The passage: You will by no means come out from there until you have paid the last farthing.
The parables have a wonderful quality that the Lord himself points to but we seldom grasp: the mere intellect cannot understand them. They speak to the conscience and the will, not to the intellect and imagination. They are strong and direct but not definite. They are meant not to explain anything but to rouse a man to say, “I am not what I ought to be; I do not do what I ought to do!” The wise may give endless rambling interpretations, while the child who uses the parables to walk the one path keeps receiving light from them. The Lord’s words, like those of all true teachers, are most obscured by those who interpret rather than do them, and theologians have hidden the gospel more than any adversary. Christ came for our will, not our understanding. He who does what he sees will understand; he who wants to understand rather than do will stumble on and talk foolishness, lacking what could understand such things. Only those who walk by what they find can understand the gospel and its parables. The speaker never meant anyone else to know intellectually what would harm him so known, since he would imagine he had grasped and even possessed it. When the pilgrim of the truth reaches the region of the parable, he finds its interpretation. It is not a fruit or jewel to store, but a well springing by the wayside.
Let us look at what the Lord himself said about his parables. I take Matthew xiii. 14, 15, because it is plainer and quotes Isaiah in full, after the Septuagint; the other Gospels should be read in its light (Mark’s is so compressed it could be falsely read, and John seems to blame the devil directly for the blinding). The point is that those who close their deeper eyes by insincerity shall not be able to use even the superficial eyes of the understanding in the matter. Whether this follows by necessity or as a special punishment, it is God’s will and comes from the live Truth: they shall not see what is not for such as they. It is the punishment of the true Love, and constantly fulfilled. If I know anything of God’s truth, the objectors to Christianity I know do not; their arguments, though not false in themselves, miss the matter. They see what they argue against, but not what they think they argue against.
This removes the difficulty that the parables are plainly for teaching the truth, yet the Lord speaks of them as for concealing it. They are for the understanding of the practical man only, who does what he knows and seeks to understand vitally. They reveal to the live conscience, not to the keenest intellect, though they may rouse the conscience with glimpses of truth where a man is near waking. Ignorance may be both a punishment and a kindness, since all punishment is kindness, the best of which the man is then capable: “Because you will not do, you shall not see; it would be worse for you to see, being unwilling to do.” They are punished by having the way closed; their own doing falls on them. To tell them things plainly would only harden them, since they would not act on them. They get parables, lanterns of the truth, clear to those who walk by their light and dark to those who will not; the latter would have the light in their eyes, and it would only blind them. Their punishment is to be in the wrong and stay there until they come out of it: “You choose the dark; you shall stay in it till its terrors make you cry out.” God puts a seal on a man’s will, either as his great punishment or his mighty favour: “Ye love the darkness, abide in the darkness”; “O woman, great is thy faith: be it done unto thee even as thou wilt!”
I do not know what special meaning lies in the magistrate, judge, and officer, beyond perhaps a general sense of the final approach coming by steps; but I think I know what “agree on the way” and “the uttermost farthing” mean. The parable appeals to the common sense of its hearers in every affair of righteousness. Settle the claim against you; compulsion waits behind it. Do now what you must do one day. Since payment cannot be escaped, escape the prison that enforces it. Do not drive Justice to extremities. You cannot escape the eternal law of things; yield of yourself, and do not make God compel you.
To the honest man, or the man who would be honest, this word is gracious. To the untrue it is a terrible threat; to him who is of the truth it is sweet as the most loving promise. He who is of God’s mind rejoices at the word of the changeless Truth; the voice of the Right is his salvation. If God were not inexorably just, the feeblest lover of right would have no stay: “You are true, O Lord; one day I also shall be true!” “Render the right, cost what it may” is dreadful to those whose life is a falsehood; but those who love righteousness more than life would pay the last farthing. It is a joy deep as peace to know God is determined on such payment, determined to have his children clean as snow, so that with his help they not only make up for any wrong but at length, by eternal choice of good, become incapable under any temptation of doing what God would not do.
Men often cherish, without giving it form, the evil fancy that there is some way out of strict justice, some way to escape doing all that is required. There is none; such a way would be worse than the road to the everlasting fire, for it would end in eternal death. There is no heaven with a little hell in it, no keeping some of the devil in our hearts or pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather! Do not think to be delivered from the necessity of being good by being made good. God is the God of the animals in a far lovelier way, I suspect, than many dare think, but he will not be God of a man by making a good beast of him. You must be good; neither death nor good company will make you so, though if you are willing and try, all helps will be given. A robe of imputed righteousness is the poorest of legal cobwebs spun by spiritual spiders. To me it seems an invention of well-meaning dulness to soothe insanity, though it has served as an escape from worse imaginations. John seems to point at it: he that does righteousness is righteous even as Christ is righteous. Christ is our righteousness not so that we escape punishment, still less being righteous, but as the live, potent creator of righteousness in us, so that, receiving his spirit, we resist unto blood, striving against sin, and know in ourselves how lovely righteousness is and how mean, ugly, and unnatural unrighteousness is. He is our righteousness, and it is no fiction, pretence, or imputation.
