Third Series

The Creation in Christ

The passage: Everything was made by him, and nothing that has been made was made without him. In him was life, and that life was the light of men (John i. 3, 4).

Anyone who loves the gospel and thinks about it, especially someone used to putting thoughts into words, has probably felt that something is wrong with the end of the third verse in English. It limps, and seems unworthy of the rest. That it is merely redundant is cold comfort to anyone hoping for perfection in the words of the man closest to the Lord. The last phrase is so useless it sounds foolish: “All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made.”

So I was hopeful when I saw in the Greek that moving one full stop would remove the redundancy. Punctuation has no authority for anyone who knows what scribes, editors and printers do to texts, and a precious meaning would be something to thank God for. It did reveal a truth, one that brought the wording into line with the apostle’s highest thought. I was so glad that it hardly mattered that the best manuscripts and translations back the change; the case for the usual reading seemed to me worthless.

Let us look at the passage as I think it should be translated, and then at the meaning it was written for. That meaning belongs to the truth as it is in Jesus and doesn’t depend on this passage, but John expresses it here magnificently and uniquely, if I am right about the interpretation that came to me the moment I saw how the words probably relate.

“All things were made through him, and without him was made not one thing. That which was made in him was life, and the life was the light of men.”

Notice the contrast between through and in.

This great statement seems to me to hold, more than in shadow, the seed of creation and redemption: of everything divine in its bearing on everything human.

I write not to provoke controversy, which I loathe, but in the hope of showing those ready to see it the glory of the truth of the Father and the Son, as this first of seers expressed it. I care as little for a name for orthodoxy as for championing novelty. To the untrue, truth itself must seem unsound, because the light in them is darkness.

I believe that Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of the eternal Father: from the very first he is the Son, because God is the Father. That is an imperfect statement, as any human thought must be that reaches toward the unknown roots of our existence, but I believe it too firmly not to say it, even in words that cannot be right. So I believe the Father is the greater, and that without the Father there could be no Son. I won’t argue this by logic, and state it only for what follows. Paul implies the same when he speaks of the Lord handing the kingdom to his Father, that God may be all in all. I worship the Son as the human God, the only Man, who draws his being and power from the Father. He is equal to his Father, and subject to him, as a son is, and has made himself his Father’s equal in what is most precious in Godhead: Love. That is the essence of the statement I am dealing with, higher than making the worlds, which he did by the Father’s power and not his own. So John, to whom the Lord must have said things he did not say to the rest, writes that all things were made not by the Son but through him.

We shouldn’t explain things away into nothing; we should picture them as best we can, even if the pictures are only shadows of the heavenly. Our being and understanding are poor shadows, but they are shadows of his, cast by him, and no more our own doing than his creative power is. So, in shadow-speech, I say: when the Father brought the visible out of the unseen, he made essential use of the Son, so that everything was created through him. Who can understand how the Father’s part differs from the Son’s? Perhaps we will one day see a little into it, for I dare hope that through chosen sonship we will come much nearer to creating ourselves. To call the finest work of human genius “creation” seems to me a mockery of humanity, itself still being created.

Read the verse again. All things were made through him, but “that which was made in him was life.” See it? The power by which he made the worlds was given him by his Father, but he had a greater power in himself. Something was made not through but in him, by himself: here he creates, in his grand way, within himself, as the Father did.

What life does the apostle mean? Many forms of life came through the Son, but they were results, not the life made in him. The Father could use him in creating only because of the life that was in him.

What God’s life is to himself, we can only know that we cannot know, and even that is not plain ignorance: to see you cannot understand something is already to approach it. What it is to us we do know: the cause of everything we call life, of everything that is. The one endless mystery (I take the two to be one) is how God can be self-existent and how he can make others exist. It will stay a mystery for ever, not because God won’t explain it but because he couldn’t make us understand. A creature cannot know its own creation, since its cause comes before it, nor understand what it can do nothing like. To understand how we were made we would have to make ourselves, which takes being God; and the idea that I, with this cramped, self-dissatisfied consciousness, could have caused myself is the most dismal of all. Yet if I am a child of God I must be like him even in creative energy; something in me must answer, in a childlike way, to his eternal might. But I run ahead. The question now is what that life was, made in the Son, by him inside himself: not through him but in him, his own as God’s life is God’s own.

