would not have mistaken the truth but for the untruth still in it, and he who casts out devils will cast out that devil.
In the saying before us I see enough to believe its words embody the mind of Christ. If I could not, I would say, 'I have not yet recognised his mind in this, so I have not understood it, for to understand what is true is to know it true.' I have yet to see any words credibly reported as Jesus' about which I dared to say, 'His mind is not in them.' A man's mind can receive a word only so far as it is Christ's word and he is one with Christ; to him who truly receives it, it is a power, not of argument but of life. The Lord's words are for the spiritual logic that reasons from divine thought to divine thought, not for the logic that handles words as if they were things.
No thought, human or divine, can pass between people except through the symbolism of creation. The heavens and the earth are around us so that we can speak of the unseen by the seen, for the outermost husk of creation corresponds to the deepest things of the Creator. He is not a God who hides himself but one who made in order to reveal. An enemy has meddled with some things, but with more he could not; through these we may speak of God, for once he is revealed they show so much of his nature that we use them as spiritual tokens to carry to others what we have seen of the unseen. The words I now want to look into belong to this kind of mediation.
'And the Father who sent me has himself testified of me. You have never heard his voice or seen his shape, and his word does not abide in you, for you do not believe the one he sent.'
If Jesus said these words, he meant more than lies on the surface. They cannot merely assert what everybody knew, nor can their repeated negations be tautology; he was not telling the Jews a fact they would never have denied. Which of them would claim to have heard God's voice or seen his shape? John himself says, 'No man hath seen God at any time.' The tone here is reproach. Then he reproaches them for not seeing God, when no man has, and Paul says no man can! Is there a paradox? There cannot be the sophism: 'No man has seen God; you are to blame for not having seen him; therefore all men are to blame.' And if we read it, 'No man has seen God, but some ought to have seen him,' there is no hope for the race in being told that not one who could see him ever has.
One utterance is John's, the other his master's. If they contradicted, John's would of course be thrown away; but there can hardly be contradiction, since the man who says the one records the other from the master he belonged to and loved as no man ever loved man.
The word see has one sense in one statement and another in the other: with the eyes in the first, with the soul in the second. One is said of all men; the other to certain Jews of Jerusalem about themselves. No man has seen God with bodily eyes; these Jews ought to have seen him with spiritual eyes.
No man has ever seen God in any outward, visible form of his own; he is revealed in no shape but his son's. But multitudes have seen something of God with the eye of the heart, and perhaps every man might and ought to. We cannot follow God into the minute workings of his spirit any more than into the life-forces beyond the microscope; he may be working in a savage's heart in ways no wisdom of his wisest child can see. Many who have never beheld God's face have caught a glimpse of the hem of his garment, or seen the vastness of his shadow; thousands who have never felt the warmth of its folds have been startled by
Of a sweepy garment vast and white.
Some have dreamed his hand laid on them who never knew themselves gathered to his bosom. The Lord's reproach is to men who ought to have had an experience they had not had. Let us look nearer at his words.
'Ye have not heard his voice' might mean 'you have never listened' or 'never obeyed'; but the next phrase, 'nor seen his shape,' keeps us to the primary sense of hear: 'You have never heard his voice so as to know it for his,' and 'You do not know what he is like.' He plainly implies, 'You ought to know both.' 'You have not his word abiding in you' means 'The word in you from the beginning, the word of God in your conscience, you have not kept; the scripture in which you think you have eternal life, which you accept as Moses' witness, is not at home in you. It comes to you and goes from you; you hear, heed not and forget. You do not dwell with it, brood on it and obey it. You are not of its kind, not among those whose ears are ready and who hunger after the word of the Father.'
What is the sign in them of this ignorance of God, on which the Lord bases his accusation?—'You do not believe the one he sent.'
'How so?' the Jews might answer. 'Have we not asked you for a sign from heaven, and have you not flatly refused it?'