What keeps men from seeing righteousness and unrighteousness as they are is that they have been told many things are righteous or unrighteous which are neither. Righteousness is just fairness, from God to man and from man to God and to man: giving every one his large, mighty due. He who does this, and no one else, is righteous. Any system that persuades men there is any salvation but becoming righteous as Jesus is righteous, that a man can be made good as a good dog is good without his own willed share, or that he is saved by having his sins hidden under imputed righteousness, is, so far as it does so, of the devil and not of God. Thank God, even error does not injure the true of heart. They grow in the truth, and as love casts out fear, truth casts out falsehood.
I read in this parable that a man had better make up his mind to be righteous and fair, and pay what he owes in every relation of life, wherever one man may demand of another or complain of unfair play. Arrange matters with those who have anything against you while you are still together and things can be arranged; you will have to, under harder circumstances than now. Putting off is no use. There are means of compelling you.
“In this affair, however, I am in the right.”
“If so, very well, for this affair. But I have reason to doubt whether you are capable of judging righteously in your own cause. Do you hate the man?”
“No, I don’t hate him.”
“Do you dislike him?”
“I can’t say I like him.”
“Do you love him as yourself?”
“Oh, come! come! no one does that!”
“Then no one is to be trusted when he thinks, however firmly, that he is all right and his neighbour all wrong in any matter between them.”
“But I don’t say I am all right and he is all wrong; there may be something to urge on his side. What I say is that I am more in the right than he.”
“This is not fundamentally a question of things but of your spiritual condition and action toward your neighbour. If you were all right toward him, you could do him no wrong. Whatever the dispute, you owe him something you do not pay, as surely as you think he owes you something he will not pay.”
“He would take immediate advantage of me if I owned that.”
“So much the worse for him. Until you are fair to him, it does not matter to you whether he is unfair to you or not.”
“I beg your pardon, it is just what does matter! I want nothing but my rights. What can matter to me more than my rights?”
“Your duties, your debts. You are all wrong. It matters little to you whether he gives you your rights; it is life or death to you whether you give him his. Whether or not he pays what you count his debt, you will be compelled to pay all you owe him. If you owe him a pound and he owes you a million, you must pay the pound whether he pays the million or not. If, owing you love, he gives you hate, you, owing him love, must still pay it. A love, justice, or praise withheld from you, a judgment passed on you without judgment, will not absolve you of a love unpaid, a justice undone, a praise withheld, a false judgment passed. These uttermost farthings, to say nothing of debts the world itself counts grievous wrongs, you must pay, whether he pays you or not. We have a good while to pay, but a crisis comes, always sooner than those expect who are not ready, when the unyielded demand will be followed by prison.
The same holds for every demand of God: refusing to pay makes an adversary who will compel you, for your own sake. If you say “I will not,” he will see to it. There is a prison whose doors, we know, open only when the last farthing is paid.
The main debts God demands are those at the root of all right, which we owe in mind, soul, and being. Whatever in us could make an adversary or keep us from doing God’s will or agreeing with our fellow must be yielded. Every relation to God and our fellow must be heartily acknowledged and met as real. Smaller debts, if any is small, follow.
If the man acknowledges the debt and would pay but cannot, the universe will be taxed to help him. If he accepts God’s will, he is the Father’s child, the Father’s whole power and wealth are his, and the uttermost farthing will easily be paid. If he denies the debt, or acknowledges it and does nothing, then at last the prison! God in the dark can make a man thirst for the light who in the light sought only the dark. The cells may differ in darkness but not in this: every door opens only to payment. There is no day but God’s will, and he who is of the night cannot roam the day forever; unfelt and unprized, the light must be taken from him that he may know what darkness is. When the darkness is perfect, when he is without the light he spent the light in slaying, then he will know darkness.
I think I have seen from afar something of the final prison, the innermost cell of the debtor of the universe; I will try to convey what it may be.
It is the vast outside, the ghastly dark beyond the gates of the city of which God is the light, where evil dogs range, silent as the dark, for there is no sound any more than sight. The time of signs is over; all were misused, and nothing is left by which to believe. The man wakes from the final struggle of death in absolute loneliness, worse than any deserted childhood. Nothing outside his consciousness reaches him: all is dark and dumb, no motion, no wind, no dream of change, no scent from a far field, no sign of God. God has so far withdrawn that the man is conscious only of what God has withdrawn from. In the live world he cared for nothing but himself; now, in the dead world, he is in God’s prison, his own separated self. He would not believe in God because he never saw him; now he doubts there is such a thing as a man’s face, or that he ever saw one rather than dreamed it. He never came near enough to human beings to know what one was, so may well doubt that they ever were, or that he was one.
