The passage: The Lord says, “I am the truth” (John xiv. 6).
The man of the five senses uses “truth” only for something historical or scientific that has been proved a fact. He may grant that a higher truth could exist, but his lower powers can’t prove it, so he acts as if a wise man would ignore any appeal to the highest part of his nature. But in the word of the man, truth means more than fact, more than the relations of facts or persons, more than the loftiest metaphysical abstraction: it means being and life, will and action. For he says, “I am the truth.”
I want to help whoever I can to understand what the truth means, not through definitions or logical distinctions but so that the right idea comes to mind when they hear the word from the Lord, and not an empty sound or a vague or false notion. If he says “I am the truth,” it is good to know what he means by it. He can mean nothing merely intellectual that could be stated and left there; he means something vital, which governs all its necessary relations and includes whatever goes by the same name on any lower plane. Let us climb toward it step by step.
When something is so, the word that says it is so is the truth. But the fact may be worth nothing in itself, and so may our knowing it. Whether I walked on one side of the street or the other one morning can’t matter in itself, though it might matter to someone to know. So it would sound wrong to say “It is a truth that I walked on the sunny side”; the right word is fact. Whether a statement about it is correct is still a question of fact. But when we ask whether the statement is true or false, we are looking at it as a person’s assertion, and have risen to another plane. Which side I walked on may not matter, but it matters vitally to the witness, and to anyone who loves him, whether he believes what he says: whether he himself is true or false. About the thing, the question is of fact; about the man, it is of truth. He is either a pure soul or a false one, capable and guilty of a lie, and it makes no difference whether he stated the fact; if he meant to, he remains a true man.
I anticipate here: there are truths as well as facts, and lies against truths as well as against facts. The Pharisees who said Corban lied against the truth that a man must honour his father and mother.
Now let us rise from casual facts to constant ones that we cannot change, which involve what we call law. These have more dignity, and statements about them matter more. Whether the water in my jug froze one morning is a small matter; that water always freezes at thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit is of great importance. Is that a truth? I think not. No principle we can see is involved in the changeless fact. The principle at its root in God’s mind must be a truth, but to us the fact is still only a fact, and the word truth should be kept for higher things. Some call the facts of nature truths, but however wide a law you make, you have gone no higher than saying that such and such is always so. Call it a law of nature, not a truth. It can’t be a truth to us until we see why it exists, its relation to mind and intent and ultimately to self-existence: tell us why it must be so, and you state a truth. When we see that a law is what it is because it embodies an eternal thought, a fact of the being of God (and only God’s facts are truths), it becomes an embodied truth to us, a way God would have us think of him. When a law of nature makes us say, “I see why it ought to be; it is just like God,” it rises, not to the dignity of a truth in itself, but to the truth of its own nature: a revelation of God’s character and will, a picture of something in him, far nearer a truth than anything below it. Without the solidity of matter, what notion would we have of the unchanging, or of God and truth and law?
There is a region, perhaps lower by scientific standards, where the word truth begins to apply. I believe every fact in nature is a revelation of God, there as it is because God is as he is, and I suspect all its facts impress us so that we learn God without knowing it. We can see any one fact this way only by finding its soul, its fact of God; but from our first contact with the world it has shown us God through things seen, by which we come to know the unseen. What idea of God could we have without the sky, a visible sphere that is also a formless infinity? The truth of the sky is what it makes us feel of the God who sent it to our eyes. Light, in its discovered laws, seems to me to be as it is because God is as he is: its so-called laws are the waving of his garments, waving as they do because he is thinking and loving and walking inside them.
We are now in a region far above the one commonly claimed for science, open only to the heart of the child and the childlike man and woman. The poet is at home here, and often has to go there to fetch his things. For things as they are, not as science deals with them, are God’s revelation to his children. To be clear: every fact and law of science, even a tentative one, has God’s will in it and may reveal him, but none is there for its own sake. Each is a means; the intent, and God in it, are found in the finished end, not in the laws except as his means. That is why human science cannot discover God: it unpicks the tapestry of God’s science backward, working with its back to him, always leaving his intent, his finished work, behind. At best it reaches his back, never his face, while those who would reach his heart, who like Dante are returning to where they already are, will find the springhead of his science too. Analysis is well, as death is well; analysis is death, not life. It finds a little of the way God walks to his ends, but leaves the end behind. I don’t say the scientist does so, but the process of his work does, following God’s footsteps backward without, too often, appreciating what they were for. To rise from the finished work is the swifter and loftier ascent. Even if a man could find out why God worked as he did, he would discover God, but not the best and deepest of him, for means cannot be as great as ends.
