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           Title: Unspoken Sermons Second Series
      Creator(s): MacDonald, George (1824-1905)
     Print Basis: London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1885
   CCEL Subjects: Classic; Sermons;
      LC Call no: BV4253
     LC Subjects:

                  Practical theology

                  Pastoral theology

                  Preaching. Homiletics

                  Sermons
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                         Unspoken Sermons Second Series

By George MacDonald

    London: Longmans, Green & Co.

    1885

   THESE ALSO

   AFTER EIGHTEEN YEARS

   TO

   MY WIFE

   Coraggio, Bordighera

   January 1885
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  THE WAY.

   If thou wouldest be perfect.'--St. Matthew xix. 21.

   For reasons many and profound, amongst the least because of the
   fragmentary nature of the records, he who would read them without the
   candle of the Lord--that is, the light of truth in his inward
   parts--must not merely fall into a thousand errors--a thing for such a
   one of less moment--but must fail utterly of perceiving and
   understanding the life therein struggling to reveal itself--the life,
   that is, of the Son of Man, the thought, the feeling, the intent of the
   Lord himself, that by which he lived, that which is himself, that which
   he poured out for us. Yet the one thing he has to do with is this life
   of Jesus, his inner nature and being, manifested through his outer
   life, according to the power of sight in the spiritual eye that looks
   thereupon.

   In contemplating the incident revealing that life of which I would now
   endeavour to unfold the truth, my readers who do not study the Greek
   Testament must use the revised version. Had I not known and rejoiced in
   it long before the revision appeared, I should have owed the revisers
   endless gratitude, if for nothing more than the genuine reading of St.
   Matthew's report of the story of the youth who came to our Lord.
   Whoever does not welcome the change must fail to see its preciousness.

   Reading then from the revised version, we find in St. Matthew the
   commencement of the conversation between Jesus and the young man very
   different from that given in the Gospels of St. Mark and St. Luke.
   There is not for that the smallest necessity for rejecting either
   account; they blend perfectly, and it is to me a joy unspeakable to
   have both. Put together they give a completed conversation. Here it is
   as I read it; let my fellow students look to the differing, far from
   opposing, reports, and see how naturally they combine.

   Good Master,' said the kneeling youth, and is interrupted by the
   Master:--

   Why callest thou me good?' he returns. None is good save one, even
   God.'

   Daring no reply to this, the youth leaves it, and betakes himself to
   his object in addressing the Lord.

   What good thing shall I do,' he says, that I may have eternal life?'

   But again the Lord takes hold of the word good:--

   Why askest thou me concerning that which is good?' he rejoins. One
   there is who is good.--But if thou wouldest enter into life, keep the
   commandments.'

   Which?'

   Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not
   steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Honour thy father and thy
   mother; and, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.'

   All these things have I observed: what lack I yet?'

   If thou wouldest be perfect, go, sell that thou hast, and give to the
   poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.'

   Let us regard the story.

   As Jesus went out of a house (see St. Mark x. 10 and 17), the young man
   came running to him, and kneeling down in the way, addressed him as
   Good Master.'

   The words with which the Lord interrupts his address reveal the whole
   attitude of the Lord's being. At that moment, at every and each moment,
   just as much as when in the garden of Gethsemane, or encountering any
   of those hours which men call crises of life, his whole thought, his
   whole delight, was in the thought, in the will, in the being of his
   Father. The joy of the Lord's life, that which made it life to him, was
   the Father; of him he was always thinking, to him he was always
   turning. I suppose most men have some thought of pleasure or
   satisfaction or strength to which they turn when action pauses, life
   becomes for a moment still, and the wheel sleeps on its own swiftness:
   with Jesus it needed no pause of action, no rush of renewed
   consciousness, to send him home; his thought was ever and always his
   Father. To its home in the heart of the Father his heart ever turned.
   That was his treasure-house, the jewel of his mind, the mystery of his
   gladness, claiming all degrees and shades of delight, from peace and
   calmest content to ecstasy. His life was hid in God. No vain show could
   enter at his eyes; every truth and grandeur of life passed before him
   as it was; neither ambition nor disappointment could distort them to
   his eternal childlike gaze; he beheld and loved them from the bosom of
   the Father. It was not for himself he came to the world--not to
   establish his own power over the doings, his own influence over the
   hearts of men: he came that they might know the Father who was his joy,
   his life. The sons of men were his Father's children like himself: that
   the Father should have them all in his bosom was the one thought of his
   heart: that should be his doing for his Father, cost him what it might!
   He came to do his will, and on the earth was the same he had been from
   the beginning, the eternal first. He was not interested in himself, but
   in his Father and his Father's children. He did not care to hear
   himself called good. It was not of consequence to him. He was there to
   let men see the goodness of the Father in whom he gloried. For that he
   entered the weary dream of the world, in which the glory was so dulled
   and clouded. You call me good! You should know my Father!'

   For the Lord's greatness consisted in his Father being greater than he:
   who calls into being is greater than who is called. The Father was
   always the Father, the Son always the Son; yet the Son is not of
   himself, but by the Father; he does not live by his own power, like the
   Father. If there were no Father, there would be no Son. All that is the
   Lord's is the Father's, and all that is the Father's he has given to
   the Son. The Lord's goodness is of the Father's goodness; because the
   Father is good the Son is good. When the word good enters the ears of
   the Son, his heart lifts it at once to his Father, the Father of all.
   His words contain no denial of goodness in himself: in his grand
   self-regard he was not the original of his goodness, neither did he
   care for his own goodness, except to be good: it was to him a matter of
   course. But for his Father's goodness, he would spend life, suffering,
   labour, death, to make that known! His other children must learn to
   give him his due, and love him as did the primal Son! The Father was
   all in all to the Son, and the Son no more thought of his own goodness
   than an honest man thinks of his honesty. When the good man sees
   goodness, he thinks of his own evil: Jesus had no evil to think of, but
   neither does he think of his goodness; he delights in his Father's. Why
   callest thou me good? None is good save one, even God.'

   Checked thus, the youth turns to the question which, working in his
   heart, had brought him running, and made him kneel: what good thing
   shall he do that he may have eternal life? It is unnecessary to inquire
   precisely what he meant by eternal life. Whatever shape the thing took
   to him, that shape represented a something he needed and had not got--a
   something which, it was clear to him, could be gained only in some path
   of good. But he thought to gain a thing by a doing, when the very thing
   desired was a being: he would have that as a possession which must
   possess him.

   The Lord cared neither for isolated truth nor for orphaned deed. It was
   truth in the inward parts, it was the good heart, the mother of good
   deeds, he cherished. It was the live, active, knowing, breathing good
   he came to further. He cared for no speculation in morals or religion.
   It was good men he cared about, not notions of good things, or even
   good actions, save as the outcome of life, save as the bodies in which
   the primary live actions of love and will in the soul took shape and
   came forth. Could he by one word have set at rest all the questionings
   of philosophy as to the supreme good and the absolute truth, I venture
   to say that word he would not have uttered. But he would die to make
   men good and true. His whole heart would respond to the cry of sad
   publican or despairing pharisee, How am I to be good?'

   When the Lord says, Why askest thou me concerning that which is good?'
   we must not put emphasis on the me, as if the Lord refused the
   question, as he had declined the epithet: he was the proper person to
   ask, only the question was not the right one: the good thing was a
   small matter; the good Being was all in all. [1] Why ask me about the
   good thing? There is one living good, in whom the good thing, and all
   good, is alive and ever operant. Ask me not about the good thing, but
   the good person, the good being--the origin of all good'--who, because
   he is, can make good. He is the one live good, ready with his life to
   communicate living good, the power of being, and so doing good, for he
   makes good itself to exist. It is not with this good thing and that
   good thing we have to do, but with that power whence comes our power
   even to speak the word good. We have to do with him to whom no one can
   look without the need of being good waking up in his heart; to think
   about him is to begin to be good. To do a good thing is to do a good
   thing; to know God is to be good. It is not to make us do all things
   right he cares, but to make us hunger and thirst after a righteousness
   possessing which we shall never need to think of what is or is not
   good, but shall refuse the evil and choose the good by a motion of the
   will which is at once necessity and choice. You see again he refers him
   immediately as before to his Father.

   But I am anxious my reader should not mistake. Observe, the question in
   the young man's mind is not about the doing or not doing of something
   he knows to be right; had such been the case, the Lord would have
   permitted no question at all; the one thing he insists upon is the
   doing of the thing we know we ought to do. In the instance present, the
   youth looking out for some unknown good thing to do, he sends him back
   to the doing of what he knows, and that in answer to his question
   concerning the way to eternal life.

   A man must have something to do in the matter, and may well ask such a
   question of any teacher! The Lord does not for a moment turn away from
   it, and only declines the form of it to help the youth to what he
   really needs. He has, in truth, already more than hinted where the
   answer lies, namely, in God himself, but that the youth is not yet
   capable of receiving; he must begin with him farther back: If thou
   wouldest enter into life, keep the commandments;'--for verily, if the
   commandments have nothing to do with entering into life, why were they
   ever given to men? This is his task--he must keep the commandments.

   Then the road to eternal life is the keeping of the commandments! Had
   the Lord not said so, what man of common moral sense would ever dare
   say otherwise? What else can be the way into life but the doing of what
   the Lord of life tells the creatures he has made, and whom he would
   have live for ever, that they must do? It is the beginning of the way.
   If a man had kept all those commandments, yet would he not therefore
   have in him the life eternal; nevertheless, without keeping of the
   commandments there is no entering into life; the keeping of them is the
   path to the gate of life; it is not life, but it is the way--so much of
   the way to it. Nay, the keeping of the commandments, consciously or
   unconsciously, has closest and essential relation to eternal life.

   The Lord says nothing about the first table of the law: why does he not
   tell this youth as he did the lawyer, that to love God is everything?

   He had given him a glimpse of the essence of his own life, had pointed
   the youth to the heart of all--for him to think of afterwards: he was
   not ready for it yet. He wanted eternal life: to love God with all our
   heart, and soul, and strength, and mind, is to know God, and to know
   him is eternal life; that is the end of the whole saving matter; it is
   no human beginning, it is the grand end and eternal beginning of all
   things; but the youth was not capable of it. To begin with that would
   be as sensible as to say to one asking how to reach the top of some
   mountain, Just set your foot on that shining snow-clad peak, high there
   in the blue, and you will at once be where you wish to go.' Love God
   with all your heart, and eternal life is yours:'--it would have been to
   mock him. Why, he could not yet see or believe that that was eternal
   life! He was not yet capable of looking upon life even from afar! How
   many Christians are? How many know that they are not? How many care
   that they are not? The Lord answers his question directly, tells him
   what to do--a thing he can do--to enter into life: he must keep the
   commandments!--and when he asks, Which?' specifies only those that have
   to do with his neighbour, ending with the highest and most difficult of
   them.

   But no man can perfectly keep a single commandment of the second table
   any more than of the first.'

   Surely not--else why should they have been given? But is there no
   meaning in the word keep, or observe, except it be qualified by
   perfectly? Is there no keeping but a perfect keeping?

   None that God cares for.'

   There I think you utterly wrong. That no keeping but a perfect one will
   satisfy God, I hold with all my heart and strength; but that there is
   none else he cares for, is one of the lies of the enemy. What father is
   not pleased with the first tottering attempt of his little one to walk?
   What father would be satisfied with anything but the manly step of the
   full-grown son?

   When the Lord has definitely mentioned the commandments he means, the
   youth returns at once that he has observed those from his youth up: are
   we to take his word for it? The Lord at least takes his word for it: he
   looked on him and loved him. Was the Lord deceived in him? Did he tell
   an untruth? or did the Master believe he had kept the commandments
   perfectly? There must be a keeping of the commandments, which, although
   anything but perfect, is yet acceptable to the heart of him from whom
   nothing is hid. In that way the youth had kept the commandments. He had
   for years been putting forth something of his life-energy to keep them.
   Nor, however he had failed of perfection, had he missed the end for
   which they were given him to keep. For the immediate end of the
   commandments never was that men should succeed in obeying them, but
   that, finding they could not do that which yet must be done, finding
   the more they tried the more was required of them, they should be
   driven to the source of life and law--of their life and his law--to
   seek from him such reinforcement of life as should make the fulfilment
   of the law as possible, yea, as natural, as necessary. This result had
   been wrought in the youth. His observance had given him no
   satisfaction; he was not at rest; but he desired eternal life--of which
   there was no word in the law: the keeping of the law had served to
   develop a hunger which no law or its keeping could fill. Must not the
   imperfection of his keeping of the commandments, even in the lower
   sense in which he read them, have helped to reveal how far they were
   beyond any keeping of his, how their implicit demands rose into the
   infinitude of God's perfection?

   Having kept the commandments, the youth needed and was ready for a
   further lesson: the Lord would not leave him where he was; he had come
   to seek and to save. He saw him in sore need of perfection--the thing
   the commonplace Christian thinks he can best do without--the thing the
   elect hungers after with an eternal hunger. Perfection, the perfection
   of the Father, is eternal life. If thou wouldest be perfect,' said the
   Lord. What an honour for the youth to be by him supposed desirous of
   perfection! And what an enormous demand does he, upon the supposition,
   make of him! To gain the perfection he desired, the one thing lacking
   was, that he should sell all that he had, give it to the poor, and
   follow the Lord! Could this be all that lay between him and entering
   into life? God only knows what the victory of such an obedience might
   at once have wrought in him! Much, much more would be necessary before
   perfection was reached, but certainly the next step, to sell and
   follow, would have been the step into life: had he taken it, in the
   very act would have been born in him that whose essence and vitality is
   eternal life, needing but process to develop it into the glorious
   consciousness of oneness with The Life.

   There was nothing like this in the law: was it not hard?--Hard to let
   earth go, and take heaven instead? for eternal life, to let dead things
   drop? to turn his back on Mammon, and follow Jesus? lose his rich
   friends, and be of the Master's household? Let him say it was hard who
   does not know the Lord, who has never thirsted after righteousness,
   never longed for the life eternal!

   The youth had got on so far, was so pleasing in the eyes of the Master,
   that he would show him the highest favour he could; he would take him
   to be with him--to walk with him, and rest with him, and go from him
   only to do for him what he did for his Father in heaven--to plead with
   men, be a mediator between God and men. He would set him free at once,
   a child of the kingdom, an heir of the life eternal.

   I do not suppose that the youth was one whom ordinary people would call
   a lover of money; I do not believe he was covetous, or desired even the
   large increase of his possessions; I imagine he was just like most good
   men of property: he valued his possessions--looked on them as a good. I
   suspect that in the case of another, he would have regarded such
   possession almost as a merit, a desert; would value a man more who had
   means, value a man less who had none--like most of my readers. They
   have not a notion how entirely they will one day have to alter their
   judgment, or have it altered for them, in this respect: well for them
   if they alter it for themselves!

   From this false way of thinking, and all the folly and unreality that
   accompany it, the Lord would deliver the young man. As the thing was,
   he was a slave; for a man is in bondage to what ever he cannot part
   with that is less than himself. He could have taken his possessions
   from him by an exercise of his own will, but there would have been
   little good in that; he wished to do it by the exercise of the young
   man's will: that would be a victory indeed for both! So would he enter
   into freedom and life, delivered from the bondage of mammon by the
   lovely will of the Lord in him, one with his own. By the putting forth
   of the divine energy in him, he would escape the corruption that is in
   the world through lust--that is, the desire or pleasure of having.

   The young man would not.

   Was the Lord then premature in his demand on the youth? Was he not
   ready for it? Was it meant for a test, and not as an actual word of
   deliverance? Did he show the child a next step on the stair too high
   for him to set his foot upon? I do not believe it. He gave him the very
   next lesson in the divine education for which he was ready. It was
   possible for him to respond, to give birth, by obedience, to the
   redeemed and redeeming will, and so be free. It was time the demand
   should be made upon him. Do you say, But he would not respond, he would
   not obey!'? Then it was time, I answer, that he should refuse, that he
   should know what manner of spirit he was of, and meet the confusions of
   soul, the sad searchings of heart that must follow. A time comes to
   every man when he must obey, or make such refusal--and know it.

   Shall I then be supposed to mean that the refusal of the young man was
   of necessity final? that he was therefore lost? that because he
   declined to enter into life the door of life was closed against him?
   Verily, I have not so learned Christ. And that the lesson was not lost,
   I see in this, that he went away sorrowful. Was such sorrow, in the
   mind of an earnest youth, likely to grow less or to grow more? Was all
   he had gone through in the way of obedience to be of no good to him?
   Could the nature of one who had kept the commandments be so slight
   that, after having sought and talked with Jesus, held communion with
   him who is the Life, he would care less about eternal life than before?
   Many, alas! have looked upon his face, yet have never seen him, and
   have turned back; some have kept company with him for years, and denied
   him; but their weakness is not the measure of the patience or the
   resources of God. Perhaps this youth was never one of the Lord's so
   long as he was on the earth, but perhaps when he saw that the Master
   himself cared nothing for the wealth he had told him to cast away,
   that, instead of ascending the throne of his fathers, he let the people
   do with him what they would, and left the world the poor man he had
   lived in it, by its meanest door, perhaps then he became one of those
   who sold all they had, and came and laid the money at the apostles'
   feet. In the meantime he had that in his soul which made it heavy: by
   the gravity of his riches the world held him, and would not let him
   rise. He counted his weight his strength, and it was his weakness.
   Moneyless in God's upper air he would have had power indeed. Money is
   the power of this world--a power for defeat and failure to him who
   holds it--a weakness to be overcome ere a man can be strong; yet many
   decent people fancy it a power of the world to come! It is indeed a
   little power, as food and drink, as bodily strength, as the winds and
   the waves are powers; but it is no mighty thing for the redemption of
   men; yea, to the redemption of those who have it, it is the saddest
   obstruction. To make this youth capable of eternal life, clearly--and
   the more clearly that he went away sorrowful--the first thing was to
   make a poor man of him! He would doubtless have gladly devoted his
   wealth to the service of the Master, yea, and gone with him, as a rich
   man, to spend it for him. But part with it to free him for his
   service--that he could not--yet!

   And how now would he go on with his keeping of the commandments? Would
   he not begin to see more plainly his shortcomings, the larger scope of
   their requirements? Might he not feel the keeping of them more
   imperative than ever, yet impossible without something he had not? The
   commandments can never be kept while there is a strife to keep them:
   the man is overwhelmed in the weight of their broken pieces. It needs a
   clean heart to have pure hands, all the power of a live soul to keep
   the law--a power of life, not of struggle; the strength of love, not
   the effort of duty.

   One day the truth of his conduct must dawn upon him with absolute
   clearness. Bitter must be the discovery. He had refused the life
   eternal! had turned his back upon The Life! In deepest humility and
   shame, yet with the profound consolation of repentance, he would return
   to the Master and bemoan his unteachableness. There are who, like St.
   Paul, can say, I did wrong, but I did it in ignorance; my heart was not
   right, and I did not know it:' the remorse of such must be very
   different from that of one who, brought to the point of being capable
   of embracing the truth, turned from it and refused to be set free. To
   him the time will come, God only knows its hour, when he will see the
   nature of his deed, with the knowledge that he was dimly seeing it so
   even when he did it: the alternative had been put before him. And all
   those months, or days, or hours, or moments, he might have been
   following the Master, hearing the words he spoke, through the windows
   of his eyes looking into the very gulfs of Godhead!

   The sum of the matter in regard to the youth is this:--He had begun
   early to climb the eternal stair. He had kept the commandments, and by
   every keeping had climbed. But because he was well to do--a phrase of
   unconscious irony--he felt well to be--quite, but for that lack of
   eternal life! His possessions gave him a standing in the world--a
   position of consequence--of value in his eyes. He knew himself looked
   up to; he liked to be looked up to; he looked up to himself because of
   his means, forgetting that means are but tools, and poor tools too. To
   part with his wealth would be to sink to the level of his inferiors!
   Why should he not keep it? why not use it in the service of the Master?
   What wisdom could there be in throwing away such a grand advantage? He
   could devote it, but he could not cast it from him! He could devote it,
   but he could not devote himself! He could not make himself naked as a
   little child and let his Father take him! To him it was not the word of
   wisdom the Good Master' spoke. How could precious money be a hindrance
   to entering into life! How could a rich man believe he would be of more
   value without his money? that the casting of it away would make him one
   of God's Anakim? that the battle of God could be better fought without
   its impediment? that his work refused as an obstruction the aid of
   wealth? But the Master had repudiated money that he might do the will
   of his Father; and the disciple must be as his master. Had he done as
   the Master told him, he would soon have come to understand. Obedience
   is the opener of eyes.

   There is this danger to every good youth in keeping the commandments,
   that he will probably think of himself more highly than he ought to
   think. He may be correct enough as to the facts, and in his deductions,
   and consequent self-regard, be anything but fair. He may think himself
   a fine fellow, when he is but an ordinarily reasonable youth, trying to
   do but the first thing necessary to the name or honour of a man.
   Doubtless such a youth is exceptional among youths; but the number of
   fools not yet acknowledging the first condition of manhood nowise
   alters the fact that he who has begun to recognize duty, and
   acknowledge the facts of his being, is but a tottering child on the
   path of life. He is on the path; he is as wise as at the time he can
   be; the Father's arms are stretched out to receive him; but he is not
   therefore a wonderful being; not therefore a model of wisdom; not at
   all the admirable creature his largely remaining folly would, in his
   worst moments, that is when he feels best, persuade him to think
   himself; he is just one of God's poor creatures. What share this
   besetting sin of the good young man may have had in the miserable
   failure of this one, we need not inquire; but it may well be that he
   thought the Master under-valued his work as well as his wealth, and was
   less than fair to him.