It was, I answer, the act in him that corresponds, as Son, to his Father’s self-existence. What is deepest in God? Not his power. A being who was only power would be so far from divine that we could give him only fear, not righteous worship; however justly he judged, he could not be God. (Evil, of course, cannot create one atom.) The God we love could not be righteous unless he were something deeper than we usually mean by the word. In one word, God is Love. Love is the deepest depth in him, the root of all his being. He could not be God without creatures to be God to, but love is more: the heart and hand of his creation, his right and his power to create. Nor could he be righteous, meaning fair to his creatures, if love had not made them. His perfection is his love, and all his divine rights rest on it. He is not the great monarch! The simplest peasant loving his cow is more divine than a monarch whose glory is his monarchy. If God refused to punish sin, or punished it for anything but love, he would not be the Father of Jesus Christ. So what in Christ corresponds to God’s creative power? It must also come from love, but in the Son the love is toward one already existing. Because of that eternal love the Father must have the Son; God could not be love without things to love. Jesus has God to love, and his love answers the Father’s. The answer to self-existent love is self-giving love, and Jesus’ refusal of himself corresponds to God’s creating. His love creates by renouncing self: the death of self as a motive, self drowned in the life of God, where it lives only as love. What is life in a child but perfect response to his parents, oneness with them? A child at strife with them is as a child dead, stiff and contorted; see him yield to a will rightly above his own, and life flows back into his limbs and light fountains in his eyes!

Negatively, Christ does and cares for nothing for his own sake; positively, he cares with his whole soul for his Father’s will and pleasure. Because his Father is his Father, he chooses to be his child. The truth in Jesus is his relation to the Father; his righteousness is fulfilling it. Born of God, he is alive, but by giving himself perfectly, choosing to die to himself and live to God, he creates in himself a new and higher life. Standing on it, he can wake in us, his brothers and sisters, a divine shadow of that life. We came from the same home, the heart of his God and ours, but without our elder brother to go first we would never have chosen the self-giving that is life. To will, not from self but with the Eternal, is to live.

This choice of his own being, made in full knowledge, this willing to be the perfectly obedient Son, is what in Jesus answers to God’s self-existence. By putting himself under the Father’s will as his only good, the only reason he exists, he rose at once to the height of his being and sat on the throne of his nature. When he died on the cross, in the wild weather of his outlying provinces, he did what he had always done at home in glory and gladness. From the infinite beginning (speaking only in contradictions) he completed the eternal circle of his being by saying, “Thy will, not mine, be done!” He made himself what he is by deathing himself into the will of the eternal Father, through which he was the eternal Son, plunging into the fountain of his own life, the everlasting Fatherhood. This is the life made in Jesus. Because he willed it, it is possible, and essential, for every man, woman and child the Father has sent into the outer world to return to the inner, his heart. As the Father’s self-existent life gave us being, so Jesus’ willed devotion lets him give us eternal life like his own, by enabling us to do the same. There is no other life for anyone: a disciple must live by the same absolute devotion of his will to the Father’s, and so his life is one with the Father’s.

We have come out of the divine nature, which chooses to be divine, so we must choose to be divine, one with God, loving and living as he does, or perish. People cannot originate this life; it must be shown them and they must choose it. God is the Father of Jesus and of us, of every possibility of our being, but Jesus is the father of our sonship: in him was made the life that is sonship to the Father, the acknowledgment in fact and life of the Father’s claim on his sons and daughters. We cannot be true sons unless our will wills his, our doing following his making. Jesus was the true Son not because he couldn’t help it but because he willed to be the son he was in the divine idea; so with us. We are sons and daughters by God’s claim and must be so by our will, for we aren’t made to be what we cannot help being. Only by choosing God as the Father he is and doing his will can we be saved into the original necessity and bliss of our being. Working this out must be painful, and handing it on to those below us always painful, but the eternal form of God’s will for us is intense bliss.