The argument carried little weight with those it applied to most, since the more it applied the less they could see that it did; but it would carry great force with some listeners whose minds were open and whose hearts were drawn to him. His argument was this: 'If you had ever heard the Father's voice, imagined a God anything like him, or cared for his will so that his word was at home in your hearts, you would have known me when you saw me. The least acquaintance with God, such as any true heart has, would have shown you by the light of his word in you, by the shape you had glimpsed however vaguely, and by the likeness of my face and voice to my father's, that I came from him; and you would have listened. The family feeling would have been awake, the holy instinct that makes you know your elder brother. That you do not know me is because you do not know your own father, even my father: all your lives you have refused to do his will, and so have not heard his voice; you have thought of him only as a partisan of your ambitions. If you had loved my father, you would have known his son.' I think he might have added, 'If you had even loved your neighbour, you would have known me, neighbour to the deepest and best in you.' If the Lord appeared in England today as once in Palestine, he would not come in the painters' halo, or in that wintry shine of effeminate beauty and sweet weakness in which they helplessly portray him; nor probably as a carpenter, mason or gardener. He would come in a form and condition bearing the same relation to England, Scotland and Ireland now as his then bore to motley Judea, Samaria and Galilee. Coming so unlooked for, who would recognize and receive him? The idea involves no absurdity; he is not far from us at any moment, if the old story is more than the best of the world's fables. Now as then, the first would be the childlike in heart, the truest, the least selfish—not the highest in any church's estimation, for the childlike are not yet the many, and perhaps not even those who know most about his former visit and have pondered every word of the Greek Testament. The first to cry 'It is the Lord!' would be neither 'good churchman' nor 'good dissenter,' nor anyone who imagines him caring about stupid outside matters. It would not be the man who holds by the mooring-ring of the letter, fast in the quay of what he calls theology, and from his rotting deck abuses those who go down to the sea in ships—who lets the wind of the spirit blow where it will, but never lets it blow him out among its wonders in the deep. Nor he who obeys a command without caring to see its reason, nor he who from barrenness of soul cannot receive the Master's meaning and so makes his word of none effect. If anyone, it would be those likest the Master, who did the will of their father and his, who built on the rock by hearing and doing his sayings. But are there any enough like him to know him at once by voice and face? Multitudes would be taken by a false Christ fashioned after their fancy, and would reject the Lord as a poor impostor. One thing is certain: those who first recognized him would be those who most loved righteousness and hated iniquity.
But I would not forget that foolish forms often cover a live heart, warm toward everything human and divine; the ugliest robe may hide the loveliest form. Every covering is not a clothing. The grass clothes the fields, and the glory surpassing Solomon's clothes the grass; but the traditions of even the worthiest elders will not clothe a soul, much less those of the unworthy. A soul's true clothing must grow out of the soul itself. Some naked souls need only the sight of truth to rush to it, as Dante says, like a wild beast to its den; others, heavily clad in the scribes' leftover garments and afraid of tearing what is fit only to be trodden underfoot, circle it warily like a shy horse that fears a hidden enemy. But let each be true in the way possible to him, and he shall have the Master's praise.
If the Lord appeared, the many who take the common presentation of a thing or person for the thing or person could never see the new vision as another form of the old. The Master has been so misrepresented by those who claimed to present him—above all in the relation between him and his father—that they could see no likeness. For my part, I would rather believe in no God than in the God generally offered. How far those may be to blame who, righteously disgusted, throw the idea away without asking whether something in it may be true though most must be false, on the chance that some who call themselves his prophets have taken spiritual bribes
And pure perfection with impure defeature—
how far those may be to blame, it is not my work to inquire. Some would gladly grasp the hope that this might prove a fact; others do not care to discern, on the palimpsest covered but not obliterated, a credible tale of a perfect man revealing a perfect God: they are not true enough to want that to be fact which would demand they model their lives on a perfect idea and found every hope on it.
But all of us, beholding the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image.