   To return to the summing up of the matter:--

   The youth, climbing the stair of eternal life, had come to a
   landing-place where not a step more was visible. On the cloud-swathed
   platform he stands looking in vain for further ascent. What he thought
   with himself he wanted, I cannot tell: his idea of eternal life I do
   not know; I can hardly think it was but the poor idea of living for
   ever, all that commonplace minds grasp at for eternal life--its mere
   concomitant shadow, in itself not worth thinking about, not for a
   moment to be disputed, and taken for granted by all devout Jews: when a
   man has eternal life, that is, when he is one with God, what should he
   do but live for ever? without oneness with God, the continuance of
   existence would be to me the all but unsurpassable curse--the
   unsurpassable itself being, a God other than the God I see in Jesus;
   but whatever his idea, it must have held in it, though perhaps only in
   solution, all such notions as he had concerning God and man and a
   common righteousness. While thus he stands, then, alone and helpless,
   behold the form of the Son of Man! It is God himself come to meet the
   climbing youth, to take him by the hand, and lead him up his own stair,
   the only stair by which ascent can be made. He shows him the first step
   of it through the mist. His feet are heavy; they have golden shoes. To
   go up that stair he must throw aside his shoes. He must walk
   bare-footed into life eternal. Rather than so, rather than stride
   free-limbed up the everlasting stair to the bosom of the Father, he
   will keep his precious shoes! It is better to drag them about on the
   earth, than part with them for a world where they are useless!

   But how miserable his precious things, his golden vessels, his
   embroidered garments, his stately house, must have seemed when he went
   back to them from the face of the Lord! Surely it cannot have been long
   before in shame and misery he cast all from him, even as Judas cast
   from him the thirty pieces of silver, in the agony of every one who
   wakes to the fact that he has preferred money to the Master! For,
   although never can man be saved without being freed from his
   possessions, it is yet only hard, not impossible, for a rich man to
   enter into the kingdom of God.
     __________________________________________________________________

   [1] As it stands, it is difficult to read the passage without putting
   emphasis on the me, which spoils the sense. I think it would better be,
   Why dost thou ask me concerning &c.?'
     __________________________________________________________________

  THE HARDNESS OF THE WAY.

   Children, how hard is it!'--St. Mark x. 24.

   I suspect there is scarcely a young man rich and thoughtful who is not
   ready to feel our Lord's treatment of this young man hard. He is apt to
   ask, Why should it be difficult for a rich man to enter into the
   kingdom of heaven?' He is ready to look upon the natural fact as an
   arbitrary decree, arising, shall I say? from some prejudice in the
   divine mind, or at least from some objection to the joys of well-being,
   as regarded from the creatures' side. Why should the rich fare
   differently from other people in respect of the world to come? They do
   not perceive that the law is they shall fare like other people, whereas
   they want to fare as rich people. A condition of things in which it
   would be easy for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven is to
   me inconceivable. There is no kingdom of this world into which a rich
   man may not easily enter--in which, if he be but rich enough, he may
   not be the first: a kingdom into which it would be easy for a rich man
   to enter could be no kingdom of heaven. The rich man does not by any
   necessity of things belong to the kingdom of Satan, but into that
   kingdom he is especially welcome, whereas into the kingdom of heaven he
   will be just as welcome as another man.

   I suspect also that many a rich man turns from the record of this
   incident with the resentful feeling that there lies in it a claim upon
   his whole having; while there are many, and those by no means only of
   the rich, who cannot believe the Lord really meant to take the poor
   fellow's money from him. To the man born to riches they seem not merely
   a natural, but an essential condition of well-being; and the man who
   has made his money, feels it his by the labour of his soul, the travail
   of the day, and the care of the night. Each feels a right to have and
   to hold the things he possesses; and if there is a necessity for his
   entering into the kingdom of heaven, it is hard indeed that right and
   necessity should confront each other, and constitute all but a bare
   impossibility! Why should he not make the best of both worlds'? He
   would compromise, if he might; he would serve Mammon a little, and God
   much. He would not have such a best of both worlds' as comes of putting
   the lower in utter subservience to the higher--of casting away the
   treasure of this world and taking the treasure of heaven instead. He
   would gain as little as may be of heaven--but something, with the loss
   of as little as possible of the world. That which he desires of heaven
   is not its best; that which he would not yield of the world is its most
   worthless.

   I can well imagine an honest youth, educated in Christian forms, thus
   reasoning with himself:--Is the story of general relation? Is this
   demand made upon me? If I make up my mind to be a Christian, shall I be
   required to part with all I possess? It must have been comparatively
   easy in those times to give up the kind of things they had! If I had
   been he, I am sure I should have done it--at the demand of the Saviour
   in person. Things are very different now! Wealth did not then imply the
   same social relations as now! I should be giving up so much more!
   Neither do I love money as he was in danger of doing: in all times the
   Jews have been Mammon-worshippers! I try to do good with my money!
   Besides, am I not a Christian already? Why should the same thing be
   required of me as of a young Jew? If every one who, like me, has a
   conscience about money, and cares to use it well, had to give up all,
   the power would at once be in the hands of the irreligious; they would
   have no opposition, and the world would go to the devil! We read often
   in the Bible of rich men, but never of any other who was desired to
   part with all that he had! When Ananias was struck dead, it was not
   because he did not give up all his money, but because he pretended to
   have done so. St. Peter expressly says, "While it remained was it not
   thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power?" How
   would the Lord have been buried but for the rich Joseph? Besides, the
   Lord said, "If thou wouldst be perfect, go, sell that thou hast." I
   cannot be perfect; it is hopeless; and he does not expect it.'--It
   would be more honest if he said, I do not want to be perfect; I am
   content to be saved.' Such as he do not care for being perfect as their
   Father in heaven is perfect, but for being what they call saved. They
   little think that without perfection there is no salvation--that
   perfection is salvation: they are one.--And again,' he adds, in
   conclusion triumphant, the text says, "How hard is it for them that
   trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God!" I do not trust in my
   riches. I know that they can do nothing to save me!'

   I will suppose myself in immediate communication with such a youth. I
   should care little to set forth anything called truth, except in siege
   for surrender to the law of liberty. If I cannot persuade, I would be
   silent. Nor would I labour to instruct the keenest intellect; I would
   rather learn for myself. To persuade the heart, the will, the action,
   is alone worth the full energy of a man. His strength is first for his
   own, then for his neighbour's manhood. He must first pluck out the beam
   out of his own eye, then the mote out of his brother's--if indeed the
   mote in his brother's be more than the projection of the beam in his
   own. To make a man happy as a lark, might be to do him grievous wrong:
   to make a man wake, rise, look up, turn, is worth the life and death of
   the Son of the Eternal.

   I say then to the youth:--

   Have you kept--have you been keeping the commandments?'

   I will not dare to say that,' I suppose him to answer. I ought to know
   better than that youth how much is implied in the keeping of the
   commandments!'

   But,' I ask insisting, does your answer imply that, counting the Lord a
   hard master, you have taken the less pains to do as he would have you?
   or that, bending your energies to the absolute perfection he requires,
   you have the more perceived the impossibility of fulfilling the law?
   Can you have failed to note that it is the youth who has been for years
   observing the commandments on whom the further, and to you startling,
   command is laid, to part with all that he has? Surely not! Are you then
   one on whom, because of correspondent condition, the same command could
   be laid? Have you, in any sense like that in which the youth answered
   the question, kept the commandments? Have you, unsatisfied with the
   result of what keeping you have given them, and filled with desire to
   be perfect, gone kneeling to the Master to learn more of the way to
   eternal life? or are you so well satisfied with what you are, that you
   have never sought eternal life, never hungered and thirsted after the
   righteousness of God, the perfection of your being? If this latter be
   your condition, then be comforted; the Master does not require of you
   to sell what you have and give to the poor. You follow him! You go with
   him to preach good tidings!--you who care not for righteousness! You
   are not one whose company is desirable to the Master. Be comforted, I
   say: he does not want you; he will not ask you to open your purse for
   him; you may give or withhold; it is nothing to him. What! is he to be
   obliged to one outside his kingdom--to the untrue, the ignoble, for
   money? Bring him a true heart, an obedient hand: he has given his
   life-blood for that; but your money--he neither needs it nor cares for
   it.'

   Pray, do not deal harshly with me. I confess I have not been what I
   ought, but I want to repent, and would fain enter into life. Do not
   think, because I am not prepared, without the certainty that it is
   required of me, to cast from me all I have that I have no regard for
   higher things.'

   Once more, then, go and keep the commandments. It is not come to your
   money yet. The commandments are enough for you. You are not yet a child
   in the kingdom. You do not care for the arms of your father; you value
   only the shelter of his roof. As to your money, let the commandments
   direct you how to use it. It is in you but pitiable presumption to
   wonder whether it is required of you to sell all that you have. When in
   keeping the commandments you have found the great reward of loving
   righteousness--the further reward of discovering that, with all the
   energy you can put forth, you are but an unprofitable servant; when you
   have come to know that the law can be kept only by such as need no law;
   when you have come to feel that you would rather pass out of being than
   live on such a poor, miserable, selfish life as alone you can call
   yours; when you are aware of a something beyond all that your mind can
   think, yet not beyond what your heart can desire--a something that is
   not yours, seems as if it never could be yours, which yet your life is
   worthless without; when you have come therefore to the Master with the
   cry, "What shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?" it may be he
   will then say to you, "Sell all that you have and give to the poor, and
   come follow me." If he do, then will you be of men most honourable if
   you obey--of men most pitiable if you refuse. Till then you would be no
   comfort to him, no pleasure to his friends. For the young man to have
   sold all and followed him would have been to accept God's patent of
   peerage: to you it is not offered. Were one of the disobedient, in the
   hope of the honour, to part with every straw he possessed, he would but
   be sent back to keep the commandments in the new and easier
   circumstances of his poverty.

   Does this comfort you? Then alas for you! A thousand times alas! Your
   relief is to know that the Lord has no need of you--does not require
   you to part with your money, does not offer you himself instead! You do
   not indeed sell him for thirty pieces of silver, but you are glad not
   to buy him with all that you have! Wherein do you differ from the youth
   of the story? In this, that he was invited to do more, to do
   everything, to partake of the divine nature; you have not had it in
   your power to refuse; you are not fit to be invited. Such as you can
   never enter the kingdom. You would not even know you were in heaven if
   you were in it; you would not see it around you if you sat on the very
   footstool of the throne.'

   But I do not trust in my riches; I trust in the merits of my Lord and
   Saviour. I trust in his finished work. I trust in the sacrifice he has
   offered.'

   Yes; yes!--you will trust in anything but the Man himself who tells you
   it is hard to be saved! Not all the merits of God and his Christ can
   give you eternal life; only God and his Christ can; and they cannot,
   would not if they could, without your keeping the commandments. The
   knowledge of the living God is eternal life. What have you to do with
   his merits? You have to know his being, himself. And as to trusting in
   your riches--who ever imagined he could have eternal life by his
   riches? No man with half a conscience, half a head, and no heart at
   all, could suppose that any man trusting in his riches to get him in,
   could enter the kingdom. That would be too absurd. The money-confident
   Jew might hope that, as his riches were a sign of the favour of God,
   that favour would not fail him at the last; or their possession might
   so enlarge his self-satisfaction that he could not entertain the idea
   of being lost; but trust in his riches!--no. It is the last refuge of
   the riches-lover, the riches-worshipper, the man to whom their
   possession is essential for his peace, to say he does not trust in them
   to take him into life. Doubtless the man who thinks of nothing so much,
   trusts in them in a very fearful sense; but hundreds who do so will yet
   say, "I do not trust in my riches; I trust in--" this or that
   stock-phrase.'

   You forget yourself; you are criticizing the Lord's own words: he said,
   "How hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom
   of heaven!"'

   I do not forget myself; to this I have been leading you:--our Lord, I
   believe, never said those words. The reading of both the Sinaitic and
   the Vatican manuscript, the oldest two we have, that preferred, I am
   glad to see, by both Westcott and Tischendorf, though not by Tregelles
   or the Revisers, is, "Children, how hard is it to enter into the
   kingdom of God!" These words I take to be those of the Lord. Some
   copyist, with the mind at least of a rich man, dissatisfied with the
   Lord's way of regarding money, and like yourself anxious to compromize,
   must forsooth affix his marginal gloss--to the effect that it is not
   the possessing of riches, but the trusting in them, that makes it
   difficult to enter into the kingdom! Difficult? Why, it is eternally
   impossible for the man who trusts in his riches to enter into the
   kingdom! it is for the man who has riches it is difficult. Is the Lord
   supposed to teach that for a man who trusts in his riches it is
   possible to enter the kingdom? that, though impossible with men, this
   is possible with God? God take the Mammon-worshipper into his glory!
   No! the Lord never said it. The annotation of Mr. Facingbothways crept
   into the text, and stands in the English version. Our Lord was not in
   the habit of explaining away his hard words. He let them stand in all
   the glory of the burning fire wherewith they would purge us. Where
   their simplicity finds corresponding simplicity, they are understood.
   The twofold heart must mistake. It is hard for a rich man, just because
   he is a rich man, to enter into the kingdom of heaven.'

   Some, no doubt, comfort themselves with the thought that, if it be so
   hard, the fact will be taken into account: it is but another shape of
   the fancy that the rich man must be differently treated from his
   fellows; that as he has had his good things here, so he must have them
   there too. Certain as life they will have absolute justice, that is,
   fairness, but what will that avail, if they enter not into the kingdom?
   It is life they must have; there is no enduring of existence without
   life. They think they can do without eternal life, if only they may
   live for ever! Those who know what eternal life means count it the one
   terror to have to live on without it.

   Take then the Lord's words thus: Children, how hard is it to enter into
   the kingdom of God!' It is quite like his way of putting things.
   Calling them first to reflect on the original difficulty for every man
   of entering into the kingdom of God, he reasserts in yet stronger
   phrase the difficulty of the rich man: It is easier for a camel to go
   through a needle's eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom
   of God.' It always was, always will be, hard to enter into the kingdom
   of heaven. It is hard even to believe that one must be born from
   above--must pass into a new and unknown consciousness. The law-faithful
   Jew, the ceremonial Christian, shrinks from the self-annihilation, the
   life of grace and truth, the upper air of heavenly delight, the
   all-embracing love that fills the law full and sets it aside. They
   cannot accept a condition of being as in itself eternal life. And hard
   to believe in, this life, this kingdom of God, this simplicity of
   absolute existence, is hard to enter. How hard? As hard as the Master
   of salvation could find words to express the hardness: If any man
   cometh unto me, and hateth not . . . . his own life also, he cannot be
   my disciple.' And the rich man must find it harder than another to hate
   his own life. There is so much associated with it to swell out the self
   of his consciousness, that the difficulty of casting it from him as the
   mere ugly shadow of the self God made, is vastly increased.

   None can know how difficult it is to enter into the kingdom of heaven,
   but those who have tried--tried hard, and have not ceased to try. I
   care not to be told that one may pass at once into all possible
   sweetness of assurance; it is not assurance I desire, but the thing
   itself; not the certainty of eternal life, but eternal life. I care not
   what other preachers may say, while I know that in St. Paul the spirit
   and the flesh were in frequent strife. They only, I repeat, know how
   hard it is to enter into life, who are in conflict every day, are
   growing to have this conflict every hour--nay, begin to see that no
   moment is life, without the presence that maketh strong. Let any tell
   me of peace and content, yea, joy unspeakable as the instant result of
   the new birth; I deny no such statement, refuse no such testimony; all
   I care to say is, that, if by salvation they mean less than absolute
   oneness with God, I count it no salvation, neither would be content
   with it if it included every joy in the heaven of their best imagining.
   If they are not righteous even as he is righteous, they are not saved,
   whatever be their gladness or their content; they are but on the way to
   be saved. If they do not love their neighbour--not as themselves: that
   is a phrase ill to understand, and not of Christ, but--as Christ loves
   him, I cannot count them entered into life, though life may have begun
   to enter into them. Those whose idea of life is simply an eternal one,
   best know how hard it is to enter into life. The Lord said, Children
   how hard is it to enter into the kingdom!' the disciples little knew
   what was required of them!

   Demands unknown before are continually being made upon the Christian:
   it is the ever fresh rousing and calling, asking and sending of the
   Spirit that worketh in the children of obedience. When he thinks he has
   attained, then is he in danger; when he finds the mountain he has so
   long been climbing show suddenly a distant peak, radiant in eternal
   whiteness, and all but lost in heavenly places, a peak whose
   glory-crowned apex it seems as if no human foot could ever reach--then
   is there hope for him; proof there is then that he has been climbing,
   for he beholds the yet unclimbed; he sees what he could not see before;
   if he knows little of what he is, he knows something of what he is not.
   He learns ever afresh that he is not in the world as Jesus was in the
   world; but the very wind that breathes courage as he climbs is the hope
   that one day he shall be like him, seeing him as he is.

   Possessions are Things, and Things in general, save as affording matter
   of conquest and means of spiritual annexation, are very ready to prove
   inimical to the better life. The man who for consciousness of
   well-being depends upon anything but life, the life essential, is a
   slave; he hangs on what is less than himself. He is not perfect who,
   deprived of every thing, would not sit down calmly content, aware of a
   well-being untouched; for none the less would he be possessor of all
   things, the child of the Eternal. Things are given us, this body first
   of things, that through them we may be trained both to independence and
   true possession of them. We must possess them; they must not possess
   us. Their use is to mediate--as shapes and manifestations in lower kind
   of the things that are unseen, that is, in themselves unseeable, the
   things that belong, not to the world of speech, but the world of
   silence, not to the world of showing, but the world of being, the world
   that cannot be shaken, and must remain. These things unseen take form
   in the things of time and space--not that they may exist, for they
   exist in and from eternal Godhead, but that their being may be known to
   those in training for the eternal; these things unseen the sons and
   daughters of God must possess. But instead of reaching out after them,
   they grasp at their forms, reward the things seen as the things to be
   possessed, fall in love with the bodies instead of the souls of them.
   There are good people who can hardly believe that, if the young man had
   consented to give up his wealth, the Lord would not then have told him
   to keep it; they too seem to think the treasure in heaven insufficient
   as a substitute. They cannot believe he would have been better off
   without his wealth. Is not wealth power?' they ask. It is indeed power,
   and so is a wolf hid in the robe; it is power, but as of a brute
   machine, of which the owner ill knows the handles and cranks, valves
   and governor. The multitude of those who read the tale are of the same
   mind as the youth himself--in his worst moment, as he turned and
   went--with one vast difference, that they are not sorrowful.

   Things can never be really possessed by the man who cannot do without
   them--who would not be absolutely, divinely content in the
   consciousness that the cause of his being is within it--and with him. I
   would not be misunderstood: no man can have the consciousness of God
   with him and not be content; I mean that no man who has not the Father
   so as to be eternally content in him alone, can possess a sunset or a
   field of grass or a mine of gold or the love of a fellow-creature
   according to its nature--as God would have him possess it--in the
   eternal way of inheriting, having, and holding. He who has God, has all
   things, after the fashion in which he who made them has them. To man,
   woman, and child, I say--if you are not content, it is because God is
   not with you as you need him, not with you as he would be with you, as
   you must have him; for you need him as your body never needed food or
   air, need him as your soul never hungered after joy, or peace, or
   pleasure.

   It is imperative on us to get rid of the tyranny of things. See how
   imperative: let the young man cling with every fibre to his wealth,
   what God can do he will do; his child shall not be left in the hell of
   possession! Comes the angel of death!--and where are the things that
   haunted the poor soul with such manifold hindrance and obstruction! The
   world, and all that is in the world, drops and slips, from his feet,
   from his hands, carrying with it his body, his eyes, his ears, every
   pouch, every coffer, that could delude him with the fancy of
   possession.

   Is the man so freed from the dominion of things? does Death so serve
   him--so ransom him? Why then hasten the hour? Shall not the youth abide
   the stroke of Time's clock--await the Inevitable on its path to free
   him?'

   Not so!--for then first, I presume, does the man of things become aware
   of their tyranny. When a man begins to abstain, then first he
   recognizes the strength of his passion; it may be, when a man has not a
   thing left, he will begin to know what a necessity he had made of
   things; and if then he begin to contend with them, to cast out of his
   soul what Death has torn from his hands, then first will he know the
   full passion of possession, the slavery of prizing the worthless part
   of the precious.

   Wherein then lies the service of Death? He takes the sting, but leaves
   the poison!'

   In this: it is not the fetters that gall, but the fetters that soothe,
   which eat into the soul. When the fetters of gold are gone, on which
   the man delighted to gaze, though they held him fast to his
   dungeon-wall, buried from air and sunshine, then first will he feel
   them in the soreness of their lack, in the weary indifference with
   which he looks on earth and sea, on space and stars. When the truth
   begins to dawn upon him that those fetters were a horror and a
   disgrace, then will the good of saving death appear, and the man begin
   to understand that having never was, never could be well-being; that it
   is not by possessing we live, but by life we possess. In this way is
   the loss of the things he thought he had, a motioning, hardly towards,
   yet in favour of deliverance. It may seem to the man the first of his
   slavery when it is in truth the beginning of his freedom. Never soul
   was set free without being made to feel its slavery; nothing but itself
   can enslave a soul, nothing without itself free it.

   When the drunkard, free of his body, but retaining his desire unable to
   indulge it, has time at length to think, in the lack of the means of
   destroying thought, surely there dawns for him then at last a fearful
   hope!--not until, by the power of God and his own obedient effort, he
   is raised into such a condition that, be the temptation what it might,
   he would not yield for an immortality of unrequited drunkenness--all
   its delights and not one of its penalties--is he saved.

   Thus death may give a new opportunity--with some hope for the multitude
   counting themselves Christians, who are possessed by things as by a
   legion of devils; who stand well in their church; whose lives are
   regarded as stainless; who are kind, friendly, give largely, believe in
   the redemption of Jesus, talk of the world and the church; yet whose
   care all the time is to heap up, to make much into more, to add house
   to house and field to field, burying themselves deeper and deeper in
   the ash-heap of Things.

   But it is not the rich man only who is under the dominion of things;
   they too are slaves who, having no money, are unhappy from the lack of
   it. The man who is ever digging his grave is little better than he who
   already lies mouldering in it. The money the one has, the money the
   other would have, is in each the cause of an eternal stupidity. To the
   one as to the other comes the word, How is it that ye do not
   understand?'
     __________________________________________________________________

  THE CAUSE OF SPIRITUAL STUPIDITY.

   How is it that ye do not understand?'--St. Mark viii. 21.