“And the life was the light of men.”

The life I have described became light for people when he in whom it began appeared. It became light so that they could see it and choose it for themselves, choosing to live that way.

There is always something deeper than anything said; all words, human and divine, all figures and pictures, are only outer layers through which the central reality shines more or less clearly. Light itself is the poor outer form of something deeper and better: life. Life is Christ himself; light is his body. Light is what we see in him; life is what we may be in him. Life “is a light by abundant clarity invisible,” the unspeakable unknown, and it must become light people can see before they can know it. So the obedient human God appeared as an obedient divine man, humbly doing his Father’s works among unfriendly brothers. The Son took form in flesh to be seen and so become the light of men—not that they might have light but that they might have life: seeing what they could never originate, they might begin to hunger for the life they are capable of, so that the life in them longs for him who is its life, as root and stem thirst for the flower they exist for. So the child of God may become the son of God by beholding the Son, the life revealed in light; his radiant heart may be sunlight to his fellows; the idea may be drawn out by the presence of the Ideal, the perfect Son of the Father, sent to his brothers and sisters.

The Son’s devotion could never have been without the Father’s, who seeks his own glory no more than the Son does and is devoted to the Son and all his sons and daughters with perfect, fathomless unselfishness. All that Jesus was and did on earth is what he has always been as the blessed Son-God of the Father-God: that life shining out so that people could see it, being like God, doing God’s will and works, and so unveiling the Father in the Son. It is the Son’s prayer to the other sons to come back to the Father and be reconciled. He seems to me to say: “I know your Father, because he is my Father; I have been with him from eternity. You don’t know him, and I have come to tell you he is just like me, only greater and better. He alone is the true, original good; I am true because I seek nothing but his will. He alone is all in all; I am not, but he is my Father, and I am the son in whom his heart of love is satisfied. Come home with me and sit on the throne of my obedience. Together we will do his will and be glad, for his will is the only good. Do with me what you like; I won’t defend myself. My witness is true, and I will stand by it whatever comes. If I held to it only until danger came close, then prayed for twelve legions of angels, I would be saying the Father will do anything for his children until it hurts him. I bear witness, in the face of death, that my Father is like me, and I dare death to prove me wrong. Kill me, do what you will: my Father is true, and I am true in saying so. Death can kill only my body; it can’t take me prisoner. Father, your will be done! The pain will pass; it is only for a time. I will gladly suffer so that people know I live and that you are my life. Be with me, Father, so that it is not more than I can bear.”

Friends, if you suppose anything less than this could save the world, or bring joy to a single child of God’s making, you know neither the Son nor the Father.

What holds the universe together, the one active unity, reconciling every form and wandering desire and returning love, the fact at the root of every vision, showing that “love is the only good in the world” and selfishness the one hateful thing, is the Son’s devotion to the Father. It is the life of the universe. What makes the universe a whole is not that God created everything, but that the one through whom he created it loves him perfectly and is content to exist because his Father is with him. Nor is it that God is all in all, but the Son’s love for the Father. Unity cannot come from oneness: for unity to begin there must be two. Without Christ, then, there could be no universe. The reconciliation Jesus brought is not the first source of the world’s unity and safety; it was the necessary working out of the prior eternal fact that God and Christ are one, Father and Son, each loving the other as only a Father or only a Son can. The Lord’s prayer for unity between people, the Father and himself springs from love’s eternal need. Without the Father and the Son, no two would care a jot for each other. It might be right for creatures to love because they exist, but what two creatures would ever have started the loving? I can’t believe it would have been I; even with an inclination to love, selfishness would soon have overcome it. But if the Father loves the Son, if the music behind life’s harmony lies not in a theory of love in the Father’s heart but in the burning fact of it in the hearts of Father and Son, then glory to the Father, the Son and the spirit of both, who draw us up into the glory of their joy, to share their thoughts of love, of delight and rest in each other, of joy in all the little ones. The life of Jesus is the light of men, showing them the Father.