Ask a man of mere science what the truth of a flower is, and he will pull it to pieces and show you its parts and how each serves its life, and tell you where it grows and what climate and insects do to it. Ask the poet, and he will say, “Why, the flower itself, the perfect flower, and what it cannot help saying to anyone with ears to hear.” The truth of a flower is not the facts about it, however accurate, but the shining, gladdening, patient thing on its stalk that draws smiles and tears from child and prophet. The man of science laughs at this because he is only a man of science and doesn’t know what it means; the poet and the child care as little for his laughter as the birds of God (Dante’s name for angels) for his treatise on aeronautics. The children of God must always be mocked by the children of the world, in the church or out of it, who have sharp eyes and ears but dull hearts; those who hold love the only good understand them, smile, and can do without what they have to offer. In the higher state their love is leading them to, they will soon outstrip the men of science, for they have what lies at the root of science, what God’s science exists to reveal. What does it profit a man to know everything and lose the bliss, the sense of well-being, that alone gives his knowledge value?
God’s science in the flower exists for the flower’s relation to his children. If we understand the flower, are at one with it and love it, we have what the science is for, and only that equips us to search truly for the means by which God’s idea of the flower was worked out. The idea of God is the flower, not its botany, which is only ways and means, like canvas and brush to the picture in a painter’s mind. The mere intellect can’t find out what owes its being to the supreme heart; its relation to what is born of the heart is false unless humble. God thought the flower, invented its means, and sent it, a gift of himself, to the eyes and hearts of his children. That even the ignorant and degraded love flowers suggests they have a place in the history of the world, as written in heaven’s archives, that science could never understand. Watch that child! He has found one of his silent, motionless brothers, with God’s clothing on it and God’s thought in its face. What a smile breaks out as the divine understanding passes between them! Watch his mother when he takes it home to her, no nearer understanding it than he. It is no old association that brings tears to her eyes, but God’s thought, unrecognized as such, holding communion with her; she weeps with inexplicable delight. It is only a daisy! But to her it is no mere fact or law of nature; it is the truth of a flower, a perfect thought from the heart of God, a truth of God: not an intellectual truth but a divine fact, a dim revelation, a movement of the creative soul. Who but a father could think flowers up for his little ones? We are close now to the region where the Lord’s word is at home: “I am the truth.”
What is the truth of water? That it is made of hydrogen and oxygen? Does this precious thing exist for the sake of that fact? Did God put the two gases together only so that man could pull them apart, as a father makes toys only to be pulled to pieces? That is a school examiner’s idea of a toy’s best use, not a father’s! Show us what in the two gases fits them to be honoured by forming this lovely thing, and you will give us a revelation about more than water, about the God who made them. There is no water in oxygen or hydrogen. It comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the living God. Water itself, which dances and sings and slakes that wonderful thirst (a picture of the draught the woman of Samaria asked Jesus for), is its own truth, and so a truth of God. Let anyone who wants to know the maker’s love get painfully thirsty and drink from a brook, and then lift up his heart, not just then to the maker of oxygen and hydrogen but to the inventor and mediator of thirst and water, to foresee a little of what his soul may find in God. If he doesn’t then pant like a deer for water-brooks, let him go back to his science and its husks, which will make him thirsty at last, like the Persian’s victim in the dust-tower. Resolving water into its elements tells no more about it than “thirst and water” would tell about the joy of drinking. Let a man go to the hillside and let the brook sing to him until he loves it, and he will be far nearer the fountain of truth than the chemist’s triumphal car will ever carry its shouting, half-understanding followers. He will draw from the brook the water of joyous tears, and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water.
So the truth of a thing is its blossom, what it was made for, the topmost stone set on with rejoicing. Truth in a man’s imagination is the power to recognize that: wherever we see the glory of God in anything he has made, sky or flower or human face, a true imagination is seeing a truth of God. Now to a still higher plane.