   After feeding the four thousand with seven loaves and a few small
   fishes, on the east side of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus, having crossed
   the lake, was met on the other side by certain Pharisees, whose
   attitude towards him was such that he betook himself again to the boat,
   and recrossed the lake. On the way the disciples bethought them that
   they had in the boat but a single loaf: probably while the Lord was
   occupied with the Pharisees, one of them had gone and bought it, little
   thinking they were about to start again so soon. Jesus, still occupied
   with the antagonism of the leaders of the people, and desirous of
   destroying their influence on his disciples, began to warn them against
   them. In so doing he made use of a figure they had heard him use
   before--that of leaven as representing a hidden but potent and
   pervading energy: the kingdom of heaven, he had told them, was like
   leaven hid in meal, gradually leavening the whole of it. He now tells
   them to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees. The disciples, whose
   minds were occupied with their lack of provisions, the moment they
   heard the word leaven, thought of bread, concluded it must be because
   of its absence that he spoke of leaven, and imagined perhaps a warning
   against some danger of defilement from Pharisaical cookery: It is
   because we have taken no bread!' A leaven like that of the Pharisees
   was even then at work in their hearts; for the sign the Pharisees
   sought in the mockery of unbelief, they had had a few hours before, and
   had already, in respect of all that made it of value, forgotten.

   It is to the man who is trying to live, to the man who is obedient to
   the word of the Master, that the word of the Master unfolds itself.
   When we understand the outside of things, we think we have them: the
   Lord puts his things in subdefined, suggestive shapes, yielding no
   satisfactory meaning to the mere intellect, but unfolding themselves to
   the conscience and heart, to the man himself, in the process of
   life-effort. According as the new creation, that of reality, advances
   in him, the man becomes able to understand the words, the symbols, the
   parables of the Lord. For life, that is, action, is alone the human
   condition into which the light of the Living can penetrate; life alone
   can assimilate life, can change food into growth. See how the disciples
   here fooled themselves!

   See how the Lord calls them to their senses. He does not tell them in
   so many words where they are wrong; he attacks instead the cause in
   themselves which led to their mistake--a matter always of infinitely
   more consequence than any mistake itself: the one is a live mistake, an
   untruth in the soul, the other a mere dead blunder born of it. The
   word--connection therefore between their blunder and our Lord's
   exhortation, is not to be found; the logic of what the Lord said, is
   not on the surface. Often he speaks not to the words but to the
   thought; here he speaks not even to the thought, but to the whole mode
   of thinking, to the thought--matrix, the inward condition of the men.

   He addresses himself to rouse in them a sense of their lack of
   confidence in God, which was the cause of their blunder as to his
   meaning. He reminds them of the two miracles with the loaves, and the
   quantity of fragments left beyond the need. From one of these miracles
   they had just come; it was not a day behind them; yet here they were
   doubting already! He makes them go over the particulars of the
   miracles--hardly to refresh their memories--they were tenacious enough
   of the marvel, but to make their hearts dwell on them; for they had
   already forgotten or had failed to see their central revelation--the
   eternal fact of God's love and care and compassion. They knew the
   number of the men each time, the number of the loaves each time, the
   number of the baskets of fragments they had each time taken up, but
   they forgot the Love that had so broken the bread that its remnants
   twenty times outweighed its loaves.

   Having thus questioned them like children, and listened as to the
   answers of children, he turns the light of their thoughts upon
   themselves, and, with an argument to the man which overleaps all the
   links of its own absolute logic, demands, How is it that ye do not
   understand?' Then they did understand, and knew that he did not speak
   to them of the leaven of bread, but of the teaching of the Pharisees
   and of the Sadducees. He who trusts can understand; he whose mind is
   set at ease can discover a reason.

   How otherwise than by rebuking and quelling their anxiety, could those
   words have made them see what then they saw? What connection was there
   between How many baskets took ye up?' and How is it that ye do not
   understand?' What had the miracles to do with their discovering that
   when he spoke of leaven, it was not of the leaven of bread? If not of
   the leaven of bread, how did the reference to those miracles of bread
   make them recognize the fact?

   The lesson he would have had them learn from the miracle, the natural
   lesson, the only lesson worthy of the miracle, was, that God cared for
   his children, and could, did, and would provide for their necessities.
   This lesson they had not learned. No doubt the power of the miracle was
   some proof of his mission, but the love of it proved it better, for it
   made it worth proving: it was a throb of the Father's heart. The ground
   of the Master's upbraiding is not that they did not understand him, but
   that they did not trust God; that, after all they had seen, they yet
   troubled themselves about bread. Because we easily imagine ourselves in
   want, we imagine God ready to forsake us. The miracles of Jesus were
   the ordinary works of his Father, wrought small and swift that we might
   take them in. The lesson of them was that help is always within God's
   reach when his children want it--their design, to show what God is--not
   that Jesus was God, but that his Father was God--that is, was what he
   was, for no other kind of God could be, or be worth believing in, no
   other notion of God be worth having. The mission undertaken by the Son,
   was not to show himself as having all power in heaven and earth, but to
   reveal his Father, to show him to men such as he is, that men may know
   him, and knowing, trust him. It were a small boon indeed that God
   should forgive men, and not give himself. It would be but to give them
   back themselves; and less than God just as he is will not comfort men
   for the essential sorrow of their existence. Only God the gift can turn
   that sorrow into essential joy: Jesus came to give them God, who is
   eternal life.

   Those miracles of feeding gave the same lesson to their eyes, their
   hands, their mouths, that his words gave to their ears when he said,
   seek not ye what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, neither be ye of
   doubtful mind; for your Father knoweth that ye have need of these
   things;' Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and
   all these things shall be added unto you.' So little had they learned
   it yet, that they remembered the loaves but forgot the Father--as men
   in their theology forget the very Qeou logoV. Thus forgetting, they
   were troubled about provision for the day, and the moment leaven was
   mentioned, thought of bread. What else could he mean? The connection
   was plain! The Lord reminds them of the miracle, which had they
   believed after its true value, they would not have been so occupied as
   to miss what he meant. It had set forth to them the truth of God's
   heart towards them; revealed the loving care without which he would not
   be God. Had they learned this lesson, they would not have needed the
   reminder; for their hearts would not have been so filled with
   discomfort as to cause them mistake his word. Had they but said with
   themselves that, though they had but one loaf, they had him who makes
   all the loaves, they would never have made the foolish blunder they
   did.

   The answer then to the Lord's reproach, How is it that ye do not
   understand?' is plainly this: their minds were so full of care about
   the day's bread, that they could not think with simplicity about
   anything else; the mere mention of leaven threw them floundering afresh
   in the bog of their unbelief. When the Lord reminded them of what their
   eyes had seen, so of what he was and what God was, and of the
   foolishness of their care--the moment their fear was taught to look up,
   that moment they began to see what the former words of the Lord must
   have meant: their minds grew clear enough to receive and reflect in a
   measure their intent.

   The care of the disciples was care for the day, not for the morrow; the
   word morrow must stand for any and every point of the future. The next
   hour, the next moment, is as much beyond our grasp and as much in God's
   care, as that a hundred years away. Care for the next minute is just as
   foolish as care for the morrow, or for a day in the next thousand
   years--in neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything.
   Those claims only of the morrow which have to be prepared to-day are of
   the duty of to-day; the moment which coincides with work to be done, is
   the moment to be minded; the next is nowhere till God has made it.

   Their lack of bread seems to have come from no neglect, but from the
   immediacy of the Lord's re-embarkation; at the same time had there been
   a want of foresight, that was not the kind of thing the Lord cared to
   reprove; it was not this and that fault he had come to set right, but
   the primary evil of life without God, the root of all evils, from
   hatred to discourtesy. Certain minor virtues also, prudence amongst the
   rest, would thus at length be almost, if not altogether, superseded. If
   a man forget a thing, God will see to that: man is not lord of his
   memory or his intellect. But man is lord of his will, his action; and
   is then verily to blame when, remembering a duty, he does not do it,
   but puts it off, and so forgets it. If a man lay himself out to do the
   immediate duty of the moment, wonderfully little forethought, I
   suspect, will be found needful. That forethought only is right which
   has to determine duty, and pass into action. To the foundation of
   yesterday's work well done, the work of the morrow will be sure to fit.
   Work done is of more consequence for the future than the foresight of
   an archangel.

   With the disciples as with the rich youth, it was Things that prevented
   the Lord from being understood. Because of possession the young man had
   not a suspicion of the grandeur of the call with which Jesus honoured
   him. He thought he was hardly dealt with to be offered a patent of
   Heaven's nobility--he was so very rich! Things filled his heart; things
   blocked up his windows; things barricaded his door, so that the very
   God could not enter. His soul was not empty, swept, and garnished, but
   crowded with meanest idols, among which his spirit crept about upon its
   knees, wasting on them the gazes that belonged to his fellows and his
   Master. The disciples were a little further on than he; they had left
   all and followed the Lord; but neither had they yet got rid of Things.
   The paltry solitariness of a loaf was enough to hide the Lord from
   them, to make them unable to understand him. Why, having forgotten,
   could they not trust? Surely if he had told them that for his sake they
   must go all day without food, they would not have minded! But they lost
   sight of God, and were as if either he did not see, or did not care for
   them.

   In the former case it was the possession of wealth, in the latter the
   not having more than a loaf, that rendered incapable of receiving the
   word of the Lord: the evil principle was precisely the same. If it be
   Things that slay you, what matter whether things you have, or things
   you have not? The youth, not trusting in God, the source of his riches,
   cannot brook the word of his Son, offering him better riches, more
   direct from the heart of the Father. The disciples, forgetting who is
   lord of the harvests of the earth, cannot understand his word, because
   filled with the fear of a day's hunger. He did not trust in God as
   having given; they did not trust in God as ready to give. We are like
   them when, in any trouble, we do not trust him. It is hard on God, when
   his children will not let him give; when they carry themselves so that
   he must withhold his hand, lest he harm them. To take no care that they
   acknowledge whence their help comes, would be to leave them worshippers
   of idols, trusters in that which is not.

   Distrust is atheism, and the barrier to all growth. Lord, we do not
   understand thee, because we do not trust thy Father--whole-hearted to
   us, as never yet was mother to her first-born! Full of care, as if he
   had none, we think this and that escapes his notice, for this and that
   he does not think! While we who are evil would die to give our children
   bread to eat, we are not certain the only Good will give us anything of
   what we desire! The things of thy world so crowd our hearts, that there
   is no room in them for the things of thy heart, which would raise ours
   above all fear, and make us merry children in our Father's house!
   Surely many a whisper of the watching Spirit we let slip through
   brooding over a need not yet come to us! To-morrow makes to-day's whole
   head sick, its whole heart faint. When we should be still, sleeping or
   dreaming, we are fretting about an hour that lies a half sun's--journey
   away! Not so doest thou, Lord! thou doest the work of thy Father! Wert
   thou such as we, then should we have good cause to be troubled! But
   thou knowest it is difficult, things pressing upon every sense, to
   believe that the informing power of them is in the unseen; that out of
   it they come; that, where we can descry no hand directing, a will,
   nearer than any hand, is moving them from within, causing them to
   fulfil his word! Help us to obey, to resist, to trust.

   The care that is filling your mind at this moment, or but waiting till
   you lay the book aside to leap upon you--that need which is no need, is
   a demon sucking at the spring of your life.

   No; mine is a reasonable care--an unavoidable care, indeed!'

   Is it something you have to do this very moment?'

   No.'

   Then you are allowing it to usurp the place of something that is
   required of you this moment!'

   There is nothing required of me at this moment.'

   Nay, but there is--the greatest thing that can be required of man.'

   Pray, what is it?'

   Trust in the living God. His will is your life.'

   He may not will I should have what I need!'

   Then you only think you need it. Is it a good thing?'

   Yes, it is a good thing.'

   Then why doubt you shall have it?'

   Because God may choose to have me go without it.'

   Why should he?'

   I cannot tell.'

   Must it not be in order to give you something instead?'

   I want nothing instead.'

   I thought I was talking to a Christian!'

   I can consent to be called nothing else.'

   Do you not, then, know that, when God denies anything a child of his
   values, it is to give him something he values?'

   But if I do not want it?'

   You are none the less miserable just because you do not have it.
   Instead of his great possessions the young man was to have the company
   of Jesus, and treasure in heaven. When God refused to deliver a certain
   man from a sore evil, concerning which he three times besought him,
   unaccustomed to be denied, he gave him instead his own graciousness,
   consoled him in person for his pain.'

   Ah, but that was St. Paul!'

   True; what of that?'

   He was one by himself!'

   God deals with all his children after his own father-nature. No
   scripture is of private interpretation even for a St. Paul. It sets
   forth God's way with man. If thou art not willing that God should have
   his way with thee, then, in the name of God, be miserable--till thy
   misery drive thee to the arms of the Father.'

   I do trust him in spiritual matters.'

   Everything is an affair of the spirit. If God has a way, then that is
   the only way. Every little thing in which you would have your own way,
   has a mission for your redemption; and he will treat you as a naughty
   child until you take your Father's way for yours.'

   There will be this difference, however, between the rich that loves his
   riches and the poor that hates his poverty--that, when they die, the
   heart of the one will be still crowded with things and their pleasures,
   while the heart of the other will be relieved of their lack; the one
   has had his good things, the other his evil things. But the rich man
   who held his things lightly, nor let them nestle in his heart; who was
   a channel and no cistern; who was ever and always forsaking his
   money--starts, in the new world, side by side with the man who
   accepted, not hated, his poverty. Each will say, I am free!'

   For the only air of the soul, in which it can breathe and live, is the
   present God and the spirits of the just: that is our heaven, our home,
   our all-right place. Cleansed of greed, jealousy, vanity, pride,
   possession, all the thousand forms of the evil self, we shall be God's
   children on the hills and in the fields of that heaven, not one
   desiring to be before another, any more than to cast that other out;
   for ambition and hatred will then be seen to be one and the same
   spirit.--What thou hast, I have; what thou desirest, I will; I give to
   myself ten times in giving once to thee. My want that thou mightst
   have, would be rich possession.'

   But let me be practical; for thou art ready to be miserable over
   trifles, and dost not believe God good enough to care for thy care: I
   would reason with thee to help thee rid of thy troubles, for they hide
   from thee the thoughts of thy God.

   The things readiest to be done, those which lie not at the door but on
   the very table of a man's mind, are not merely in general the most
   neglected, but even by the thoughtful man, the oftenest let alone, the
   oftenest postponed. The Lord of life demanding high virtue of us, can
   it be that he does not care for the first principles of justice? May a
   man become strong in righteousness without learning to speak the truth
   to his neighbour? Shall a man climb the last flight of the stair who
   has never set foot on the lowest step? Truth is one, and he who does
   the truth in the small thing is of the truth; he who will do it only in
   a great thing, who postpones the small thing near him to the great
   thing farther from him, is not of the truth. Let me suggest some
   possible parallels between ourselves and the disciples maundering over
   their one loaf--with the Bread of Life at their side in the boat. We
   too dull our understandings with trifles, fill the heavenly spaces with
   phantoms, waste the heavenly time with hurry. To those who possess
   their souls in patience come the heavenly visions. When I trouble
   myself over a trifle, even a trifle confessed--the loss of some little
   article, say--spurring my memory, and hunting the house, not from
   immediate need, but from dislike of loss; when a book has been borrowed
   of me and not returned, and I have forgotten the borrower, and fret
   over the missing volume, while there are thousands on my shelves from
   which the moments thus lost might gather treasure holding relation with
   neither moth, nor rust, nor thief; am I not like the disciples? Am I
   not a fool whenever loss troubles me more than recovery would gladden?
   God would have me wise, and smile at the trifle. Is it not time I lost
   a few things when I care for them so unreasonably? This losing of
   things is of the mercy of God; it comes to teach us to let them go. Or
   have I forgotten a thought that came to me, which seemed of the truth,
   and a revealment to my heart? I wanted to keep it, to have it, to use
   it by and by, and it is gone! I keep trying and trying to call it back,
   feeling a poor man till that thought be recovered--to be far more lost,
   perhaps, in a note-book, into which I shall never look again to find
   it! I forget that it is live things God cares about--live truths, not
   things set down in a book, or in a memory, or embalmed in the joy of
   knowledge, but things lifting up the heart, things active in an active
   will. True, my lost thought might have so worked; but had I faith in
   God, the maker of thought and memory, I should know that, if the
   thought was a truth, and so alone worth anything, it must come again;
   for it is in God--so, like the dead, not beyond my reach: kept for me,
   I shall have it again.

   These are foolish illustrations--not worth writing!'

   If such things are not, then the mention of them is foolish. If they
   are, then he is foolish who would treat them as if they were not. I
   choose them for their smallness, and appeal especially to all who keep
   house concerning the size of trouble that suffices to hide word and
   face of God.

   With every haunting trouble then, great or small, the loss of thousands
   or the lack of a shilling, go to God, and appeal to him, the God of
   your life, to deliver you, his child, from that which is unlike him,
   therefore does not belong to you, but is antagonistic to your nature.
   If your trouble is such that you cannot appeal to him, the more need
   you should appeal to him! Where one cannot go to God, there is
   something specially wrong. If you let thought for the morrow, or the
   next year, or the next month, distress you; if you let the chatter of
   what is called the public, peering purblind into the sanctuary of
   motive, annoy you; if you seek or greatly heed the judgment of men,
   capable or incapable, you set open your windows to the mosquitoes of
   care, to drown with their buzzing the voice of the Eternal!

   If you tell me that but for care, the needful work of the world would
   be ill done--What work,' I ask, can that be, which will be better done
   by the greedy or anxious than by the free, fearless soul? Can care be a
   better inspirer of labour than the sending of God? If the work is not
   his work, then, indeed, care may well help it, for its success is loss.
   But is he worthy the name of man who, for the fear of starvation, will
   do better work than for the joy that his labour is not in vain in the
   Lord? I know as well as you that you are not likely to get rich that
   way; but neither will you block up the gate of the kingdom of heaven
   against yourself.

   Ambition in every shape has to do with Things, with outward advantages
   for the satisfaction of self-worship; it is that form of pride, foul
   shadow of Satan, which usurps the place of aspiration. The sole
   ambition that is of God is the ambition to rise above oneself; all
   other is of the devil. Yet is it nursed and cherished in many a soul
   that thinks itself devout, filling it with petty cares and
   disappointments, that swarm like bats in its air, and shut out the
   glory of God. The love of the praise of men, the desire of fame, the
   pride that takes offence, the puffing-up of knowledge, these and every
   other form of Protean self-worship--we must get rid of them all. We
   must be free. The man whom another enslaves may be free as God; to him
   who is a slave in himself, God will not enter in; he will not sup with
   him, for he cannot be his friend. He will sit by the humblest hearth
   where the daily food is prepared; he will not eat in a lumber-room, let
   the lumber be thrones and crowns. Will not, did I say? Cannot, I say.
   Men full of things would not once partake with God, were he by them all
   the day.

   Nor will God force any door to enter in. He may send a tempest about
   the house; the wind of his admonishment may burst doors and windows,
   yea, shake the house to its foundations; but not then, not so, will he
   enter. The door must be opened by the willing hand, ere the foot of
   Love will cross the threshold. He watches to see the door move from
   within. Every tempest is but an assault in the siege of love. The
   terror of God is but the other side of his love; it is love outside the
   house, that would be inside--love that knows the house is no house,
   only a place, until it enter--no home, but a tent, until the Eternal
   dwell there. Things must be cast out to make room for their souls--the
   eternal truths which in things find shape and show.

   But who is sufficient to cast them out? If a man take courage and
   encounter the army of bats and demon-snakes that infests the place of
   the Holy, it is but to find the task too great for him; that the temple
   of God will not be cleansed by him; that the very dust he raises in
   sweeping is full of corruptive forces. Let such as would do what they
   must yet cannot, be what they must yet cannot, remember, with hope and
   courage, that he who knows all about our being, once spake a parable to
   the end that they ought always to pray, and not to faint.
     __________________________________________________________________

  THE WORD OF JESUS ON PRAYER.

   They ought always to pray.'--St. Luke xviii. 1.

   The impossibility of doing what we would as we would, drives us to look
   for help. And this brings us to a new point of departure. Everything
   difficult indicates something more than our theory of life yet
   embraces, checks some tendency to abandon the strait path, leaving open
   only the way ahead. But there is a reality of being in which all things
   are easy and plain--oneness, that is, with the Lord of Life; to pray
   for this is the first thing; and to the point of this prayer every
   difficulty hedges and directs us. But if I try to set forth something
   of the reasonableness of all prayer, I beg my readers to remember that
   it is for the sake of action and not speculation; if prayer be anything
   at all, it is a thing to be done: what matter whether you agree with me
   or not, if you do not pray? I would not spend my labour for that; I
   desire it to serve for help to pray, not to understand how a man might
   pray and yet be a reasonable soul.

   First, a few words about the parable itself.

   It is an instance, by no means solitary, of the Lord's use of a tale
   about a very common or bad person, to persuade, reasoning a fortiori,
   of the way of the All-righteous. Note the points: Did the unrighteous
   judge, to save himself from annoyance, punish one with whom he was not
   offended, for the sake of a woman he cared nothing about? and shall not
   the living Justice avenge his praying friends over whose injuries he
   has to exercise a long-suffering patience towards their enemies?'--for
   so I would interpret the phrase, as correctly translated in the
   Revision, and he is long-suffering over them.'--I say unto you, that he
   will avenge them speedily. Howbeit when the Son of Man cometh, shall he
   find faith on the earth?'