But light is not enough; it is for the sake of life. We too must have life in ourselves, and we can live only as Jesus lived, in the way life was made in him: by giving up our life, the one supreme act open to us for making life in ourselves. Christ did it of himself and became light to us so that we could do it after him. We must do it ourselves; all his help, the light and the Spirit’s working in our hearts, is so that we can. Until then we are not alive. The Son’s whole agony with every person is to get him to die as he died. Preaching that doesn’t aim at this builds with wood and hay and stubble. If I cannot say with my whole heart, “Father, do with me as you will, only help me against myself and for you”; if I cannot say, “I am your child, a part of you, glorious in you but grown poor in me: let me be your dog, your horse, anything you will, yours in any shape, and my own or anyone else’s only as yours”—if we cannot give ourselves like that, we have not yet grasped what Christ has grasped us for. The faith a person may, and must, put in God reaches beyond the farthest star the universe could hold. But the question now is not moving mountains, which will one day be easy, but waking and rising from the dead now.

When someone truly says “Thy will be done” with Jesus, as Jesus said it, he closes the everlasting circle of life, and the life of the Father and the Son flows through him as part of the divine organism. Then the Lord’s prayer is fulfilled in him: “I in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one.” The Christ in us is the perfect child’s spirit toward the perfect Father, our true nature flowered by the Lord, whose life is the light of men so that it may become their life, for our true nature is childhood to the Father.

Friends, if you know or suspect these things are true, let us get up and live, even in our darkest spiritual dullness, when hope itself sees nothing to hope for. Let us not dwell on the cause of our earthliness, unless it is some wrong in us, but go straight to the Life. Never let us take comfort in the thought that our deadness is physical: what comfort is it that a deadened body overpowers a spirit that should master it and inspire it to obey? Let us find comfort in the Father and the Son: as long as the Son loves the Father with all the love the Father can welcome, all is well with the little ones. God is all right, so why mind standing a minute in the dark outside his window? We miss being inside, but waiting has its own bliss. Suppose the rain falls and the wind blows, and we stand alone, or with someone dear sharing our outness, and the window is dark behind curtains of inscrutable good. We can tell ourselves, or our friend, “God is; Jesus is not dead; nothing can be going wrong, however it looks to hearts unfinished in childness.” And we can say to the Lord, “Jesus, are you loving the Father in there? Then we out here will do his will and wait patiently till he opens the door. Perhaps you are telling the Father, ‘Your little ones need some wind and rain; their buds are hard and the flowers won’t open; I can’t make them blessed without a bit more winter.’ And perhaps the Father will say, ‘Comfort them, my son Jesus, by remembering your patience when you were missing me, and how sure you were of me when everything around you seemed so unlike me.’” In a word, let us be at peace, because peace is at the heart of things: perfect satisfaction between the Father and the Son, which they call us to share and promise we will, when they have had their good way with us.

Ahead lies a happiness beyond words or human invention for every child who falls in with the Father’s perfect imagination. His imagination is one with his creative will: what God imagines exists. When the created one falls in with the will of him who “loved him into being,” all is well, and the great creation goes on in him on ever higher levels. Your will, O God, be done! Everything else is loss and decay. There is no life but that born of the life the Word made in himself by doing your will, which is the light of men. Through that light the life of men is born, the same life that first came to be in Jesus. As he laid down his life, so must we lay down ours, that as he lives we may live. That which was made in him was life, and the life is the light of men; yet his own, to whom he was sent, did not believe him.

The Knowing of the Son

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

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

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.