When truth touches a man not as something outside him that his intellect reflects, but as a being of action, so that knowing it affects or ought to affect his sense of duty, it becomes far nobler. A fact of no value in itself becomes a matter of moral life and death when he must choose to be true or false about it. Seeing the truth of a thing, its heart and crown, brings him near the fountain of truth it came from; perceiving God in what is, he becomes more of what he was meant to be, with new relations to the universe. But doing the least duty raises him far higher; by it he begins to be a true man. A man may delight in the vision and glory of a truth and not be true himself; the man with weak sight who does what he sees, as far as he sees, and wants to see farther, is true. Knowing what is so and saying it isn’t makes a liar. Whoever recognizes the truth of a human relation and neglects its duty, or knows the laws of nature and ignores them, is not a true man, and the more he teaches those laws the less true he is. He may obey every one and still be the falsest of men, because of higher and closer duties he neglects: whoever looks after himself and not his brother and sister is false. A man may be a poet, aware of the beauty that is a thing’s final cause and of the creative loveliness behind it; he may refuse to lie, steal or slander; and still not be a true man: he has not come to the flower of his own being, or reached the truth of a thing in his own case, that for which he exists, the idea in the mind that made him, and he is not striving toward it. There are relations closer than those with the facts around him, and plainer than those that seem to bring the maker near, which he fails to see, or sees and fails to acknowledge, or acknowledges and fails to fulfil. A man is a man only in doing the truth, and a perfect man only in doing the highest truth, which is fulfilling his relations to his origin. But his relations with his fellow men are infinitely closer than with the things around him, and to many far plainer than his relation to God; the nearer is plain so that he can step on it and rise to the higher. These relations, of thought to thought, being to being, duty to duty, spring from how his being began and are one with his nature. To the intellect alone they are facts of his nature; that they belong to it makes them truths, and fulfilling them a duty. By fulfilling them he is a true man, and by fulfilling them perfectly he is himself a living truth. He is made to understand them at first better than he can love them, so that he can choose them purely because they are true; choosing them, he chooses to love them, and by doing them is enabled to love and truly see them. Then they stop appearing as duties and show as what they are: absolute truths, essential realities, eternal delights. The man who chooses duty is a true man; the perfect man at last never thinks of duty and forgets its name. Jesus’ duty was to do in lower forms what he loved and did perfectly in the highest as well; so he fulfilled all righteousness. One who went to the truth by mere impulse would be a holy animal, not a true man. Relations, truths and duties are shown to a man as lying beyond him so that he may choose them and be a child of God, choosing righteousness as God does. Hence the whole sad, victorious human story, and the glory yet to be revealed!
The moral philosopher who treats duties only as facts in his system is essentially a liar, and so is the man who sees them as truths, essential realities of his humanity, and goes no further. Each is a man in possibility, not yet a real one. To recognize these relations is to be obliged to fulfil them. A man who doesn’t undoes the right of his own existence and destroys his raison d’être; he makes himself a living reason why he should not live, since nothing on those terms could ever have begun. His presence is a claim on his creator for destruction.
The facts of human relation are truths indeed, and most awful: “Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and no murderer has eternal life in him.” The man who hunts pleasure instead of working the fields of duty, who thinks of himself as alone on earth, is himself a lie. Instead of the man he was made to be, he lives as the beasts seem to, except that they, I trust, are rising and he is sinking. But he can’t be allowed to sink beyond God’s reach; that is why the holy (healing) miseries come on him, which he complains of as hard and unfair. They are a painful persuasion to be himself, to be a truth.
Suppose that a man fulfilled all the relations to his fellows that I have described, and was toward them at least a true man. He would still feel, all the more, that something necessary to his well-being was missing. Like a living flower, he would feel he had not yet blossomed and could not tell what the blossom ought to be. The Lord’s words to the young man, “If you would be perfect,” point this way. His existence would not yet be justified to itself. He would stay unsatisfied, because a relation in him, the deepest, closest and strongest, would not yet be a living fact, a truth in him. Not being true toward it, he would not be himself, not ripened into the divine idea that alone can content itself. He is like a child with a child’s heart who doesn’t know he has a father yet misses him with his whole nature, if not his awareness. The relation has not yet begun to be fulfilled in him enough for the coming blossom to send ahead the patience and hope to live by faith without sight. When the flower begins to come, the human plant begins to rejoice in the glory of God not yet revealed, the inheritance of the saints in light; with raised stem and forward-leaning bud it waits for the hour when the lily of God’s field will know itself alive, with God himself for its heart and air, the hour when God and the man are one and all God cares for is the man’s. But I am forgetting my plan.