   Here then is a word of the Lord about prayer: it is a comfort that he
   recognizes difficulty in the matter--sees that we need encouragement to
   go on praying, that it looks as if we were not heard, that it is no
   wonder we should be ready to faint and leave off. He tells a parable in
   which the suppliant has to go often and often to the man who can help
   her, gaining her end only at the long last. Actual delay on the part of
   God, we know from what follows, he does not allow; the more plain is it
   that he recognizes how the thing must look to those whom he would have
   go on praying. Here as elsewhere he teaches us that we must not go by
   the look of things, but by the reality behind the look. A truth, a
   necessity of God's own willed nature, is enough to set up against a
   whole army of appearances. It looks as if he did not hear you: never
   mind; he does; it must be that he does; go on as the woman did; you too
   will be heard. She is heard at last, and in virtue of her much going;
   God hears at once, and will avenge speedily. The unrighteous judge
   cared nothing for the woman; those who cry to God are his own
   chosen--plain in the fact that they cry to him. He has made and
   appointed them to cry: they do cry: will he not hear them? They exist
   that they may pray; he has chosen them that they may choose him; he has
   called them that they may call him--that there may be such communion,
   such interchange as belongs to their being and the being of their
   Father. The gulf of indifference lay between the poor woman and the
   unjust judge; God and those who seek his help, are closer than two
   hands clasped hard in love: he will avenge them speedily. It is a bold
   assertion in the face of what seems great delay--an appearance
   acknowledged in the very groundwork of the parable. Having made it, why
   does he seem to check himself with a sigh, adding, Howbeit when the Son
   of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?' After all he had
   said, and had yet to say, after all he had done, and was going on to
   do, when he came again, after time given for the holy leaven to work,
   would he find men trusting the Father? Would he find them, even then,
   beyond the tyranny of appearances, believing in spite of them? Would
   they be children enough towards God to know he was hearing them and
   working for them, though they could not hear him or see him work?--to
   believe the ways of God so wide, that even on the breadth of his track
   was room for their understanding to lose its way--what they saw, so
   small a part of what he was doing, that it could give them but little
   clue to his end? that it was because the goal God had in view for them
   was so high and afar, that they could detect no movement of approach
   thereto? The sigh, the exclamation, never meant that God might be doing
   something more than he was doing, but that the Father would have a
   dreary time to wait ere his children would know, that is, trust in him.
   The utterance recognizes the part of man, his slowly yielded part in
   faith, and his blame in troubling God by not trusting in him. If men
   would but make haste, and stir themselves up to take hold on God! They
   were so slow of heart to believe! They could but would not help it and
   do better!

   He seems here to refer to his second coming--concerning the time of
   which, he refused information; concerning the mode of which, he said it
   would be unexpected; but concerning the duty of which, he insisted it
   was to be ready: we must be faithful, and at our work. Do those who
   say, lo here or lo there are the signs of his coming, think to be too
   keen for him, and spy his approach? When he tells them to watch lest he
   find them neglecting their work, they stare this way and that, and
   watch lest he should succeed in coming like a thief! So throughout: if,
   instead of speculation, we gave ourselves to obedience, what a
   difference would soon be seen in the world! Oh, the multitude of
   so-called religious questions which the Lord would answer with, strive
   to enter in at the strait gate'! Many eat and drink and talk and teach
   in his presence; few do the things he says to them! Obedience is the
   one key of life.

   I would meet difficulties, not answer objections; I would remove
   stumbling-blocks from the path of him who would pray; I would help him
   to pray. If, seeing we live not by our own will, we live by another
   will, then is there reason, and then only can there be reason in
   prayer. To him who refuses that other will, I have nothing to say. The
   hour may come when he will wish there were some one to pray to; now he
   is not of those whom I can help.

   If there be a God, and I am his creature, there may be, there should
   be, there must be some communication open between him and me. If any
   one allow a God, but one scarce good enough to care about his
   creatures, I will yield him that it were foolish to pray to such a God;
   but the notion that, with all the good impulses in us, we are the
   offspring of a cold-hearted devil, is so horrible in its inconsistency,
   that I would ask that man what hideous and cold-hearted disregard to
   the truth makes him capable of the supposition! To such a one God's
   terrors, or, if not his terrors, then God's sorrows yet will speak; the
   divine something in him will love, and the love be left moaning.

   If I find my position, my consciousness, that of one from home, nay,
   that of one in some sort of prison; if I find that I can neither rule
   the world in which I live nor my own thoughts or desires; that I cannot
   quiet my passions, order my likings, determine my ends, will my growth,
   forget when I would, or recall what I forget; that I cannot love where
   I would, or hate where I would; that I am no king over myself; that I
   cannot supply my own needs, do not even always know which of my seeming
   needs are to be supplied, and which treated as impostors; if, in a
   word, my own being is everyway too much for me; if I can neither
   understand it, be satisfied with it, nor better it--may it not well
   give me pause--the pause that ends in prayer? When my own scale seems
   too large for my management; when I reflect that I cannot account for
   my existence, have had no poorest hand in it, neither, should I not
   like it, can do anything towards causing it to cease; when I think that
   I can do nothing to make up to those I love, any more than to those I
   hate, for evils I have done them and sorrows I have caused them; that
   in my worst moments I disbelieve in my best, in my best loathe my
   worst; that there is in me no wholeness, no unity; that life is not a
   good to me, for I scorn myself--when I think all or any such things,
   can it be strange if I think also that surely there ought to be
   somewhere a being to account for me, one to account for himself, and
   make the round of my existence just; one whose very being accounts and
   is necessary to account for mine; whose presence in my being is
   imperative, not merely to supplement it, but to make to myself my
   existence a good? For if not rounded in itself, but dependent on that
   which it knows not and cannot know, it cannot be to itself a good known
   as a good--a thing of reason and well-being: it will be a life longing
   for a logos to be the interpretative soul of its cosmos--a logos it
   cannot have. To know God present, to have the consciousness of God
   where he is the essential life, must be absolutely necessary to that
   life! He that is made in the image of God must know him or be desolate:
   the child must have the Father! Witness the dissatisfaction, yea
   desolation of my soul-wretched, alone, unfinished, without him! It
   cannot act from itself, save in God; acting from what seems itself
   without God, is no action at all, it is a mere yielding to impulse. All
   within is disorder and spasm. There is a cry behind me, and a voice
   before; instincts of betterment tell me I must rise above my present
   self--perhaps even above all my possible self: I see not how to obey,
   how to carry them out! I am shut up in a world of consciousness, an
   unknown I in an unknown world: surely this world of my unwilled,
   unchosen, compelled existence, cannot be shut out from him, cannot be
   unknown to him, cannot be impenetrable, impermeable, unpresent to him
   from whom I am! nay, is it not his thinking in which I think? is it not
   by his consciousness that I am conscious? Whatever passes in me must be
   as naturally known to him as to me, and more thoroughly, even to
   infinite degrees. My thought must lie open to him: if he makes me
   think, how can I elude him in thinking? If I should spread my wings
   toward the dawn, and sojourn at the last of the sea, even there thy
   hand would lead me, and thy right hand would hold me!' If he has
   determined the being, how shall any mode of that being be hidden from
   him? If I speak to him, if I utter words ever so low; if I but think
   words to him; nay, if I only think to him, surely he, my original, in
   whose life and will and no otherwise I now think concerning him, hears,
   and knows, and acknowledges! Then shall I not think to him? Shall I not
   tell him my troubles--how he, even he, has troubled me by making
   me?--how unfit I am to be that which I am?--that my being is not to me
   a good thing yet?--that I need a law that shall account to me for it in
   righteousness--reveal to me how I am to make it a good--how I am to be
   a good, and not an evil? Shall I not tell him that I need him to
   comfort me? his breath to move upon the face of the waters of the Chaos
   he has made? Shall I not cry to him to be in me rest and strength? to
   quiet this uneasy motion called life, and make me live indeed? to
   deliver me from my sins, and make me clean and glad? Such a cry is of
   the child to the Father: if there be a Father, verily he will hear, and
   let the child know that he hears! Every need of God, lifting up the
   heart, is a seeking of God, is a begging for himself, is profoundest
   prayer, and the root and inspirer of all other prayer.

   If it be reasonable for me to cry thus, if I cannot but cry, it is
   reasonable that God should hear, he cannot but hear. A being that could
   not hear or would not answer prayer, could not be God.

   But, I ask, all this admitted--is what you call a necessary truth an
   existent fact? You say, "It must be so;" I say, "What if there is no
   God!" Convince me that prayer is heard, and I shall know. Why should
   the question admit of doubt? Why should it require to be reasoned
   about? We know that the wind blows: why should we not know that God
   answers prayer?'

   I reply, What if God does not care to have you know it at second hand?
   What if there would be no good in that? There is some testimony on
   record, and perhaps there might be much were it not that, having to do
   with things so immediately personal, and generally so delicate, answers
   to prayer would naturally not often be talked about; but no testimony
   concerning the thing can well be conclusive; for, like a reported
   miracle, there is always some way to daff it; and besides, the
   conviction to be got that way is of little value; it avails nothing to
   know the thing by the best of evidence.

   As to the evidence itself, adduction of proof is scarce possible in
   respect of inward experience, and to this class belongs the better part
   of the evidence: the testimony may be truthful, yet the testifier
   utterly self-deceived! How am I to know the thing as he says he knows
   it? How am I to judge of it? There is king David:--Poetry!--old
   poetry!--and in the most indefinite language in the world! Doubtless he
   is little versed in the utterance of the human soul, who does not
   recognize in many of the psalms a cry as true as ever came from depth
   of pain or height of deliverance; but it may all have been but now the
   jarring and now the rhythmical movement of the waves of the psychical
   æther!--I lay nothing upon testimony for my purpose now, knowing the
   things that can be said, and also not valuing the bare assent of the
   intellect. The sole assurance worth a man's having, even if the most
   incontestable evidence were open to him from a thousand other quarters,
   is that to be gained only from personal experience--that assurance in
   himself which he can least readily receive from another, and which is
   least capable of being transmuted into evidence for another. The
   evidence of Jesus Christ could not take the place of that. A truth is
   of enormous import in relation to the life--that is the heart, and
   conscience, and will; it is of little consequence merely as a fact
   having relation to the understanding. God may hear all prayers that
   ever were offered to him, and a man may believe that he does, nor be
   one whit the better for it, so long as God has no prayers of his to
   hear, he no answers to receive from God. Nothing in this quarter will
   ever be gained by investigation. Reader, if you are in any trouble, try
   whether God will not help you; if you are in no need, why should you
   ask questions about prayer? True, he knows little of himself who does
   not know that he is wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and
   naked; but until he begins at least to suspect a need, how can he pray?
   And for one who does not want to pray, I would not lift a straw to
   defeat such a one in the argument whether God hears or does not hear
   prayer: for me, let him think what he will! it matters nothing in
   heaven or in earth: whether in hell I do not know.

   As to the so-called scientific challenge to prove the efficacy of
   prayer by the result of simultaneous petition, I am almost ashamed to
   allude to it. There should be light enough in science itself to show
   the proposal absurd. A God capable of being so moved in one direction
   or another, is a God not worth believing in--could not be the God
   believed in by Jesus Christ--and he said he knew. A God that should
   fail to hear, receive, attend to one single prayer, the feeblest or
   worst, I cannot believe in; but a God that would grant every request of
   every man or every company of men, would be an evil God--that is no
   God, but a demon. That God should hang in the thought--atmosphere like
   a windmill, waiting till men enough should combine and send out prayer
   in sufficient force to turn his outspread arms, is an idea too absurd.
   God waits to be gracious not to be tempted. A man capable of proposing
   such a test, could have in his mind no worthy representative idea of a
   God, and might well disbelieve in any: it is better to disbelieve than
   believe in a God unworthy.

   But I want to believe in God. I want to know that there is a God that
   answers prayer, that I may believe in him. There was a time when I
   believed in him. I prayed to him in great and sore trouble of heart and
   mind, and he did not hear me. I have not prayed since.'

   How do you know that he did not hear you?

   He did not give me what I asked, though the weal of my soul hung on
   it.'

   In your judgment. Perhaps he knew better.

   I am the worse for his refusal. I would have believed in him if he had
   heard me.'

   Till the next desire came which he would not grant, and then you would
   have turned your God away. A desirable believer you would have made! A
   worthy brother to him who thought nothing fit to give the Father less
   than his all! You would accept of him no decision against your desire!
   That ungranted, there was no God, or not a good one! I think I will not
   argue with you more. This only I will say: God has not to consider his
   children only at the moment of their prayer. Should he be willing to
   give a man the thing he knows he would afterwards wish he had not given
   him? If a man be not fit to be refused, if he be not ready to be
   treated with love's severity, what he wishes may perhaps be given him
   in order that he may wish it had not been given him; but barely to give
   a man what he wants because he wants it, and without farther purpose of
   his good, would be to let a poor ignorant child take his fate into his
   own hands--the cruelty of a devil. Yet is every prayer heard; and the
   real soul of the prayer may require, for its real answer, that it
   should not be granted in the form in which it is requested.

   To have a thing in another shape, might be equivalent to not having it
   at all.'

   If you knew God, you would leave that to him. He is not mocked, and he
   will not mock. But he knows you better than you know yourself, and
   would keep you from fooling yourself. He will not deal with you as the
   child of a day, but as the child of eternal ages. You shall be
   satisfied, if you will but let him have his way with the creature he
   has made. The question is between your will and the will of God. He is
   not one of those who give readiest what they prize least. He does not
   care to give anything but his best, or that which will prepare for it.
   Not many years may pass before you confess, Thou art a God who hears
   prayer, and gives a better answer.' You may come to see that the desire
   of your deepest heart would have been frustrated by having what seemed
   its embodiment then. That God should as a loving father listen, hear,
   consider, and deal with the request after the perfect tenderness of his
   heart, is to me enough; it is little that I should go without what I
   pray for. If it be granted that any answer which did not come of love,
   and was not for the final satisfaction of him who prayed, would be
   unworthy of God; that it is the part of love and knowledge to watch
   over the wayward, ignorant child; then the trouble of seemingly
   unanswered prayers begins to abate, and a lovely hope and comfort takes
   its place in the child-like soul. To hear is not necessarily to
   grant--God forbid! but to hear is necessarily to attend to--sometimes
   as necessarily to refuse.

   Concerning this thing,' says St. Paul, I besought the Lord thrice, that
   it might depart from me. And he hath said unto me, My grace is
   sufficient for thee; power is made perfect in weakness.' God had a
   better thing for Paul than granting his prayer and removing his
   complaint: he would make him strong; the power of Christ should descend
   and remain upon him; he would make him stronger than his suffering,
   make him a sharer in the energy of God. Verily, if we have God, we can
   do without the answer to any prayer.

   But if God is so good as you represent him, and if he knows all that we
   need, and better far than we do ourselves, why should it be necessary
   to ask him for anything?'

   I answer, What if he knows prayer to be the thing we need first and
   most? What if the main object in God's idea of prayer be the supplying
   of our great, our endless need--the need of himself? What if the good
   of all our smaller and lower needs lies in this, that they help to
   drive us to God? Hunger may drive the runaway child home, and he may or
   may not be fed at once, but he needs his mother more than his dinner.
   Communion with God is the one need of the soul beyond all other need;
   prayer is the beginning of that communion, and some need is the motive
   of that prayer. Our wants are for the sake of our coming into communion
   with God, our eternal need. If gratitude and love immediately followed
   the supply of our needs, if God our Saviour was the one thought of our
   hearts, then it might be unnecessary that we should ask for anything we
   need. But seeing we take our supplies as a matter of course, feeling as
   if they came out of nothing, or from the earth, or our own thoughts,
   instead of out of a heart of love and a will which alone is force, it
   is needful that we should be made feel some at least of our wants, that
   we may seek him who alone supplies all of them, and find his every gift
   a window to his heart of truth. So begins a communion, a talking with
   God, a coming-to-one with him, which is the sole end of prayer, yea, of
   existence itself in its infinite phases. We must ask that we may
   receive; but that we should receive what we ask in respect of our lower
   needs, is not God's end in making us pray, for he could give us
   everything without that: to bring his child to his knee, God withholds
   that man may ask.

   In regard, however, to the high necessities of our nature, it is in
   order that he may be able to give that God requires us to ask--requires
   by driving us to it--by shutting us up to prayer. For how can he give
   into the soul of a man what it needs, while that soul cannot receive
   it? The ripeness for receiving is the asking. The blossom-cup of the
   soul, to be filled with the heavenly dews, is its prayer. When the soul
   is hungry for the light, for the truth--when its hunger has waked its
   higher energies, thoroughly roused the will, and brought the soul into
   its highest condition, that of action, its only fitness for receiving
   the things of God, that action is prayer. Then God can give; then he
   can be as he would towards the man; for the glory of God is to give
   himself.--We thank thee, Lord Christ, for by thy pain alone do we rise
   towards the knowledge of this glory of thy Father and our Father.

   And even in regard to lower things--what it may be altogether unfit to
   do for a man who does not recognize the source of his life, it may be
   in the highest sense fit to grant him when he comes to that source to
   ask for it. Even in the case of some individual desire of one who in
   the main recognizes the Father, it may be well to give him asking whom,
   not asking, it would not benefit. For the real good of every gift it is
   essential, first, that the giver be in the gift--as God always is, for
   he is love--and next, that the receiver know and receive the giver in
   the gift. Every gift of God is but a harbinger of his greatest and only
   sufficing gift--that of himself. No gift unrecognized as coming from
   God is at its own best; therefore many things that God would gladly
   give us, things even that we need because we are, must wait until we
   ask for them, that we may know whence they come: when in all gifts we
   find him, then in him we shall find all things.

   Sometimes to one praying will come the feeling rather than question:
   Were it not better to abstain? If this thing be good, will he not give
   it me? Would he not be better pleased if I left it altogether to him?'
   It comes, I think, of a lack of faith and childlikeness--taking form,
   perhaps, in a fear lest, asking for what was not good, the prayer
   should be granted. Such a thought has no place with St. Paul; he says,
   Casting all your care upon him, for he careth for you;' In everything
   making your request known unto him.' It may even come of ambition after
   spiritual distinction. In every request, heart and soul and mind ought
   to supply the low accompaniment, Thy will be done;' but the making of
   any request brings us near to him, into communion with our Life. Does
   it not also help us to think of him in all our affairs, and learn in
   everything to give thanks? Anything large enough for a wish to light
   upon, is large enough to hang a prayer upon: the thought of him to whom
   that prayer goes will purify and correct the desire. To say, Father, I
   should like this or that,' would be enough at once, if the wish were
   bad, to make us know it and turn from it. Such prayer about things must
   of necessity help to bring the mind into true and simple relation with
   him; to make us remember his will even when we do not see what that
   will is. Surely it is better and more trusting to tell him all without
   fear or anxiety. Was it not thus the Lord carried himself towards his
   Father when he said, If it be possible, let this cup pass from me'? But
   there was something he cared for more than his own fear--his Father's
   will: Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done.' There is no
   apprehension that God might be displeased with him for saying what he
   would like, and not leaving it all to his Father. Neither did he regard
   his Father's plans as necessarily so fixed that they could not be
   altered to his prayer. The true son-faith is that which comes with
   boldness, fearless of the Father doing anything but what is right
   fatherly, patient, and full of loving-kindness. We must not think to
   please him by any asceticism even of the spirit; we must speak straight
   out to him. The true child will not fear, but lay bare his wishes to
   the perfect Father. The Father may will otherwise, but his grace will
   be enough for the child.

   There could be no riches but for need. God himself is made rich by
   man's necessity. By that he is rich to give; through that we are rich
   by receiving.

   As to any notion of prevailing by entreaty over an unwilling God, that
   is heathenish, and belongs to such as think him a hard master, or one
   like the unjust judge. What so quenching to prayer as the notion of
   unwillingness in the ear that hears! And when prayer is dull, what
   makes it flow like the thought that God is waiting to give, wants to
   give us everything! Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of
   grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of
   need.' We shall be refused our prayer if that be better; but what is
   good our Father will give us with divine good will. The Lord spoke his
   parable to the end that they ought always to pray, and not to faint.'
     __________________________________________________________________

  MAN'S DIFFICULTY CONCERNING PRAYER.

   --and not to faint.'--St. Luke xviii. 1.

   How should any design of the All-wise be altered in response to prayer
   of ours!' How are we to believe such a thing?

   By reflecting that he is the All-wise, who sees before him, and will
   not block his path. Such objection springs from poorest idea of God in
   relation to us. It supposes him to have cares and plans and intentions
   concerning our part of creation, irrespective of us. What is the whole
   system of things for, but our education? Does God care for suns and
   planets and satellites, for divine mathematics and ordered harmonies,
   more than for his children? I venture to say he cares more for oxen
   than for those. He lays no plans irrespective of his children; and, his
   design being that they shall be free, active, live things, he sees that
   space be kept for them: they need room to struggle out of their
   chrysalis, to undergo the change that comes with the waking will, and
   to enter upon the divine sports and labours of children in the house
   and domain of their Father. Surely he may keep his plans in a measure
   unfixed, waiting the free desire of the individual soul! Is not the
   design of the first course of his children's education just to bring
   them to the point where they shall pray? and shall his system appointed
   to that end be then found hard and fast, tooth-fitted and inelastic, as
   if informed of no live causing soul, but an unself-knowing force--so
   that he cannot answer the prayer because of the system which has its
   existence for the sake of the prayer? True, in many cases, the prayer,
   far more than the opportunity of answering it, is God's end; but how
   will the further end of the prayer be reached, which is oneness between
   the heart of the child and of the Father? how will the child go on to
   pray if he knows the Father cannot answer him? Will not may be for
   love, but how with a self-imposed cannot? How could he be Father, who
   creating, would not make provision, would not keep room for the babbled
   prayers of his children? Is his perfection a mechanical one? Has he
   himself no room for choice--therefore can give none? There must be a
   Godlike region of choice as there is a human, however little we may be
   able to conceive it. It were a glory in such system that its suns
   themselves wavered and throbbed at the pulse of a new child-life.