Next after doubt comes reasoning on the doubt: “The only one must be God! I know no one but myself: I must be God!” Poor helpless dumb devil, his own glorious lord god! He will imagine himself that resistless force which, without his will or knowledge, is the law by which the sun burns and the stars keep their courses. His fancy will breed a thousand fancies, running riot like mice in a deserted house, and he will call it creation, and his. With no reality to set beside them or correct them by, and God’s measured order and sweet graces nowhere for him, what he thinks will be his realities, for lack of what God thinks. Soon misery will beget on imagination a thousand shapes of woe, which he cannot rule or tell from real presences: a world of miserable contradictions and cold-fever dreams.
But no human imagination could adequately picture being left without a shadow of God’s presence. If God gave it, man could not understand it; he knows neither God nor himself by understanding. No man who cares least about God was ever left in this world as God could leave him. I doubt any man from whom God had withdrawn could go on following his wickedness.
The most frightful thing that could befall a man, to his own consciousness, is to have to live an existence with which God had nothing to do. It could not be, for caused being ceases when the causation ceases; we live and do always in God, never out of him. But suppose the man so left that he seems utterly alone, yet, alas, with himself, with not the smallest interchange of thought or contact of existence possible. I believe he would be glad of contact with the worst-loathed insect, a shape of life beyond his own huge, void, formless being! He would be ready to worship his worst enemy, could he be aware of him; I imagine some such feeling in the devils’ prayer to enter the swine. The misery would be not only the absence of all being but his own, but the fearful, endless, unavoidable presence of that self. Without the correction, reflection, and support of other presences, being is not merely unsafe but a horror, for anyone but God, who is his own being. For one whose idea is God’s and the image of God, his own being is far too fragmentary and imperfect to be good company. It is the lovely creatures around us, in whom God gives himself, that save us, until we know him, from the frenzy of aloneness, which is Self, Self, Self. The man who minds only himself must at last go mad unless God interferes.
Is there any way out of the misery? Will the soul that could not believe in God with all his lovely world around testifying of him believe when shut in its own lonely, weary all-and-nothing? For a time it would try to believe it was nothing, a paltry dream that dreamed itself, and to hope the dream might dream it was no more. Self-loathing, for no sin and from no repentance or vision of better, would begin and grow to a misery no soul can tell. Yet if a being can feel self-disgust, is there not some room for hope, as much as a pinch of earth in a rock’s cleft gives a pine? There must be hope while there is existence; where there is existence there must be God, and God is for ever good. But alas, the distance from the light! Such a soul is at the farthest verge of life’s negation. No, not the farthest: a man is nearer heaven in deepest hell than just before he begins to reap the reward of his doings, for he is ready to receive the smallest show of the life that is as an unspeakable boon. All his years in the world he took the gifts of sun and air, earth and sea and human face divine as things that came because that was their way; now the poorest thinning of the darkness he would hail as men of old the glow of a descending angel, a messenger from God. He would not think of God, for it takes long; but hope, not yet seeming hope, would begin to dawn, and the thinner darkness would be a cave of light, a refuge from the horrid self of which he used to be so proud.
A man may think it impossible ever to think so unpleasantly of himself! But he has only to let things go, and it will be his real, natural way of thinking. All I have said is imaginary; but imagination is made to mirror truth, its images are more or less after the model of things that are, I suspect it is the region whence prophecy issues, and when we are true it will mirror nothing but truth. I deal here with the same light and darkness the Lord, Paul, John, Peter, and Jude dealt with. Ask yourself whether the faintest dawn, even of physical light, would not be welcome to such a soul as a refuge from the justly hated self.
And the light would grow across the awful gulf between the soul and its haven, repentance, which is the first pressure of the bosom of God. In the faint twilight the man would feel another thought beside his, another thinking Something near his dreary self, perhaps the man he had most wronged, hated, and despised, and would be glad someone was near: the man he had most injured and was most ashamed to meet would be a refuge from himself, oh, how welcome!
So I might imagine a thousand steps up from the darkness, each a little nearer the light; but ah, the weary way! He cannot come out until he has paid the uttermost farthing! Yet repentance once begun may grow more and more rapid. If God once gets a willing hold, if with but one finger he touches the man’s self, swift as possibility he will draw him into the light. For the forlorn, self-ruined wretch was made to be a child of God, partaker of the divine nature, heir of God and joint heir with Christ. Out of the abyss he cast himself into, refusing to be heir of God, he must rise and be raised, setting out to the heart of God, the one goal and home of the human race, or the last glimmer of humanity will die from him. Whoever will live must cease to be a slave and become a child of God. There is no half-way house where ungodliness may be dallied with and not prove fatal. Whether few or many are cast into such a prison as I have imagined, there is no deliverance for a human soul, in it or out of it, but in paying the last farthing, in becoming lowly, penitent, self-refusing, and so receiving sonship and learning to cry, Father!