To the intellect the highest truth is the abstract one: the relation man has to the source of his being, his will to the will that made his a will, his love to the love that kindled his power to love, his intellect to the intellect that lit his. If a man treats these only as objects of thought, ideas to be analysed and arranged, he deals with them as facts, not truths. He is no better for it, probably worse, for he knows something and is false to what most deserves his faithfulness.
But sooner or later the soul (or heart, or spirit, whatever you call the man himself as distinct from his body) becomes aware that it needs someone above it to obey, to rest in, and to deliver it from what in himself is despicable, disappointing and unworthy even of his own interest. He becomes aware of an opposition in him that is not harmony, something he hates that is present in him and seems to be himself. He calls it the old Adam, the flesh, his lower nature, his evil self, or sometimes sees it simply as the part of him where God is not. Then he is in the region of truth, beginning to come true. He will soon find there is no part of him he would be at strife with if God were there, if that part were true to what it ought to be in right relation to the whole. Whatever its name, the old Adam or the animal in him, it would then fulfil its part holily, subject to the higher, a good horse, dog or tiger.
When a man bows before a power that can account for him, to whom he is no mystery as he is to himself, that knows where he came from and where he is going, why he loves this and hates that, and where he began to go wrong, and that longs to set him right and make him someone he can look up to without doubt or fear, confident as a child led by the hand toward the heights of happy-making truth, knowing his father is right where he is wrong; when he feels his whole being held in the embrace of a father who takes full responsibility for him, then he is bursting into flower. The truth of his being, his real nature, his idea, born in God and answering to God’s truth, begins to show itself, and his nature is almost in harmony with itself. Obeying the will that is the cause of his being, and is righteousness and love and truth, he begins to stand on the peak of his being and know himself divine. He begins to feel free. It is the truth known not to his intellect but in his own sense of being true, in his essential awareness of his divine condition, that has made him free. No abstract truth, not even truth itself held by the purest metaphysical insight, can make anyone free; only the truth done, loved and lived, the truth that is of the man and not merely in him, the honesty that makes him a child of the honest God.
When a man loves and wills the truth with his whole nature, he is a living truth. But he did not originate this in himself; he saw it and strove for it. The one living, visible source of truth, embracing all truths in all relations, is Jesus Christ. His truth, chosen and willed by him, the ripeness of his being and flower of his sonship, the crown of his one supreme relation, is complete obedience to his Father. The obedient Jesus is Jesus the Truth, the root of all truth in people and of all its growth. However far from truly human a person is, his being is the undeveloped Christ in him. His likeness to Christ is his truth, as a flower’s full meaning is the truth of the flower. Every man must come to the truth of God’s idea of him: as Christ is the blossom of humanity, so the blossom of every man is the Christ perfected in him. The life-force of humanity working in him is Christ, his root, who generates and perfects his individuality. The stronger a man’s pure will to be true, the freer and more active his choice, and the more distinct his individuality, the more he and all he has is Christ’s. Without Christ he could not exist; existing, he could not have become capable of truth; capable of truth, he could never have loved it; loving and wanting it, he could not have reached it. Only the Lord’s presence in the heart, his deep human sympathy, and whatever deeper thing passes between the creating Truth and the answering soul, could keep a man hoping until he forgets himself and leaves the door open for God to come and go. Christ gives us the will to will, the power to use it, and whatever extra help we need; but we must will the truth ourselves, and the Lord waits for that, for the victory of his Father in his child’s heart. Only there can he see the result of his soul’s labour and be satisfied. When the blossom breaks out in us, the more it is ours the more it is his, because the Father’s highest creation, above all through the Son, is a being who can, like Father and Son, will what is right of his own accord. The groaning and labour, the blossom and the joy, belong to the Father, the Son and us. The will, the power of willing, may be created, but the willing itself is begotten. Because God wills first, man wills also.
When my being is consciously and willingly in the hands of the one who called it to live and think and suffer and be glad, given back to him by perfect obedience, I share the breath and life of God himself. Then I am free, because I am true, which means one with the Father; and freedom knows itself. A true man could not be miserable even in hell, for he is right with himself, being right with the one he came from. To be right with God is to be right with the universe, one with the power, love and will of the mighty Father, the cherisher of joy and lord of laughter, who owns all glories and hopes, loves everything, and hates nothing but selfishness, which he will not have in his kingdom.
Christ, then, is the Lord of life. His life is the light of men, and that light, reflected in them, changes them into the likeness of him, the Truth; so the Truth, the Son, makes them free.