   What perfection in a dwelling would it be that its furniture and the
   paths between were fitted as the trays and pigeon-holes of a cabinet?
   What stupidity of perfection would that be which left no margin about
   God's work, no room for change of plan upon change of fact--yea, even
   the mighty change that, behold now at length, his child is praying! See
   the freedom of God in his sunsets--never a second like one of the
   foregone!--in his moons and skies--in the ever--changing solid
   earth!--all moving by no dead law, but in the harmony of the vital law
   of liberty, God's creative perfection--all ordered from within. A
   divine perfection that were indeed, where was no liberty! where there
   could be but one way of a thing! I may move my arm as I please: shall
   God be unable so to move his? If but for himself, God might well desire
   no change, but he is God for the sake of his growing creatures; all his
   making and doing is for them, and change is the necessity of their very
   existence. They need a mighty law of liberty, into which shall never
   intrude one atom of chance. Is the one idea of creation the begetting
   of a free, grand, divine will in us? and shall that will, praying with
   the will of the Father, find itself cramped, fettered, manacled by
   foregone laws? Will it not rather be a new-born law itself, working new
   things? No man is so tied by divine law that he can nowise modify his
   work: shall God not modify his? Law is but mode of life-action. Is it
   of his perfection that he should have no scope, no freedom? Is he but
   the prisoned steam in the engine, pushing, escaping, stopped--his way
   ordered by valve and piston? or is he an indwelling, willing, ordering
   power? Law is the slave of Life. Is not a man's soul, as it dwells in
   his body, a dim-shadowing type of God in and throughout his universe?
   If you say, he has made things to go, set them going, and left
   them--then I say, If his machine interfered with his answering the
   prayer of a single child, he would sweep it from him--not to bring back
   chaos, but to make room for his child. But order is divine, and cannot
   be obstructive to its own higher ends; it must subserve them. Order,
   free order, neither chaos, nor law unpossessed and senseless, is the
   home of Thought. If you say There can be but one perfect way, I answer,
   Yet the perfect way to bring a thing so far, to a certain crisis, can
   ill be the perfect way to carry it on after that crisis: the plan will
   have to change then. And as this crisis depends on a will, all cannot
   be in exact, though in live preparation for it. We must remember that
   God is not occupied with a grand toy of worlds and suns and planets, of
   attractions and repulsions, of agglomerations and crystallizations, of
   forces and waves; that these but constitute a portion of his workshops
   and tools for the bringing out of righteous men and women to fill his
   house of love withal. Would he have let his Son die for a law of
   nature, as we call it? These doubtless are the outcome of willed laws
   of his own being; but they take their relations in matter only for the
   sake of the birth of sons and daughters, that they may yet again be
   born from above, and into the higher region whence these things issue;
   and many a modification of the ideal, rendering it less than complete,
   must be given to those whose very doom being to grow or perish implies
   their utter inability to lay hold of the perfect. The best means cannot
   be the ideal Best. The embodiment of uplifting truth for the low,
   cannot be equal to that for the higher, else it will fail, and prove
   for its object not good; but, as the low ascend, their revelation will
   ascend also.

   That God cannot interfere to modify his plans, interfere without the
   change of a single law of his world, is to me absurd. If we can change,
   God can change, else is he less free than we--his plans, I say, not
   principles, not ends: God himself forbid!--change them after divine
   fashion, above our fashions as the heavens are higher than the earth.
   And as in all his miracles Jesus did only in miniature what his Father
   does ever in the great--in far wider, more elaborate, and beautiful
   ways, I will adduce from them an instance of answer to prayer that has
   in it a point bearing, it seems to me, most importantly on the thing I
   am now trying to set forth.

   Poor, indeed, was the making of the wine in the earthen pots of stone,
   compared with its making in the lovely growth of the vine with its
   clusters of swelling grapes--the live roots gathering from the earth
   the water that had to be borne in pitchers and poured into the great
   vases; but it is precious as the interpreter of the same, even in its
   being the outcome of our Lord's sympathy with ordinary human rejoicing.
   There is however an element in its origin that makes it yet more
   precious to me--the regard of our Lord to a wish of his mother. Alas,
   how differently is the tale often received! how misunderstood!

   His mother had suggested to him that here was an opportunity for
   appearing in his own greatness, the potent purveyor of wine for the
   failing feast. It was not in his plan, as we gather from his words; for
   the Lord never pretended anything, whether to his enemy or his mother;
   he is The True. He lets her know that he and she have different
   outlooks, different notions of his work: What to me and thee, woman?'
   he said: my hour is not yet come;' but there was that in his look and
   tone whence she knew that her desire, scarce half-fashioned into
   request, was granted. What am I thence to conclude, worthy of the Son
   of God, and the Son of Mary, but that, at the prayer of his mother, he
   made room in his plans for the thing she desired? It was not his wish
   then to work a miracle, but if his mother wished it, he would! He did
   for his mother what for his own part he would rather have let alone.
   Not always did he do as his mother would have him; but this was a case
   in which he could do so, for it would interfere nowise with the will of
   his Father. Was the perfect son, for, being perfect, he must be perfect
   every way, to be the only son of man who needed do nothing to please
   his mother--nothing but what fell in with his plan for the hour? Not so
   could he be the root, the living heart of the great response of the
   children to the Father of all! not so could the idea of the grand
   family ever be made a reality! Alas for the son who would not willingly
   for his mother do something which in itself he would rather not do! If
   it would have hurt his mother, if it had been in any way turning from
   the will of his Father in heaven, he would not have done it: that would
   have been to answer her prayer against her. His yielding makes the
   story doubly precious to my heart. The Son then could change his
   intent, and spoil nothing: so, I say, can the Father; for the Son does
   nothing but what he sees the Father do.

   Finding it possible to understand, however, that God may answer prayers
   to those who pray for themselves, what are we to think concerning
   prayer for others? One may well say, It would surely be very selfish to
   pray only for ourselves! but the question is of the use, not of the
   character of the action: if there be any good in it, let us pray for
   all for whom we feel we can pray; but is there to be found in regard to
   prayer for others any such satisfaction as in regard to prayer for
   ourselves? The ground is changed--if the fitness of answering prayer
   lies in the praying of him who prays: the attitude necessary to
   reception does not belong to those for whom prayer is made, but to him
   by whom it is made. What fitness then can there be in praying for
   others? Will God give to another for our asking what he would not give
   without it? Would he not, if it could be done without the person's
   self, do it without a second person? If God were a tyrant, one whose
   heart might be softened by the sight of anxious love; or if he were one
   who might be informed, enlightened, reasoned with; or one in whom a
   setting forth of character, need, or claim might awake interest; then
   would there be plain reason in prayer for another--which yet, however
   disinterested and loving, must be degrading, as offered to one unworthy
   of prayer. But if we believe that God is the one unselfish, the one
   good being in the universe, and that his one design with his children
   is to make them perfect as he is perfect; if we believe that he not
   only would once give, but is always giving himself to us for our life;
   if we believe--which once I heard a bishop decline to acknowledge--that
   God does his best for every man; if also we believe that God knows
   every man's needs, and will, for love's sake, not spare one pang that
   may serve to purify the soul of one of his children; if we believe all
   this, how can we think he will in any sort alter his way with one
   because another prays for him? The prayer would arise from nothing in
   the person prayed for; why should it initiate a change in God's dealing
   with him?

   The argument I know not how to answer. I can only, in the face of it,
   and feeling all the difficulty, say, and say again, Yet I believe I may
   pray for my friend--for my enemy--for anybody! Yet and yet, there is,
   there must be some genuine, essential good and power in the prayer of
   one man for another to the maker of both--and that just because their
   maker is perfect, not less than very God.' I shall not bring authority
   to bear, for authority can at best but make us believe reason there, it
   cannot make us see it. The difficulty remains the same even when we
   hear the Lord himself pray to his Father for those the Father loves
   because they have received his Son--loves therefore with a special
   love, as the foremost in faith, the elect of the world--loves not
   merely because they must die if he did not love them, but loves from
   the deeps of divine approval. Those who believe in Jesus will be
   satisfied, in the face of the incomprehensible, that in what he does
   reason and right must lie; but not therefore do we understand. At the
   same time, though I cannot explain, I can show some ground upon which,
   even had he not been taught to do so, but left alone with his heart, a
   man might yet, I think, pray for another.

   If God has made us to love like himself, and like himself long to help;
   if there are for whom we, like him, would give our lives to lift them
   from the evil gulf of their ungodliness; if the love in us would, for
   the very easing of the love he kindled, gift another--like himself who
   chooses and cherishes even the love that pains him; if, in the midst of
   a sore need to bless, to give, to help, we are aware of an utter
   impotence; if the fire burns and cannot out; and if all our hope for
   ourselves lies in God--what is there for us, what can we think of, what
   do, but go to God?--what but go to him with this our own difficulty and
   need? And where is the natural refuge, there must be the help. There
   can be no need for which he has no supply. The best argument that he
   has help, is that we have need. If I can be helped through my friend, I
   think God will take the thing up, and do what I cannot do--help my
   friend that I may be helped--perhaps help me to help him. You see, in
   praying for another we pray for ourselves--for the relief of the needs
   of our love; it is not prayer for another alone, and thus it comes
   under the former kind. Would God give us love, the root of power, in
   us, and leave that love, whereby he himself creates, altogether
   helpless in us? May he not at least expedite something for our prayers?
   Where he could not alter, he could perhaps expedite, in view of some
   help we might then be able to give. If he desires that we should work
   with him, that work surely helps him!

   There are some things for which the very possibility of supposing them
   are an argument; but I think I can go a little farther here, and
   imagine at least the where if not the how, the divine conditions in
   which the help for another in answer to prayer is born, the divine
   region in which its possibility must dwell.

   God is ever seeking to lift us up into the sharing of his divine
   nature; God's kings, such men, namely, as with Jesus have borne witness
   to the truth, share his glory even on the throne of the Father. See the
   grandeur of the creative love of the Holy! nothing less will serve it
   than to have his children, through his and their suffering, share the
   throne of his glory! If such be the perfection of the Infinite, should
   that perfection bring him under bonds and difficulties, and not rather
   set him freer to do the thing he would in the midst of opposing forces?
   If his glory be in giving himself, and we must share therein, giving
   ourselves, why should we not begin here and now? If he would have his
   children fellow--workers with him; if he has desired and willed that
   not only by the help of his eternal Son, but by the help also of the
   children who through him have been born from above, other and still
   other children shall be brought to his knee, to his fireside, to the
   plenty of his house, why should he not have kept some margin of room
   wherein their prayers may work for those whom they have to help, who
   are of the same life as they? I cannot tell how, but may not those
   prayers in some way increase God's opportunity for working his best and
   highest will? Dealing with his children, the good ones may add to his
   power with the not yet good--add to his means of helping them. One way
   is clear: the prayer will react upon the mind that prays, its light
   will grow, will shine the brighter, and draw and enlighten the more.
   But there must be more in the thing. Prayer in its perfect idea being a
   rising up into the will of the Eternal, may not the help of the Father
   become one with the prayer of the child, and for the prayer of him he
   holds in his arms, go forth for him who wills not yet to be lifted to
   his embrace? To his bosom God himself cannot bring his children at
   once, and not at all except through his own suffering and theirs. But
   will not any good parent find some way of granting the prayer of the
   child who comes to him, saying, Papa, this is my brother's birthday: I
   have nothing to give him, and I do love him so! could you give me
   something to give him, or give him something for me?'

   Still, could not God have given the gift without the prayer? And why
   should the good of any one depend on the prayer of another?'

   I can only answer with the return question, Why should my love be
   powerless to help another?' But we must not tie God to our measures of
   time, or think he has forgotten that prayer even which, apparently
   unanswered, we have forgotten. Death is not an impervious wall; through
   it, beyond it, go the prayers. It is possible we may have some to help
   in the next world because we have prayed for them in this: will it not
   be a boon to them to have an old friend to their service? I but
   speculate and suggest. What I see and venture to say is this: If in God
   we live and move and have our being; if the very possibility of loving
   lies in this, that we exist in and by the live air of love, namely God
   himself, we must in this very fact be nearer to each other than by any
   bodily proximity or interchange of help; and if prayer is like a pulse
   that sets this atmosphere in motion, we must then by prayer come closer
   to each other than are the parts of our body by their complex
   nerve--telegraphy. Surely, in the Eternal, hearts are never parted!
   surely, through the Eternal, a heart that loves and seeks the good of
   another, must hold that other within reach! Surely the system of things
   would not be complete in relation to the best thing in it--love itself,
   if love had no help in prayer. If I love and cannot help, does not my
   heart move me to ask him to help who loves and can?--him without whom
   life would be to me nothing, without whom I should neither love nor
   care to pray!--will he answer, Child, do not trouble me; I am already
   doing all I can'? If such answer came, who that loved would not be
   content to be nowhere in the matter? But how if the eternal, limitless
   Love, the unspeakable, self-forgetting God-devotion, which, demanding
   all, gives all, should say, Child, I have been doing all I could; but
   now you are come, I shall be able to do more! here is a corner for you,
   my little one: push at this thing to get it out of the way'! How if he
   should answer, Pray on, my child; I am hearing you; it goes through me
   in help to him. We are of one mind about it; I help and you help. I
   shall have you all safe home with me by and by! There is no fear, only
   we must work, and not lose heart. Go, and let your light so shine
   before men that they may see your good things, and glorify me by
   knowing that I am light and no darkness'!--what then? Oh that lovely
   picture by Michelangelo, with the young ones and the little ones come
   to help God to make Adam!

   But it may be that the answer to prayer will come in a shape that seems
   a refusal. It may come even in an increase of that from which we seek
   deliverance. I know of one who prayed to love better: a sore division
   came between--out of which at length rose a dawn of tenderness.

   Our vision is so circumscribed, our theories are so small--the garment
   of them not large enough to wrap us in; our faith so continually
   fashions itself to the fit of our dwarf intellect, that there is
   endless room for rebellion against ourselves: we must not let our poor
   knowledge limit our not so poor intellect, our intellect limit our
   faith, our faith limit our divine hope; reason must humbly watch over
   all--reason, the candle of the Lord.

   There are some who would argue for prayer, not on the ground of any
   possible answer to be looked for, but because of the good to be gained
   in the spiritual attitude of the mind in praying. There are those even
   who, not believing in any ear to hear, any heart to answer, will yet
   pray. They say it does them good; they pray to nothing at all, but they
   get spiritual benefit.

   I will not contradict their testimony. So needful is prayer to the soul
   that the mere attitude of it may encourage a good mood. Verily to pray
   to that which is not, is in logic a folly; yet the good that, they say,
   comes of it, may rebuke the worse folly of their unbelief, for it
   indicates that prayer is natural, and how could it be natural if
   inconsistent with the very mode of our being? Theirs is a better way
   than that of those who, believing there is a God, but not believing
   that he will give any answer to their prayers, yet pray to him; that is
   more foolish and more immoral than praying to the No-god. Whatever the
   God be to whom they pray, their prayer is a mockery of him, of
   themselves, of the truth.

   On the other hand, let God give no assent to the individual prayer, let
   the prayer even be for something nowise good enough to be a gift of
   God, yet the soul that prays will get good of its prayer, if only in
   being thereby brought a little nearer to the Father, and making way for
   coming again. Prayer does react in good upon the praying soul,
   irrespective of answer. But to pray for the sake of the prayer, and
   without regard to there being no one to hear, would to me indicate a
   nature not merely illogical but morally false, did I not suspect a
   vague undetected apprehension of a Something diffused through the All
   of existence, and some sort of shadowiest communion therewith.

   There are moods of such satisfaction in God that a man may feel as if
   nothing were left to pray for, as if he had but to wait with patience
   for what the Lord would work; there are moods of such hungering desire,
   that petition is crushed into an inarticulate crying; and there is a
   communion with God that asks for nothing, yet asks for everything. This
   last is the very essence of prayer, though not petition. It is possible
   for a man, not indeed to believe in God, but to believe that there is a
   God, and yet not desire to enter into communion with him; but he that
   prays and does not faint will come to recognize that to talk with God
   is more than to have all prayers granted--that it is the end of all
   prayer, granted or refused. And he who seeks the Father more than
   anything he can give, is likely to have what he asks, for he is not
   likely to ask amiss.

   Even such as ask amiss may sometimes have their prayers answered. The
   Father will never give the child a stone that asks for bread; but I am
   not sure that he will never give the child a stone that asks for a
   stone. If the Father say, My child, that is a stone; it is no bread;'
   and the child answer, I am sure it is bread; I want it;' may it not be
   well he should try his bread?

   But now for another point in the parable, where I think I can give some
   help--I mean the Lord's apparent recognition of delay in the answering
   of prayer: in the very structure of the parable he seems to take delay
   for granted, and says notwithstanding, He will avenge them speedily!'

   The reconciling conclusion is, that God loses no time, though the
   answer may not be immediate.

   He may delay because it would not be safe to give us at once what we
   ask: we are not ready for it. To give ere we could truly receive, would
   be to destroy the very heart and hope of prayer, to cease to be our
   Father. The delay itself may work to bring us nearer to our help, to
   increase the desire, perfect the prayer, and ripen the receptive
   condition.

   Again, not from any straitening in God, but either from our own
   condition and capacity, or those of the friend for whom we pray, time
   may be necessary to the working out of the answer. God is limited by
   regard for our best; our best implies education; in this we must
   ourselves have a large share; this share, being human, involves time.
   And perhaps, indeed, the better the gift we pray for, the more time is
   necessary to its arrival. To give us the spiritual gift we desire, God
   may have to begin far back in our spirit, in regions unknown to us, and
   do much work that we can be aware of only in the results; for our
   consciousness is to the extent of our being but as the flame of the
   volcano to the world-gulf whence it issues: in the gulf of our unknown
   being God works behind our consciousness. With his holy influence, with
   his own presence, the one thing for which most earnestly we cry, he may
   be approaching our consciousness from behind, coming forward through
   regions of our darkness into our light, long before we begin to be
   aware that he is answering our request--has answered it, and is
   visiting his child. To avenge speedily must mean to make no delay
   beyond what is absolutely necessary, to begin the moment it is possible
   to begin. Because the Son of Man did not appear for thousands of years
   after men began to cry out for a Saviour, shall we imagine he did not
   come the first moment it was well he should come? Can we doubt that to
   come a moment sooner would have been to delay, not to expedite, his
   kingdom? For anything that needs a process, to begin to act at once is
   to be speedy. God does not put off like the unrighteous judge; he does
   not delay until irritated by the prayers of the needy; he will hear
   while they are yet speaking; yea, before they call he will answer.

   The Lord uses words without anxiety as to the misuse of them by such as
   do not search after his will in them; and the word avenge may be simply
   retained from the parable without its special meaning therein; yet it
   suggests a remark or two.

   Of course, no prayer for any revenge that would gratify the selfishness
   of our nature, a thing to be burned out of us by the fire of God, needs
   think to be heard. Be sure, when the Lord prayed his Father to forgive
   those who crucified him, he uttered his own wish and his Father's will
   at once: God will never punish according to the abstract abomination of
   sin, as if men knew what they were doing. Vengeance is mine,' he says:
   with a right understanding of it, we might as well pray for God's
   vengeance as for his forgiveness; that vengeance is, to destroy the
   sin--to make the sinner abjure and hate it; nor is there any
   satisfaction in a vengeance that seeks or effects less. The man himself
   must turn against himself, and so be for himself. If nothing else will
   do, then hell-fire; if less will do, whatever brings repentance and
   self-repudiation, is God's repayment.

   Friends, if any prayers are offered against us; if the vengeance of God
   be cried out for, because of some wrong you or I have done, God grant
   us his vengeance! Let us not think that we shall get off!

   But perhaps the Lord was here thinking, not of persecution, or any form
   of human wrong, but of the troubles that most trouble his true
   disciple; and the suggestion is comforting to those whose foes are
   within them, for, if so, then he recognizes the evils of self, against
   which we fight, not as parts of ourselves, but as our foes, on which he
   will avenge the true self that is at strife with them. And certainly no
   evil is, or ever could be, of the essential being and nature of the
   creature God made! The thing that is not good, however associated with
   our being, is against that being, not of it--is its enemy, on which we
   need to be avenged. When we fight, he will avenge. Till we fight, evil
   shall have dominion over us, a dominion to make us miserable; other
   than miserable can no one be, under the yoke of a nature contrary to
   his own. Comfort thyself then, who findest thine own heart and soul, or
   rather the things that move therein, too much for thee: God will avenge
   his own elect. He is not delaying; he is at work for thee. Only thou
   must pray, and not faint. Ask, ask; it shall be given you. Seek most
   the best things; to ask for the best things is to have them; the seed
   of them is in you, or you could not ask for them.

   But from whatever quarter come our troubles, whether from the world
   outside or the world inside, still let us pray. In his own right way,
   the only way that could satisfy us, for we are of his kind, will God
   answer our prayers with help. He will avenge us of our adversaries, and
   that speedily. Only let us take heed that we be adversaries to no man,
   but fountains of love and forgiving tenderness to all. And from no
   adversary, either on the way with us, or haunting the secret chamber of
   our hearts, let us hope to be delivered till we have paid the last
   farthing.
     __________________________________________________________________

  THE LAST FARTHING.

   Verily I say unto thee, thou shalt by no means come out thence, till
   thou have paid the last farthing.'--St. Matthew v. 26.

   There is a thing wonderful and admirable in the parables, not readily
   grasped, but specially indicated by the Lord himself--their
   unintelligibility to the mere intellect. They are addressed to the
   conscience and not to the intellect, to the will and not to the
   imagination. They are strong and direct but not definite. They are not
   meant to explain anything, but to rouse a man to the feeling, I am not
   what I ought to be, I do not the thing I ought to do!' Many maundering
   interpretations may be given by the wise, with plentiful loss of
   labour, while the child who uses them for the necessity of walking in
   the one path will constantly receive light from them. The greatest
   obscuration of the words of the Lord, as of all true teachers, comes
   from those who give themselves to interpret rather than do them.
   Theologians have done more to hide the gospel of Christ than any of its
   adversaries. It was not for our understandings, but our will, that
   Christ came. He who does that which he sees, shall understand; he who
   is set upon understanding rather than doing, shall go on stumbling and
   mistaking and speaking foolishness. He has not that in him which can
   understand that kind. The gospel itself, and in it the parables of the
   Truth, are to be understood only by those who walk by what they find.
   It is he that runneth that shall read, and no other. It is not intended
   by the speaker of the parables that any other should know
   intellectually what, known but intellectually, would be for his
   injury--what knowing intellectually he would imagine he had grasped,
   perhaps even appropriated. When the pilgrim of the truth comes on his
   journey to the region of the parable, he finds its interpretation. It
   is not a fruit or a jewel to be stored, but a well springing by the
   wayside.

   Let us try to understand what the Lord himself said about his parables.
   It will be better to take the reading of St. Matthew xiii. 14, 15, as
   it is plainer, and the quotation from Isaiah (vi. 9, 10) is given in
   full--after the Septuagint, and much clearer than in our version from
   the Hebrew:--in its light should be read the corresponding passages in
   the other Gospels: in St. Mark's it is so compressed as to be capable
   of quite a different and false meaning: in St. John's reference, the
   blinding of the heart seems attributed directly to the devil:--the
   purport is, that those who by insincerity and falsehood close their
   deeper eyes, shall not be capable of using in the matter the more
   superficial eyes of their understanding. Whether this follows as a
   psychical or metaphysical necessity, or be regarded as a special
   punishment, it is equally the will of God, and comes from him who is
   the live Truth. They shall not see what is not for such as they. It is
   the punishment of the true Love, and is continually illustrated and
   fulfilled: if I know anything of the truth of God, then the objectors
   to Christianity, so far as I am acquainted with them, do not; their
   arguments, not in themselves false, have nothing to do with the matter;
   they see the thing they are talking against, but they do not see the
   thing they think they are talking against.

   This will help to remove the difficulty that the parables are plainly
   for the teaching of the truth, and yet the Lord speaks of them as for
   the concealing of it. They are for the understanding of that man only
   who is practical--who does the thing he knows, who seeks to understand
   vitally. They reveal to the live conscience, otherwise not to the
   keenest intellect--though at the same time they may help to rouse the
   conscience with glimpses of the truth, where the man is on the borders
   of waking. Ignorance may be at once a punishment and a kindness: all
   punishment is kindness, and the best of which the man at the time is
   capable: Because you will not do, you shall not see; but it would be
   worse for you if you did see, not being of the disposition to do.' Such
   are punished in having the way closed before them; they punish
   themselves; their own doing results as it cannot but result on them. To
   say to them certain things so that they could understand them, would
   but harden them more, because they would not do them; they should have
   but parables--lanterns of the truth, clear to those who will walk in
   their light, dark to those who will not. The former are content to have
   the light cast upon their way; the latter will have it in their eyes,
   and cannot: if they had, it would but blind them. For them to know more
   would be their worse condemnation. They are not fit to know more; more
   shall not be given them yet; it is their punishment that they are in
   the wrong, and shall keep in the wrong until they come out of it. You
   choose the dark; you shall stay in the dark till the terrors that dwell
   in the dark affray you, and cause you to cry out.' God puts a seal upon
   the will of man; that seal is either 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!'

   What special meaning may be read in the different parts of magistrate,
   judge, and officer, beyond the general suggestion, perhaps, of the
   tentative approach of the final, I do not know; but I think I do know
   what is meant by agree on the way,' and the uttermost farthing.' The
   parable is an appeal to the common sense of those that hear it, in
   regard to every affair of righteousness. Arrange what claim lies
   against you; compulsion waits behind it. Do at once what you must do
   one day. As there is no escape from payment, escape at least the prison
   that will enforce it. Do not drive Justice to extremities. Duty is
   imperative; it must be done. It is useless to think to escape the
   eternal law of things; yield of yourself, nor compel God to compel you.

   To the honest man, to the man who would fain be honest, the word is of
   right gracious import. To the untrue, it is a terrible threat; to him
   who is of the truth, it is sweet as most loving promise. He who is of
   God's mind in things, rejoices to hear the word of the changeless
   Truth; the voice of the Right fills the heavens and the earth, and
   makes his soul glad; it is his salvation. If God were not inexorably
   just, there would be no stay for the soul of the feeblest lover of
   right: thou art true, O Lord: one day I also shall be true!' Thou shalt
   render the right, cost you what it may,' is a dread sound in the ears
   of those whose life is a falsehood: what but the last farthing would
   those who love righteousness more than life pay? It is a joy profound
   as peace to know that God is determined upon such payment, is
   determined to have his children clean, clear, pure as very snow; is
   determined that not only shall they with his help make up for whatever
   wrong they have done, but at length be incapable, by eternal choice of
   good, under any temptation, of doing the thing that is not divine, the
   thing God would not do.

   There has been much cherishing of the evil fancy, often without its
   taking formal shape, that there is some way of getting out of the
   region of strict justice, some mode of managing to escape doing all
   that is required of us; but there is no such escape. A way to avoid any
   demand of righteousness would be an infinitely worse way than the road
   to the everlasting fire, for its end would be eternal death. No, there
   is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it--no plan
   to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out
   Satan must go, every hair and feather! Neither shalt thou 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 of
   us dare to think, but he will not be the God of a man by making a good
   beast of him. Thou must be good; neither death nor any admittance into
   good company will make thee good; though, doubtless, if thou be willing
   and try, these and all other best helps will be given thee. There is no
   clothing in a robe of imputed righteousness, that poorest of legal
   cobwebs spun by spiritual spiders. To me it seems like an invention of
   well-meaning dulness to soothe insanity; and indeed it has proved a
   door of escape out of worse imaginations. It is apparently an old
   doctrine;' for St. John seems to point at it where he says, Little
   children, let no man lead you astray; he that doeth righteousness is
   righteous even as he is righteous.' Christ is our righteousness, not
   that we should escape punishment, still less escape being righteous,
   but as the live potent creator of righteousness in us, so that we, with
   our wills receiving his spirit, shall like him resist unto blood,
   striving against sin; shall know in ourselves, as he knows, what a
   lovely thing is righteousness, what a mean, ugly, unnatural thing is
   unrighteousness. He is our righteousness, and that righteousness is no
   fiction, no pretence, no imputation.

   One thing that tends to keep men from seeing righteousness and
   unrighteousness as they are, is, that they have been told many things
   are righteous and unrighteous, which are neither the one nor the other.
   Righteousness is just fairness--from God to man, from man to God and to
   man; it is giving every one his due--his large mighty due. He is
   righteous, and no one else, who does this. And any system which tends
   to persuade men that there is any salvation but that of becoming
   righteous even as Jesus is righteous; that a man can be made good, as a
   good dog is good, without his own willed share in the making; that a
   man is saved by having his sins hidden under a robe of imputed
   righteousness--that system, so far as this tendency, is of the devil
   and not of God. Thank God, not even error shall injure the true of
   heart; it is not wickedness. They grow in the truth, and as love casts
   out fear, so truth casts out falsehood.

   I read, then, in this parable, that a man had better make up his mind
   to be righteous, to be fair, to do what he can to pay what he owes, in
   any and all the relations of life--all the matters, in a word, wherein
   one man may demand of another, or complain that he has not received
   fair play. Arrange your matters with those who have anything against
   you, while you are yet together and things have not gone too far to be
   arranged; you will have to do it, and that under less easy
   circumstances than now. Putting off is of no use. You must. The thing
   has to be done; 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: it is a question of
   condition, of spiritual relation and action, towards your neighbour. If
   in yourself you were all right towards him, you could do him no wrong.
   Let it be with the individual dispute as it may, you owe him something
   that you do not pay him, as certainly as you think he owes you
   something he will not pay you.'

   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 about the thing. It is a
   very small matter to you whether the man give you your rights or not;
   it is life or death to you whether or not you give him his. Whether he
   pay you what you count his debt or no, you will be compelled to pay him
   all you owe him. If you owe him a pound and he you a million, you must
   pay him the pound whether he pay you the million or not; there is no
   business-parallel here. If, owing you love, he gives you hate, you,
   owing him love, have yet to pay it. A love unpaid you, a justice undone
   you, a praise withheld from you, a judgment passed on you without
   judgment, will not absolve you of the debt of a love unpaid, a justice
   not done, a praise withheld, a false judgment passed: these uttermost
   farthings--not to speak of such debts as the world itself counts
   grievous wrongs--you must pay him, whether he pay you or not. We have a
   good while given us to pay, but a crisis will come--come soon after
   all--comes always sooner than those expect it who are not ready for
   it--a crisis when the demand unyielded will be followed by prison.

   The same holds with every demand of God: by refusing to pay, the man
   makes an adversary who will compel him--and that for the man's own
   sake. If you or your life say, I will not,' then he will see to it.
   There is a prison, and the one thing we know about that prison is, that
   its doors do not open until entire satisfaction is rendered, the last
   farthing paid.

   The main debts whose payment God demands are those which lie at the
   root of all right, those we owe in mind, and soul, and being. Whatever
   in us can be or make an adversary, whatever could prevent us from doing
   the will of God, or from agreeing with our fellow--all must be yielded.
   Our every relation, both to God and our fellow, must be acknowledged
   heartily, met as a reality. Smaller debts, if any debt can be small,
   follow as a matter of course.

   If the man acknowledge, and would pay if he could but cannot, the
   universe will be taxed to help him rather than he should continue
   unable. If the man accepts the will of God, he is the child of the
   Father, the whole power and wealth of the Father is for him, and the
   uttermost farthing will easily be paid. If the man denies the debt, or
   acknowledging does nothing towards paying it, then--at last--the
   prison! God in the dark can make a man thirst for the light, who never
   in the light sought but the dark. The cells of the prison may differ in
   degree of darkness; but they are all alike in this, that not a door
   opens but to payment. There is no day but the will of God, and he who
   is of the night cannot be for ever allowed to roam the day; unfelt,
   unprized, the light must be taken from him, that he may know what the
   darkness is. When the darkness is perfect, when he is totally without
   the light he has spent the light in slaying, then will he know
   darkness.

   I think I have seen from afar something of the final prison of all, the
   innermost cell of the debtor of the universe; I will endeavour to
   convey what I think it may be.

   It is the vast outside; the ghastly dark beyond the gates of the city
   of which God is the light--where the evil dogs go ranging, silent as
   the dark, for there is no sound any more than sight. The time of signs
   is over. Every sense has its signs, and they were all misused: there is
   no sense, no sign more--nothing now by means of which to believe. The
   man wakes from the final struggle of death, in absolute
   loneliness--such a loneliness as in the most miserable moment of
   deserted childhood he never knew. Not a hint, not a shadow of anything
   outside his consciousness reaches him. All is dark, dark and dumb; no
   motion--not the breath of a wind! never a dream of change! not a scent
   from far-off field! nothing to suggest being or thing besides the man
   himself, no sign of God anywhere. God has so far withdrawn from the
   man, that he is conscious only of that from which he has withdrawn. In
   the midst of 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 God; now he doubts if there be
   such a thing as the face of a man--doubts if he ever really saw one,
   ever anything more than dreamed of such a thing:--he never came near
   enough to human being, to know what human being really was--so may well
   doubt if human beings ever were, if ever he was one of them.

   Next after doubt comes reasoning on the doubt: The only one must be
   God! I know no one but myself: I must myself be God--none else!' Poor
   helpless dumb devil!--his own glorious lord god! Yea, he will imagine
   himself that same resistless force which, without his will, without his
   knowledge, is the law by which the sun burns, and the stars keep their
   courses, the strength that drives all the engines of the world. His
   fancy will give birth to a thousand fancies, which will run riot like
   the mice in a house but just deserted: he will call it creation, and
   his. Having no reality to set them beside, nothing to correct them by;
   the measured order, harmonious relations, and sweet graces of God's
   world nowhere for him; what he thinks, will be, for lack of what God
   thinks, the man's realities: what others can he have! Soon, misery will
   beget on imagination a thousand shapes of woe, which he will not be
   able to rule, direct, or even distinguish from real presences--a whole
   world of miserable contradictions and cold-fever-dreams.

   But no liveliest human imagination could supply adequate representation
   of what it would be to be left without a shadow of the presence of God.
   If God gave it, man could not understand it: he knows neither God nor
   himself in the way of the understanding. For not he who cares least
   about God was in this world ever left as God could leave him. I doubt
   if any man could continue following his wickedness from whom God had
   withdrawn.

   The most frightful idea of what could, to his own consciousness, befall
   a man, is that he should have to lead an existence with which God had
   nothing to do. The thing could not be; for being that is caused, the
   causation ceasing, must of necessity cease. It is always in, and never
   out of God, that we can live and do. But I suppose the man so left that
   he seems to himself utterly alone, yet, alas! with himself--smallest
   interchange of thought, feeblest contact of existence, dullest
   reflection from other being, impossible: in such evil case I believe
   the man would be glad to come in contact with the worst-loathed insect:
   it would be a shape of life, something beyond and besides his own huge,
   void, formless being! I imagine some such feeling in the prayer of the
   devils for leave to go into the swine. His worst enemy, could he but be
   aware of him, he would be ready to worship. For the misery would be not
   merely the absence of all being other than his own self, but the
   fearful, endless, unavoidable presence of that self. Without the
   correction, the reflection, the support of other presences, being is
   not merely unsafe, it is a horror--for anyone but God, who is his own
   being. For him whose idea is God's, and the image of God, his own being
   is far too fragmentary and imperfect to be anything like good company.
   It is the lovely creatures God has made all around us, in them giving
   us himself, that, until we know him, save us from the frenzy of
   aloneness--for that aloneness is Self, Self, Self. The man who minds
   only himself must at last go mad if God did not interfere.

   Can there be 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 the prison of its own lonely, weary
   all-and-nothing? It would for a time try to believe that it was indeed
   nothing, a mere glow of the setting sun on a cloud of dust, a paltry
   dream that dreamed itself--then, ah, if only the dream might dream that
   it was no more! that would be the one thing to hope for. Self-loathing,
   and that for no sin, from no repentance, from no vision of better,
   would begin and grow and grow; and to what it might not come no soul
   can tell--of essential, original misery, uncompromising self-disgust!
   Only, then, if a being be capable of self-disgust, is there not some
   room for hope--as much as a pinch of earth in the cleft of a rock might
   yield for the growth of a pine? Nay, there must be hope while there is
   existence; for where there is existence there must be God; and God is
   for ever good, nor can be other than 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 when in deepest
   hell than just ere he begins to reap the reward of his doings--for he
   is in a condition to receive the smallest show of the life that is, as
   a boon unspeakable. All his years in the world he received the endless
   gifts of sun and air, earth and sea and human face divine, as things
   that came to him because that was their way, and there was no one to
   prevent them; now the poorest thinning of the darkness he would hail as
   men of old the glow of a descending angel; it would be as a messenger
   from God. Not that he would think of God! it takes long to think of
   God; but hope, not yet seeming hope, would begin to dawn in his bosom,
   and the thinner darkness would be as a cave of light, a refuge from the
   horrid self of which he used to be so proud.

   A man may well imagine it impossible ever to think so unpleasantly of
   himself! But he has only to let things go, and he will make it the
   real, right, natural way to think of himself. True, all I have been
   saying is imaginary; but our imagination is made to mirror truth; all
   the things that appear in it are more or less after the model of things
   that are; I suspect it is the region whence issues prophecy; and when
   we are true it will mirror nothing but truth. I deal here with the same
   light and darkness the Lord dealt with, the same St. Paul and St. John
   and St. Peter and St. Jude dealt with. Ask yourself whether the
   faintest dawn of even physical light would not be welcome to such a
   soul as some refuge from the dark of the justly hated self.

   And the light would grow and grow across the awful gulf between the
   soul and its haven--its repentance--for repentance is the first
   pressure of the bosom of God; and in the twilight, struggling and
   faint, the man would feel, faint as the twilight, another thought
   beside his, another thinking Something nigh his dreary self--perhaps
   the man he had most wronged, most hated, most despised--and would be
   glad that some one, whoever, was near him: the man he had most injured,
   and was most ashamed to meet, would be a refuge from himself--oh, how
   welcome!

   So might I imagine a thousand steps up from the darkness, each a little
   less dark, a little nearer the light--but, ah, the weary way! He cannot
   come out until he have paid the uttermost farthing! Repentance once
   begun, however, may grow more and more rapid! If God once get a willing
   hold, if with but one finger he touch the man's self, swift as
   possibility will he draw him from the darkness into the light. For that
   for which the forlorn, self-ruined wretch was made, was to be a child
   of God, a partaker of the divine nature, an heir of God and joint heir
   with Christ. Out of the abyss into which he cast himself, refusing to
   be the heir of God, he must rise and be raised. To the heart of God,
   the one and only goal of the human race--the refuge and home of all and
   each, he must set out and go, 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 of rest, where ungodliness may be
   dallied with, nor prove quite fatal. Be they few or many cast into such
   prison as I have endeavoured to imagine, there can be no deliverance
   for human soul, whether in that prison or out of it, but in paying the
   last farthing, in becoming lowly, penitent, self-refusing--so receiving
   the sonship, and learning to cry, Father!
     __________________________________________________________________

  ABBA, FATHER!

   --the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.'--Romans viii.
   15.

   The hardest, gladdest thing in the world is, to cry Father! from a full
   heart. I would help whom I may to call thus upon the Father.

   There are things in all forms of the systematic teaching of
   Christianity to check this outgoing of the heart--with some to render
   it simply impossible. The more delicate the affections, the less easy
   to satisfy, the readier are they to be damped and discouraged, yea
   quite blown aside; even the suspicion of a cold reception is enough to
   paralyze them. Such a cold wind blowing at the very gate of
   heaven--thank God, outside the gate!--is the so-called doctrine of
   Adoption. When a heart hears--and believes, or half believes--that it
   is not the child of God by origin, from the first of its being, but may
   possibly be adopted into his family, its love sinks at once in a cold
   faint: where is its own father, and who is this that would adopt it? To
   myself, in the morning of childhood, the evil doctrine was a mist
   through which the light came struggling, a cloud-phantom of repellent
   mien-requiring maturer thought and truer knowledge to dissipate it. But
   it requires neither much knowledge nor much insight to stand up against
   its hideousness; it needs but love that will not be denied, and courage
   to question the phantom.

   A devout and honest scepticism on God's side, not to be put down by
   anything called authority, is absolutely necessary to him who would
   know the liberty wherewith Christ maketh free. Whatever any company of
   good men thinks or believes, is to be approached with respect; but
   nothing claimed or taught, be the claimers or the teachers who they
   may, must come between the soul and the spirit of the father, who is
   himself the teacher of his children. Nay, to accept authority may be to
   refuse the very thing the authority' would teach; it may remain
   altogether misunderstood just for lack of that natural process of doubt
   and inquiry, which we were intended to go through by him who would have
   us understand.

   As no scripture is of private interpretation, so is there no feeling in
   human heart which exists in that heart alone, which is not, in some
   form or degree, in every heart; and thence I conclude that many must
   have groaned like myself under the supposed authority of this doctrine.
   The refusal to look up to God as our Father is the one central wrong in
   the whole human affair; the inability, the one central misery: whatever
   serves to clear any difficulty from the way of the recognition of the
   Father, will more or less undermine every difficulty in life.

   Is God then not my Father,' cries the heart of the child, that I need
   to be adopted by him? Adoption! that can never satisfy me. Who is my
   father? Am I not his to begin with? Is God not my very own Father? Is
   he my Father only in a sort or fashion--by a legal contrivance? Truly,
   much love may lie in adoption, but if I accept it from any one, I allow
   myself the child of another! The adoption of God would indeed be a
   blessed thing if another than he had given me being! but if he gave me
   being, then it means no reception, but a repudiation.--"O Father, am I
   not your child?"'

   No; but he will adopt you. He will not acknowledge you his child, but
   he will call you his child, and be a father to you.'

   Alas!' cries the child, if he be not my father, he cannot become my
   father. A father is a father from the beginning. A primary relation
   cannot be superinduced. The consequence might be small where earthly
   fatherhood was concerned, but the very origin of my being--alas, if he
   be only a maker and not a father! Then am I only a machine, and not a
   child--not a man! It is false to say I was created in his image!

   It avails nothing to answer that we lost our birthright by the fall. I
   do not care to argue that I did not fall when Adam fell; for I have
   fallen many a time, and there is a shadow on my soul which I or another
   may call a curse; I cannot get rid of a something that always intrudes
   between my heart and the blue of every sky. But it avails nothing,
   either for my heart or their argument, to say I have fallen and been
   cast out: can any repudiation, even that of God, undo the facts of an
   existent origin? Nor is it merely that he made me: by whose power do I
   go on living? When he cast me out, as you say, did I then begin to draw
   my being from myself--or from the devil? In whom do I live and move and
   have my being? It cannot be that I am not the creature of God.'

   But creation is not fatherhood.'

   Creation in the image of God, is. And if I am not in the image of God,
   how can the word of God be of any meaning to me? "He called them gods
   to whom the word of God came," says the Master himself. To be fit to
   receive his word implies being of his kind. No matter how his image may
   have been defaced in me: the thing defaced is his image, remains his
   defaced image--an image yet that can hear his word. What makes me evil
   and miserable is, that the thing spoiled in me is the image of the
   Perfect. Nothing can be evil but in virtue of a good hypostasis. No,
   no! nothing can make it that I am not the child of God. If one say,
   "Look at the animals: God made them: you do not call them the children
   of God!" I answer: "But I am to blame; they are not to blame! I cling
   fast to my blame: it is the seal of my childhood." I have nothing to
   argue from in the animals, for I do not understand them. Two things
   only I am sure of: that God is to them "a faithful creator;" and that
   the sooner I put in force my claim to be a child of God, the better for
   them; for they too are fallen, though without blame.'

   But you are evil: how can you be a child of the Good?'

   Just as many an evil son is the child of a good parent.'

   But in him you call a good parent, there yet lay evil, and that
   accounts for the child being evil.'

   I cannot explain. God let me be born through evil channels. But in
   whatever manner I may have become an unworthy child, I cannot thereby
   have ceased to be a child of God--his child in the way that a child
   must ever be the child of the man of whom he comes. Is it not
   proof--this complaint of my heart at the word Adoption? Is it not the
   spirit of the child, crying out, "Abba, Father"?'

   Yes; but that is the spirit of adoption; the text says so.'

   Away with your adoption! I could not even be adopted if I were not such
   as the adoption could reach--that is, of the nature of God. Much as he
   may love him, can a man adopt a dog? I must be of a nature for the word
   of God to come to--yea, so far, of the divine nature, of the image of
   God! Heartily do I grant that, had I been left to myself, had God
   dropped me, held no communication with me, I could never have thus
   cried, never have cared when they told me I was not a child of God. But
   he has never repudiated me, and does not now desire to adopt me. Pray,
   why should it grieve me to be told I am not a child of God, if I be not
   a child of God? If you say--Because you have learned to love him, I
   answer--Adoption would satisfy the love of one who was not but would be
   a child; for me, I cannot do without a father, nor can any adoption
   give me one.'

   But what is the good of all you say, if the child is such that the
   father cannot take him to his heart?'

   Ah, indeed, I grant you, nothing!--so long as the child does not desire
   to be taken to the father's heart; but the moment he does, then it is
   everything to the child's heart that he should be indeed the child of
   him after whom his soul is thirsting. However bad I may be, I am the
   child of God, and therein lies my blame. Ah, I would not lose my blame!
   in my blame lies my hope. It is the pledge of what I am, and what I am
   not; the pledge of what I am meant to be, what I shall one day be, the
   child of God in spirit and in truth.'

   Then you dare to say the apostle is wrong in what he so plainly
   teaches?'

   By no means; what I do say is, that our English presentation of his
   teaching is in this point very misleading. It is not for me to judge
   the learned and good men who have revised the translation of the New
   Testament--with so much gain to every one whose love of truth is
   greater than his loving prejudice for accustomed form;--I can only say,
   I wonder what may have been their reasons for retaining this word
   adoption. In the New Testament the word is used only by the apostle
   Paul. Liddell and Scott give the meaning--"Adoption as a son," which is
   a mere submission to popular theology: they give no reference except to
   the New Testament. The relation of the word nioqesia to the form qetoV,
   which means "taken," or rather, "placed as one's child," is, I presume,
   the sole ground for the so translating of it: usage plentiful and
   invariable could not justify that translation here, in the face of what
   St. Paul elsewhere shows he means by the word. The Greek word might be
   variously meant--though I can find no use of it earlier than St. Paul;
   the English can mean but one thing, and that is not what St. Paul
   means. "The spirit of adoption" Luther translates "the spirit of a
   child;" adoption he translates kindschaft, or childship.'

   Of two things I am sure--first, that by nioqesia St. Paul did not
   intend adoption; and second, that if the Revisers had gone through what
   I have gone through because of the word, if they had felt it come
   between God and their hearts as I have felt it, they could not have
   allowed it to remain in their version.

   Once more I say, the word used by St Paul does not imply that God
   adopts children that are not his own, but rather that a second time he
   fathers his own; that a second time they are born--this time from
   above; that he will make himself tenfold, yea, infinitely their father:
   he will have them back into the very bosom whence they issued, issued
   that they might learn they could live nowhere else; he will have them
   one with himself. It was for the sake of this that, in his Son, he died
   for them.

   Let us look at the passage where he reveals his use of the word. It is
   in another of his epistles--that to the Galatians: iv. 1-7.

   But I say that so long as the heir is a child, he differeth nothing
   from a bondservant, though he is lord of all; but is under guardians
   and stewards until the term appointed of the father. So we also, when
   we were children, were held in bondage under the rudiments of the
   world: but when the fulness of the time came, God sent forth his Son,
   born of a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem them which
   were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And
   because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our
   hearts, crying, Abba, Father. So that thou art no longer a bondservant,
   but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God.'

   How could the Revisers choose this last reading, an heir through God,'
   and keep the word adoption? From the passage it is as plain as St. Paul
   could make it, that, by the word translated adoption, he means the
   raising of a father's own child from the condition of tutelage and
   subjection to others, a state which, he says, is no better than that of
   a slave, to the position and rights of a son. None but a child could
   become a son; the idea is--a spiritual coming of age; only when the
   child is a man is he really and fully a son. The thing holds in the
   earthly relation. How many children of good parents--good children in
   the main too--never know those parents, never feel towards them as
   children might, until, grown up, they have left the house--until,
   perhaps, they are parents themselves, or are parted from them by death!
   To be a child is not necessarily to be a son or daughter. The childship
   is the lower condition of the upward process towards the sonship, the
   soil out of which the true sonship shall grow, the former without which
   the latter were impossible. God can no more than an earthly parent be
   content to have only children: he must have sons and
   daughters--children of his soul, of his spirit, of his love--not merely
   in the sense that he loves them, or even that they love him, but in the
   sense that they love like him, love as he loves. For this he does not
   adopt them; he dies to give them himself, thereby to raise his own to
   his heart; he gives them a birth from above; they are born again out of
   himself and into himself--for he is the one and the all. His children
   are not his real, true sons and daughters until they think like him,
   feel with him, judge as he judges, are at home with him, and without
   fear before him because he and they mean the same thing, love the same
   things, seek the same ends. For this are we created; it is the one end
   of our being, and includes all other ends whatever. It can come only of
   unbelief and not faith, to make men believe that God has cast them off,
   repudiated them, said they are not, yea never were, his children--and
   he all the time spending himself to make us the children he designed,
   foreordained--children who would take him for their Father! He is our
   father all the time, for he is true; but until we respond with the
   truth of children, he cannot let all the father out to us; there is no
   place for the dove of his tenderness to alight. He is our father, but
   we are not his children. Because we are his children, we must become
   his sons and daughters. Nothing will satisfy him, or do for us, but
   that we be one with our father! What else could serve! How else should
   life ever be a good! Because we are the sons of God, we must become the
   sons of God.

   There may be among my readers--alas for such!--to whom the word Father
   brings no cheer, no dawn, in whose heart it rouses no tremble of even a
   vanished emotion. It is hardly likely to be their fault. For though as
   children we seldom love up to the mark of reason; though we often
   offend; and although the conduct of some children is inexplicable to
   the parent who loves them; yet, if the parent has been but ordinarily
   kind, even the son who has grown up a worthless man, will now and then
   feel, in his better moments, some dim reflex of childship, some faintly
   pleasant, some slightly sorrowful remembrance of the father around
   whose neck his arms had sometimes clung. In my own childhood and
   boyhood my father was the refuge from all the ills of life, even sharp
   pain itself. Therefore I say to son or daughter who has no pleasure in
   the name Father, You must interpret the word by all that you have
   missed in life. Every time a man might have been to you a refuge from
   the wind, a covert from the tempest, the shadow of a great rock in a
   weary land, that was a time when a father might have been a father
   indeed. Happy you are yet, if you have found man or woman such a
   refuge; so far have you known a shadow of the perfect, seen the back of
   the only man, the perfect Son of the perfect Father. All that human
   tenderness can give or desire in the nearness and readiness of love,
   all and infinitely more must be true of the perfect Father--of the
   maker of fatherhood, the Father of all the fathers of the earth,
   specially the Father of those who have specially shown a father-heart.'

   This Father would make to himself sons and daughters indeed--that is,
   such sons and daughters as shall be his sons and daughters not merely
   by having come from his heart, but by having returned thither--children
   in virtue of being such as whence they came, such as choose to be what
   he is. He will have them share in his being and nature--strong wherein
   he cares for strength; tender and gracious as he is tender and
   gracious; angry where and as he is angry. Even in the small matter of
   power, he will have them able to do whatever his Son Jesus could on the
   earth, whose was the life of the perfect man, whose works were those of
   perfected humanity. Everything must at length be subject to man, as it
   was to The Man. When God can do what he will with a man, the man may do
   what he will with the world; he may walk on the sea like his Lord; the
   deadliest thing will not he able to hurt him:--He that believeth on me,
   the works that I do shall he do also; and greater than these shall he
   do.'

   God, whose pleasure brought

   Man into being, stands away

   As it were, an handbreath off, to give

   Room for the newly-made to live.

   He has made us, but we have to be. All things were made through the
   Word, but that which was made in the Word was life, and that life is
   the light of men: they who live by this light, that is, live as Jesus
   lived--by obedience, namely, to the Father, have a share in their own
   making; the light becomes life in them; they are, in their lower way,
   alive with the life that was first born in Jesus, and through him has
   been born in them--by obedience they become one with the godhead: As
   many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God.'
   He does not make them the sons of God, but he gives them power to
   become the sons of God: in choosing and obeying the truth, man becomes
   the true son of the Father of lights.

   It is enough to read with understanding the passage I have quoted from
   his epistle to the Galatians, to see that the word adoption does not in
   the least fit St. Paul's idea, or suit the things he says. While we but
   obey the law God has laid upon us, without knowing the heart of the
   Father whence comes the law, we are but slaves--not necessarily ignoble
   slaves, yet slaves; but when we come to think with him, when the mind
   of the son is as the mind of the Father, the action of the son the same
   as that of the Father, then is the son of the Father, then are we the
   sons of God. And in both passages--this, and that which, from his
   epistle to the Romans, I have placed at the head of this sermon--we
   find the same phrase, Abba, Father, showing, if proof were needful,
   that he uses the word nioqesia in the same sense in both: nothing can
   well be plainer, that needs consideration at all, than what that sense
   is. Let us glance at the other passages in which he uses the same word:
   as he alone of the writers of the New Testament does use it, so, for
   aught I know, he may have made it for himsef. One of them is in the
   same eighth chapter of the epistle to the Romans; this I will keep to
   the last. Another is in the following chapter, the fourth verse; in it
   he speaks of the nioqesia, literally the son-placing (that is, the
   placing of sons in the true place of sons), as belonging to the Jews.
   On this I have but to remark that whose is the nioqesia' cannot mean
   either that they had already received it, or that it belonged to the
   Jews more than to the Gentiles; it can only mean that, as the
   elder-brother-nation, they had a foremost claim to it, and would
   naturally first receive it; that, in their best men, they had always
   been nearest to it. It must be wrought out first in such as had
   received the preparation necessary; those were the Jews; of the Jews
   was the Son, bringing the nioqesia, the sonship, to all. Therefore
   theirs was the nioqesia, just as theirs was the gospel. It was to the
   Jew first, then to the Gentile--though many a Gentile would have it
   before many a Jew. Those and only those who out of a true heart cry
   Abba, Father,' be they of what paltry little so-called church, other
   than the body of Christ, they may, or of no other at all, are the sons
   and daughters of God.

   St. Paul uses the word also in his epistle to the Ephesians, the first
   chapter, the fifth verse. Having predestinated us unto the adoption of
   children by Jesus Christ to himself,' says the authorized version;
   Having foreordained us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto
   himself,' says the revised--and I see little to choose between them:
   neither gives the meaning of St. Paul. If there is anything gained by
   the addition of the words of children' in the one case, and as sons' in
   the other, to translate the word for which adoption' alone is made to
   serve in the other passages, the advantage is only to the minus-side,
   to that of the wrong interpretation.

   Children we were; true sons we could never be, save through The Son. He
   brothers us. He takes us to the knees of the Father, beholding whose
   face we grow sons indeed. Never could we have known the heart of the
   Father, never felt it possible to love him as sons, but for him who
   cast himself into the gulf that yawned between us. In and through him
   we were foreordained to the sonship: sonship, even had we never sinned,
   never could we reach without him. We should have been little children
   loving the Father indeed, but children far from the sonhood that
   understands and adores. For as many as are led by the spirit of God,
   these are sons of God;' If any man hath not the spirit of Christ, he is
   none of his;' yea, if we have not each other's spirits, we do not
   belong to each other. There is no unity but having the same spirit.
   There is but one spirit, that of truth.

   It remains to note yet another passage.

   That never in anything he wrote was it St. Paul's intention to
   contribute towards a system of theology, it were easy to show: one sign
   of the fact is, that he does not hesitate to use this word he has
   perhaps himself made, in different, and apparently opposing, though by
   no means contradictory senses: his meanings always vivify each other.
   His ideas are so large that they tax his utterance and make him strain
   the use of words, but there is no danger to the honest heart, which
   alone he regards, of misunderstanding them, though the ignorant and
   unsteadfast wrest them' yet. At one time he speaks of the sonship as
   being the possession of the Israelite, at another as his who has
   learned to cry Abba, Father; and here, in the passage I have now last
   to consider, that from the 18^th to the 25^th verse of this same eighth
   chapter of his epistle to the Romans, he speaks of the nioqesia as yet
   to come--and as if it had to do, not with our spiritual, but our bodily
   condition. This use of the word, however, though not the same use as we
   find anywhere else, is nevertheless entirely consistent with his other
   uses of it.

   The 23^rd verse says, And not only so, but ourselves also, which have
   the first fruits of the spirit, even we ourselves groan within
   ourselves, waiting for adoption, the redemption of our body.'

   It is nowise difficult to discern that the ideas in this and the main
   use are necessarily associated and more than consistent. The putting of
   a son in his true, his foreordained place, has outward relations as
   well as inward reality; the outward depends on the inward, arises from
   it, and reveals it. When the child whose condition under tutors had
   passed away, took his position as a son, he would naturally change his
   dress and modes of life: when God's children cease to be slaves doing
   right from law and duty, and become his sons doing right from the
   essential love of God and their neighbour, they too must change the
   garments of their slavery for the robes of liberty, lay aside the body
   of this death, and appear in bodies like that of Christ, with whom they
   inherit of the Father. But many children who have learned to cry Abba,
   Father, are yet far from the liberty of the sons of God. Sons they are
   and no longer children, yet they groan as being still in
   bondage!--Plainly the apostle has no thought of working out an idea;
   with burning heart he is writing a letter: he gives, nevertheless,
   lines plentifully sufficient for us to work out his idea, and this is
   how it takes clear shape:--

   We are the sons of God the moment we lift up our hearts, seeking to be
   sons--the moment we begin to cry Father. But as the world must be
   redeemed in a few men to begin with, so the soul is redeemed in a few
   of its thoughts and wants and ways, to begin with: it takes a long time
   to finish the new creation of this redemption. Shall it have taken
   millions of years to bring the world up to the point where a few of its
   inhabitants shall desire God, and shall the creature of this new birth
   be perfected in a day? The divine process may indeed now go on with
   tenfold rapidity, for the new factor of man's fellow-working, for the
   sake of which the whole previous array of means and forces existed, is
   now developed; but its end is yet far below the horizon of man's
   vision:--

   The apostle speaks at one time of the thing as to come, at another time
   as done--when it is but commenced: our ways of thought are such. A
   man's heart may leap for joy the moment when, amidst the sea-waves, a
   strong hand has laid hold of the hair of his head; he may cry aloud, I
   am saved;'--and he may be safe, but he is not saved; this is far from a
   salvation to suffice. So are we sons when we begin to cry Father, but
   we are far from perfected sons. So long as there is in us the least
   taint of distrust, the least lingering of hate or fear, we have not
   received the sonship; we have not such life in us as raised the body of
   Jesus; we have not attained to the resurrection of the dead--by which
   word, in his epistle to the Philippians (iii. 2), St. Paul means, I
   think, the same thing as here he means by the sonship which he puts in
   apposition with the redemption of the body:--

   Until our outward condition is that of sons royal, sons divine; so long
   as the garments of our souls, these mortal bodies, are mean--torn and
   dragged and stained; so long as we groan under sickness and weakness
   and weariness, old age, forgetfulness, and all heavy things; so long we
   have not yet received the sonship in full--we are but getting ready one
   day to creep from our chrysalids, and spread the great heaven-storming
   wings of the psyches of God. We groan being burdened; we groan, waiting
   for the sonship--to wit, the redemption of the body--the uplifting of
   the body to be a fit house and revelation of the indwelling
   spirit--nay, like that of Christ, a fit temple and revelation of the
   deeper indwelling God. For we shall always need bodies to manifest and
   reveal us to each other--bodies, then, that fit the soul with absolute
   truth of presentment and revelation. Hence the revealing of the sons of
   God, spoken of in the 19^th verse, is the same thing as the redemption
   of the body; the body is redeemed when it is made fit for the sons of
   God; then it is a revelation of them--the thing it was meant for, and
   always, more or less imperfectly, was. Such it shall be, when truth is
   strong enough in the sons of God to make it such--for it is the soul
   that makes the body. When we are the sons of God in heart and soul,
   then shall we be the sons of God in body too: we shall be like him, for
   we shall see him as he is.'

   I care little to speculate on the kind of this body; two things only I
   will say, as needful to be believed, concerning it: first, that it will
   be a body to show the same self as before--but, second, a body to show
   the being truly--without the defects, that is, and imperfections of the
   former bodily revelation. Even through their corporeal presence shall
   we then know our own infinitely better, and find in them endlessly more
   delight, than before. These things we must believe, or distrust the
   Father of our spirits. Till this redemption of the body arrives, the
   nioqesia is not wrought out, is only upon the way. Nor can it come but
   by our working out the salvation he is working in us.

   This redemption of the body--its deliverance from all that is amiss,
   awry, unfinished, weak, worn out, all that prevents the revelation of
   the sons of God, is called by the apostle, not certainly the adoption,
   but the nioqesia, the sonship in full manifestation. It is the slave
   yet left in the sons and daughters of God that has betrayed them into
   even permitting the word adoption to mislead them!

   To see how the whole utterance hangs together, read from the 18^th
   verse to the 25^th, especially noticing the 19^th: For the earnest
   expectation of the creation waiteth for the revealing' (the outshining)
   of the sons of God.' When the sons of God show as they are, taking,
   with the character, the appearance and the place that belong to their
   sonship; when the sons of God sit with the Son of God on the throne of
   their Father; then shall they be in potency of fact the lords of the
   lower creation, the bestowers of liberty and peace upon it; then shall
   the creation, subjected to vanity for their sakes, find its freedom in
   their freedom, its gladness in their sonship. The animals will glory to
   serve them, will joy to come to them for help. Let the heartless scoff,
   the unjust despise! the heart that cries Abba, Father, cries to the God
   of the sparrow and the oxen; nor can hope go too far in hoping what
   that God will do for the creation that now groaneth and travaileth in
   pain because our higher birth is delayed. Shall not the judge of all
   the earth do right? Shall my heart be more compassionate than his?

   If to any reader my interpretation be unsatisfactory, I pray him not to
   spend his strength in disputing my faith, but in making sure his own
   progress on the way to freedom and sonship. Only to the child of God is
   true judgment possible. Were it otherwise, what would it avail to prove
   this one or that right or wrong? Right opinion on questions the most
   momentous will deliver no man. Cure for any ill in me or about me there
   is none, but to become the son of God I was born to be. Until such I
   am, until Christ is born in me, until I am revealed a son of God, pain
   and trouble will endure--and God grant they may! Call this presumption,
   and I can only widen my assertion: until you yourself are the son of
   God you were born to be, you will never find life a good thing. If I
   presume for myself, I presume for you also. But I do not presume. Thus
   have both Jesus Christ and his love-slave Paul represented God--as a
   Father perfect in love, grand in self-forgetfulness, supreme in
   righteousness, devoted to the lives he has uttered. I will not believe
   less of the Father than I can conceive of glory after the lines he has
   given me, after the radiation of his glory in the face of his Son. He
   is the express image of the Father, by which we, his imperfect images,
   are to read and understand him: imperfect, we have yet perfection
   enough to spell towards the perfect.

   It comes to this then, after the grand theory of the apostle:--The
   world exists for our education; it is the nursery of God's children,
   served by troubled slaves, troubled because the children are themselves
   slaves--children, but not good children. Beyond its own will or
   knowledge, the whole creation works for the development of the children
   of God into the sons of God. When at last the children have arisen and
   gone to their Father; when they are clothed in the best robe, with a
   ring on their hands and shoes on their feet, shining out at length in
   their natural, their predestined sonship; then shall the mountains and
   the hills break forth before them into singing, and all the trees of
   the field shall clap their hands. Then shall the wolf dwell with the
   lamb, and the leopard lie down with the kid and the calf, and the young
   lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. Then
   shall the fables of a golden age, which faith invented, and unbelief
   threw into the past, unfold their essential reality, and the tale of
   paradise prove itself a truth by becoming a fact. Then shall every
   ideal show itself a necessity, aspiration although satisfied put forth
   yet longer wings, and the hunger after righteousness know itself
   blessed. Then first shall we know what was in the Shepherd's mind when
   he said, I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.'
     __________________________________________________________________

  LIFE.

   I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.'--St. John
   x. 10.

   In a word, He came to supply all our lack--from the root outward; for
   what is it we need but more life? What does the infant need but more
   life? What does the bosom of his mother give him but life in abundance?
   What does the old man need, whose limbs are weak and whose pulse is
   low, but more of the life which seems ebbing from him? Weary with
   feebleness, he calls upon death, but in reality it is life he wants. It
   is but the encroaching death in him that desires death. He longs for
   rest, but death cannot rest; death would be as much an end to rest as
   to weariness: even weakness cannot rest; it takes strength as well as
   weariness to rest. How different is the weariness of the strong man
   after labour unduly prolonged, from the weariness of the sick man who
   in the morning cries out, Would God it were evening!' and in the
   evening, Would God it were morning!' Low-sunk life imagines itself
   weary of life, but it is death, not life, it is weary of. Never a cry
   went out after the opposite of life from any soul that knew what life
   is. Why does the poor, worn, out-worn suicide seek death? Is it not in
   reality to escape from death?--from the death of homelessness and
   hunger and cold; the death of failure, disappointment, and distraction;
   the death of the exhaustion of passion; the death of madness--of a
   household he cannot rule; the death of crime and fear of discovery? He
   seeks the darkness because it seems a refuge from the death which
   possesses him. He is a creature possessed by death; what he calls his
   life is but a dream full of horrible phantasms.

   More life!' is the unconscious prayer of all creation, groaning and
   travailing for the redemption of its lord, the son who is not yet a
   son. Is not the dumb cry to be read in the faces of some of the
   animals, in the look of some of the flowers, and in many an aspect of
   what we call Nature?

   All things are possible with God, but all things are not easy. It is
   easy for him to be, for there he has to do with his own perfect will:
   it is not easy for him to create--that is, after the grand fashion
   which alone will satisfy his glorious heart and will, the fashion in
   which he is now creating us. In the very nature of being--that is,
   God--it must be hard--and divine history shows how hard--to create that
   which shall be not himself, yet like himself. The problem is, so far to
   separate from himself that which must yet on him be ever and always and
   utterly dependent, that it shall have the existence of an individual,
   and be able to turn and regard him--choose him, and say, I will arise
   and go to my Father,' and so develop in itself the highest Divine of
   which it is capable--the will for the good against the evil--the will
   to be one with the life whence it has come, and in which it still
   is--the will to close the round of its procession in its return, so
   working the perfection of reunion--to shape in its own life the ring of
   eternity--to live immediately, consciously, and active--willingly from
   its source, from its own very life--to restore to the beginning the end
   that comes of that beginning--to be the thing the maker thought of when
   he willed, ere he began to work its being.

   I imagine the difficulty of doing this thing, of effecting this
   creation, this separation from himself such that will in the creature
   shall be possible--I imagine, I say, the difficulty of such creation so
   great, that for it God must begin inconceivably far back in the
   infinitesimal regions of beginnings--not to say before anything in the
   least resembling man, but eternal miles beyond the last farthest-pushed
   discovery in protoplasm--to set in motion that division from himself
   which in its grand result should be individuality, consciousness,
   choice, and conscious choice--choice at last pure, being the choice of
   the right, the true, the divinely harmonious. Hence the final end of
   the separation is not individuality; that is but a means to it; the
   final end is oneness--an impossibility without it. For there can be no
   unity, no delight of love, no harmony, no good in being, where there is
   but one. Two at least are needed for oneness; and the greater the
   number of individuals, the greater, the lovelier, the richer, the
   diviner is the possible unity.

   God is life, and the will-source of life. In the outflowing of that
   life, I know him; and when I am told that he is love, I see that if he
   were not love he would not, could not create. I know nothing deeper in
   him than love, nor believe there is in him anything deeper than
   love--nay, that there can be anything deeper than love. The being of
   God is love, therefore creation. I imagine that from all eternity he
   has been creating. As he saw it was not good for man to be alone, so
   has he never been alone himself;--from all eternity the Father has had
   the Son, and the never-begun existence of that Son I imagine an easy
   outgoing of the Father's nature; while to make other beings--beings
   like us, I imagine the labour of a God, an eternal labour. Speaking
   after our poor human fashions of thought--the only fashions possible to
   us--I imagine that God has never been contented to be alone even with
   the Son of his love, the prime and perfect idea of humanity, but that
   he has from the first willed and laboured to give existence to other
   creatures who should be blessed with his blessedness--creatures whom he
   is now and always has been developing into likeness with that Son--a
   likeness for long to be distant and small, but a likeness to be for
   ever growing: perhaps never one of them yet, though unspeakably
   blessed, has had even an approximate idea of the blessedness in store
   for him.

   Let no soul think that to say God undertook a hard labour in willing
   that many sons and daughters should be sharers of the divine nature, is
   to abate his glory! The greater the difficulty, the greater is the
   glory of him who does the thing he has undertaken--without shadow of
   compromise, with no half-success, but with a triumph of absolute
   satisfaction to innumerable radiant souls! He knew what it would
   cost!--not energy of will alone, or merely that utterance and
   separation from himself which is but the first of creation, though that
   may well itself be pain--but sore suffering such as we cannot imagine,
   and could only be God's, in the bringing out, call it birth or
   development, of the God--life in the individual soul--a suffering still
   renewed, a labour thwarted ever by that soul itself, compelling him to
   take, still at the cost of suffering, the not absolutely best, only the
   best possible means left him by the resistance of his creature. Man
   finds it hard to get what he wants, because he does not want the best;
   God finds it hard to give, because he would give the best, and man will
   not take it. What Jesus did, was what the Father is always doing; the
   suffering he endured was that of the Father from the foundation of the
   world, reaching its climax in the person of his Son. God provides the
   sacrifice; the sacrifice is himself. He is always, and has ever been,
   sacrificing himself to and for his creatures. It lies in the very
   essence of his creation of them. The worst heresy, next to that of
   dividing religion and righteousness, is to divide the Father from the
   Son--in thought or feeling or action or intent; to represent the Son as
   doing that which the Father does not himself do. Jesus did nothing but
   what the Father did and does. If Jesus suffered for men, it was because
   his Father suffers for men; only he came close to men through his body
   and their senses, that he might bring their spirits close to his Father
   and their Father, so giving them life, and losing what could be lost of
   his own. He is God our Saviour: it is because God is our Saviour that
   Jesus is our Saviour. The God and Father of Jesus Christ could never
   possibly be satisfied with less than giving himself to his own! The
   unbeliever may easily imagine a better God than the common theology of
   the country offers him; but not the lovingest heart that ever beat can
   even reflect the length and breadth and depth and height of that love
   of God which shows itself in his Son--one, and of one mind, with
   himself. The whole history is a divine agony to give divine life to
   creatures. The outcome of that agony, the victory of that creative and
   again creative energy, will be radiant life, whereof joy unspeakable is
   the flower. Every child will look in the eyes of the Father, and the
   eyes of the Father will receive the child with an infinite embrace.

   The life the Lord came to give us is a life exceeding that of the
   highest undivine man, by far more than the life of that man exceeds the
   life of the animal the least human. More and more of it is for each who
   will receive it, and to eternity. The Father has given to the Son to
   have life in himself; that life is our light. We know life only as
   light; it is the life in us that makes us see. All the growth of the
   Christian is the more and more life he is receiving. At first his
   religion may hardly be distinguishable from the mere prudent desire to
   save his soul; but at last he loses that very soul in the glory of
   love, and so saves it; self becomes but the cloud on which the white
   light of God divides into harmonies unspeakable.

   In the midst of life we are in death,' said one; it is more true that
   in the midst of death we are in life. Life is the only reality; what
   men call death is but a shadow--a word for that which cannot be--a
   negation, owing the very idea of itself to that which it would deny.
   But for life there could be no death. If God were not, there would not
   even be nothing. Not even nothingness preceded life. Nothingness owes
   its very idea to existence.

   One form of the question between matter and spirit is, which was first,
   and caused the other--things or thoughts; whether things without
   thought caused thought, or thought without things caused things. To
   those who cannot doubt that thought was first, causally preceding the
   earliest material show, it is easily plain that death can be the cure
   for nothing, that the cure for everything must be life--that the ills
   which come with existence, are from its imperfection, not of
   itself--that what we need is more of it. We who are, have nothing to do
   with death; our relations are alone with life. The thing that can mourn
   can mourn only from lack; it cannot mourn because of being, but because
   of not enough being. We are vessels of life, not yet full of the wine
   of life; where the wine does not reach, there the clay cracks, and
   aches, and is distressed. Who would therefore pour out the wine that is
   there, instead of filling to the brim with more wine! All the being
   must partake of essential being; life must be assisted, upheld,
   comforted, every part, with life. Life is the law, the food, the
   necessity of life. Life is everything. Many doubtless mistake the joy
   of life for life itself; and, longing after the joy, languish with a
   thirst at once poor and inextinguishable; but even that thirst points
   to the one spring. These love self, not life, and self is but the
   shadow of life. When it is taken for life itself, and set as the man's
   centre, it becomes a live death in the man, a devil he worships as his
   god; the worm of the death eternal he clasps to his bosom as his one
   joy!

   The soul compact of harmonies has more life, a larger being, than the
   soul consumed of cares; the sage is a larger life than the clown; the
   poet is more alive than the man whose life flows out that money may
   come in; the man who loves his fellow is infinitely more alive than he
   whose endeavour is to exalt himself above him; the man who strives to
   be better, than he who longs for the praise of the many; but the man to
   whom God is all in all, who feels his life-roots hid with Christ in
   God, who knows himself the inheritor of all wealth and worlds and ages,
   yea, of power essential and in itself, that man has begun to be alive
   indeed.

   Let us in all the troubles of life remember--that our one lack is
   life--that what we need is more life--more of the life-making presence
   in us making us more, and more largely, alive. When most oppressed,
   when most weary of life, as our unbelief would phrase it, let us
   bethink ourselves that it is in truth the inroad and presence of death
   we are weary of. When most inclined to sleep, let us rouse ourselves to
   live. Of all things let us avoid the false refuge of a weary collapse,
   a hopeless yielding to things as they are. It is the life in us that is
   discontented; we need more of what is discontented, not more of the
   cause of its discontent. Discontent, I repeat, is the life in us that
   has not enough of itself, is not enough to itself, so calls for more.
   He has the victory who, in the midst of pain and weakness, cries out,
   not for death, not for the repose of forgetfulness, but for strength to
   fight; for more power, more consciousness of being, more God in him;
   who, when sorest wounded, says with Sir Andrew Barton in the old
   ballad:--

   Fight on my men, says Sir Andrew Barton,

   I am hurt, but I am not slain;

   I'll lay me down and bleed awhile,

   And then I'll rise and fight again;

   --and that with no silly notion of playing the hero--what have
   creatures like us to do with heroism who are not yet barely
   honest!--but because so to fight is the truth, and the only way.

   If, in the extreme of our exhaustion, there should come to us, as to
   Elijah when he slept in the desert, an angel to rouse us, and show us
   the waiting bread and water, how would we carry ourselves? Would we, in
   faint unwillingness to rise and eat, answer, Lo I am weary unto death!
   The battle is gone from me! It is lost, or unworth gaining! The world
   is too much for me! Its forces will not heed me! They have worn me out!
   I have wrought no salvation even for my own, and never should work any,
   were I to live for ever! It is enough; let me now return whence I came;
   let me be gathered to my fathers and be at rest!'? I should be loth to
   think that, if the enemy, in recognizable shape, came roaring upon us,
   we would not, like the red-cross knight, stagger, heavy sword in
   nerveless arm, to meet him; but, in the feebleness of foiled effort, it
   wants yet more faith to rise and partake of the food that shall bring
   back more effort, more travail, more weariness. The true man trusts in
   a strength which is not his, and which he does not feel, does not even
   always desire; believes in a power that seems far from him, which is
   yet at the root of his fatigue itself and his need of rest--rest as far
   from death as is labour. To trust in the strength of God in our
   weakness; to say, I am weak: so let me be: God is strong;' to seek from
   him who is our life, as the natural, simple cure of all that is amiss
   with us, power to do, and be, and live, even when we are weary,--this
   is the victory that overcometh the world. To believe in God our
   strength in the face of all seeming denial, to believe in him out of
   the heart of weakness and unbelief, in spite of numbness and weariness
   and lethargy; to believe in the wide-awake real, through all the
   stupefying, enervating, distorting dream; to will to wake, when the
   very being seems athirst for a godless repose;--these are the broken
   steps up to the high fields where repose is but a form of strength,
   strength but a form of joy, joy but a form of love. I am weak,' says
   the true soul, but not so weak that I would not be strong; not so
   sleepy that I would not see the sun rise; not so lame but that I would
   walk! Thanks be to him who perfects strength in weakness, and gives to
   his beloved while they sleep!'

   If we will but let our God and Father work his will with us, there can
   be no limit to his enlargement of our existence, to the flood of life
   with which he will overflow our consciousness. We have no conception of
   what life might be, of how vast the consciousness of which we could be
   made capable. Many can recall some moment in which life seemed richer
   and fuller than ever before; to some, such moments arrive mostly in
   dreams: shall soul, awake or asleep, infold a bliss greater than its
   Life, the living God, can seal, perpetuate, enlarge? Can the human
   twilight of a dream be capable of generating or holding a fuller life
   than the morning of divine activity? Surely God could at any moment
   give to a soul, by a word to that soul, by breathing afresh into the
   secret caves of its being, a sense of life before which the most
   exultant ecstasy of earthly triumph would pale to ashes! If ever
   sunlit, sail-crowded sea, under blue heaven flecked with wind-chased
   white, filled your soul as with a new gift of life, think what sense of
   existence must be yours, if he whose thought has but fringed its
   garment with the outburst of such a show, take his abode with you, and
   while thinking the gladness of a God inside your being, let you know
   and feel that he is carrying you as a father in his bosom!

   I have been speaking as if life and the consciousness of it were one;
   but the consciousness of life is not life; it is only the outcome of
   life. The real life is that which is of and by itself--is life because
   it wills itself--which is, in the active, not the passive sense: this
   can only be God. But in us there ought to be a life correspondent to
   the life that is God's; in us also must be the life that wills
   itself--a life in so far resembling the self-existent life and
   partaking of its image, that it has a share in its own being. There is
   an original act possible to the man, which must initiate the reality of
   his existence. He must live in and by willing to live. A tree lives; I
   hardly doubt it has some vague consciousness, known by but not to
   itself, only to the God who made it; I trust that life in its lowest
   forms is on the way to thought and blessedness, is in the process of
   that separation, so to speak, from God, in which consists the creation
   of living souls; but the life of these lower forms is not life in the
   high sense--in the sense in which the word is used in the Bible: true
   life knows and rules itself; the eternal life is life come awake. The
   life of the most exalted of the animals is not such whatever it may
   become, and however I may refuse to believe their fate and being fixed
   as we see them. But as little as any man or woman would be inclined to
   call the existence of the dog, looking strange lack out of his wistful
   eyes, an existence to be satisfied with--his life an end sufficient in
   itself, as little could I, looking on the human pleasure, the human
   refinement, the common human endeavour around me, consent to regard
   them as worthy the name of life. What in them is true dwells amidst an
   unchallenged corruption, demanding repentance and labour and prayer for
   its destruction. The condition of most men and women seems to me a life
   in death, an abode in unwhited sepulchres, a possession of withering
   forms by spirits that slumber, and babble in their dreams. That they do
   not feel it so, is nothing. The sow wallowing in the mire may rightly
   assert it her way of being clean, but theirs is not the life of the
   God-born. The day must come when they will hide their faces with such
   shame as the good man yet feels at the memory of the time when he lived
   like them. There is nothing for man worthy to be called life, but the
   life eternal--God's life, that is, after his degree shared by the man
   made to be eternal also. For he is in the image of God, intended to
   partake of the life of the most high, to be alive as he is alive. Of
   this life the outcome and the light is righteousness, love, grace,
   truth; but the life itself is a thing that will not be defined, even as
   God will not be defined: it is a power, the formless cause of form. It
   has no limits whereby to be defined. It shows itself to the soul that
   is hungering and thirsting after righteousness, but that soul cannot
   show it to another, save in the shining of its own light. The ignorant
   soul understands by this life eternal only an endless elongation of
   consciousness; what God means by it is a being like his own, a being
   beyond the attack of decay or death, a being so essential that it has
   no relation whatever to nothingness; a something which is, and can
   never go to that which is not, for with that it never had to do, but
   came out of the heart of Life, the heart of God, the fountain of being;
   an existence partaking of the divine nature, and having nothing in
   common, any more than the Eternal himself, with what can pass or cease:
   God owes his being to no one, and his child has no lord but his Father.

   This life, this eternal life, consists for man in absolute oneness with
   God and all divine modes of being, oneness with every phase of right
   and harmony. It consists in a love as deep as it is universal, as
   conscious as it is unspeakable; a love that can no more be reasoned
   about than life itself--a love whose presence is its all-sufficing
   proof and justification, whose absence is an annihilating defect: he
   who has it not cannot believe in it: how should death believe in life,
   though all the birds of God are singing jubilant over the empty tomb!
   The delight of such a being, the splendour of a consciousness rushing
   from the wide open doors of the fountain of existence, the ecstasy of
   the spiritual sense into which the surge of life essential, immortal,
   increate, flows in silent fulness from the heart of hearts--what may
   it, what must it not be, in the great day of God and the individual
   soul!

   What then is our practical relation to the life original? What have we
   to do towards the attaining to the resurrection from the dead? If we
   did not make, could not have made ourselves, how can we, now we are
   made, do anything at the unknown roots of our being? What relation of
   conscious unity can be betwixt the self-existent God, and beings who
   live at the will of another, beings who could not refuse to be--cannot
   even cease to be, but must, at the will of that other, go on living,
   weary of what is not life, able to assert their relation to life only
   by refusing to be content with what is not life?

   The self-existent God is that other by whose will we live; so the links
   of the unity must already exist, and can but require to be brought
   together. For the link in our being wherewith to close the circle of
   immortal oneness with the Father, we must of course search the deepest
   of man's nature: there only, in all assurance, can it be found. And
   there we do find it. For the will is the deepest, the strongest, the
   divinest thing in man; so, I presume, is it in God, for such we find it
   in Jesus Christ. Here, and here only, in the relation of the two wills,
   God's and his own, can a man come into vital contact--on the eternal
   idea, in no one-sided unity of completest dependence, but in willed
   harmony of dual oneness--with the All-in-all. When a man can and does
   entirely say, Not my will, but thine be done'--when he so wills the
   will of God as to do it, then is he one with God--one, as a true son
   with a true father. When a man wills that his being be conformed to the
   being of his origin, which is the life in his life, causing and bearing
   his life, therefore absolutely and only of its kind, one with it more
   and deeper than words or figures can say--to the life which is itself,
   only more of itself, and more than itself, causing itself--when the man
   thus accepts his own causing life, and sets himself to live the will of
   that causing life, humbly eager after the privileges of his
   origin,--thus receiving God, he becomes, in the act, a partaker of the
   divine nature, a true son of the living God, and an heir of all he
   possesses: by the obedience of a son, he receives into himself the very
   life of the Father. Obedience is the joining of the links of the
   eternal round. Obedience is but the other side of the creative will.
   Will is God's will, obedience is man's will; the two make one. The
   root-life, knowing well the thousand troubles it would bring upon him,
   has created, and goes on creating other lives, that, though incapable
   of self-being, they may, by willed obedience, share in the bliss of his
   essential self-ordained being. If we do the will of God, eternal life
   is ours--no mere continuity of existence, for that in itself is
   worthless as hell, but a being that is one with the essential Life, and
   so within his reach to fill with the abundant and endless out-goings of
   his love. Our souls shall be vessels ever growing, and ever as they
   grow, filled with the more and more life proceeding from the Father and
   the Son, from God the ordaining, and God the obedient. What the delight
   of the being, what the abundance of the life he came that we might
   have, we can never know until we have it. But even now to the holy
   fancy it may sometimes seem too glorious to support--as if we must die
   of very life--of more being than we could bear--to awake to a yet
   higher life, and be filled with a wine which our souls were heretofore
   too weak to hold! To be for one moment aware of such pure simple love
   towards but one of my fellows as I trust I shall one day have towards
   each, must of itself bring a sense of life such as the utmost effort of
   my imagination can but feebly shadow now--a mighty glory of
   consciousness!--not to be always present, indeed, for my love, and not
   my glory in that love, is my life. There would be, even in that one
   love, in the simple purity of a single affection such as we were
   created to generate, and intended to cherish, towards all, an expansion
   of life inexpressible, unutterable. For we are made for love, not for
   self. Our neighbour is our refuge; self is our demon-foe. Every man is
   the image of God to every man, and in proportion as we love him, we
   shall know the sacred fact. The precious thing to human soul is, and
   one day shall be known to be, every human soul. And if it be so between
   man and man, how will it not be betwixt the man and his maker, between
   the child and his eternal Father, between the created and the creating
   Life? Must not the glory of existence be endlessly redoubled in the
   infinite love of the creature--for all love is infinite--to the
   infinite God, the great one life, than whom is no other--only shadows,
   lovely shadows of him!

   Reader to whom my words seem those of inflation and foolish excitement,
   it can be nothing to thee to be told that I seem to myself to speak
   only the words of truth and soberness; but what if the cause why they
   seem other to thy mind be--not merely that thou art not whole, but that
   thy being nowise thirsts after harmony, that thou art not of the truth,
   that thou hast not yet begun to live? How should the reveller, issuing
   worn and wasted from the haunts where the violent seize joy by force to
   find her perish in their arms--how should such reveller, I say, break
   forth and sing with the sons of the morning, when the ocean of light
   bursts from the fountain of the east? As little canst thou, with thy
   mind full of petty cares, or still more petty ambitions, understand the
   groaning and travailing of the creation. It may indeed be that thou art
   honestly desirous of saving thy own wretched soul, but as yet thou
   canst know but little of thy need of him who is the first and the last
   and the living one.
     __________________________________________________________________

  THE FEAR OF GOD.

   And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as one dead. And he laid his
   right hand upon me, saying, Fear not; I am the first and the last and
   the Living one.'--Rev. i. 17, 18.

   It is not alone the first beginnings of religion that are full of fear.
   So long as love is imperfect, there is room for torment. That love only
   which fills the heart--and nothing but love can fill any heart--is able
   to cast out fear, leaving no room for its presence. What we find in the
   beginnings of religion, will hold in varying degree, until the
   religion, that is the love, be perfected.

   The thing that is unknown, yet known to be, will always be more or less
   formidable. When it is known as immeasurably greater than we, and as
   having claims and making demands upon us, the more vaguely these are
   apprehended, the more room is there for anxiety; and when the
   conscience is not clear, this anxiety may well mount to terror.
   According to the nature of the mind which occupies itself with the idea
   of the Supreme, whether regarded as maker or ruler, will be the kind
   and degree of the terror. To this terror need belong no exalted ideas
   of God; those fear him most who most imagine him like their own evil
   selves, only beyond them in power, easily able to work his arbitrary
   will with them. That they hold him but a little higher than themselves,
   tends nowise to unity with him: who so far apart as those on the same
   level of hate and distrust? Power without love, dependence where is no
   righteousness, wake a worship without devotion, a loathliness of
   servile flattery. Neither, where the notion of God is better, but the
   conscience is troubled, will his goodness do much to exclude
   apprehension. The same consciousness of evil and of offence which gave
   rise to the bloody sacrifice, is still at work in the minds of most who
   call themselves Christians. Naturally the first emotion of man towards
   the being he calls God, but of whom he knows so little, is fear.

   Where it is possible that fear should exist, it is well it should
   exist, cause continual uneasiness, and be cast out by nothing less than
   love. In him who does not know God, and must be anything but satisfied
   with himself, fear towards God is as reasonable as it is natural, and
   serves powerfully towards the development of his true humanity. Neither
   the savage, nor the self-sufficient sage, is rightly human. It matters
   nothing whether we regard the one or the other as degenerate or as
   undeveloped--neither I say is human; the humanity is there, but has to
   be born in each, and for this birth everything natural must do its
   part; fear is natural, and has a part to perform nothing but itself
   could perform in the birth of the true humanity. Until love, which is
   the truth towards God, is able to cast out fear, it is well that fear
   should hold; it is a bond, however poor, between that which is and that
   which creates--a bond that must be broken, but a bond that can be
   broken only by the tightening of an infinitely closer bond. Verily, God
   must be terrible to those that are far from him; for they fear he will
   do, yea, he is doing with them what they do not, cannot desire, and can
   ill endure. Such as many men are, such as all without God would become,
   they must prefer a devil, because of his supreme selfishness, to a God
   who will die for his creatures, and insists upon giving himself to
   them, insists upon their being unselfish and blessed like himself. That
   which is the power and worth of life they must be, or die; and the
   vague consciousness of this makes them afraid. They love their poor
   existence as it is; God loves it as it must be--and they fear him.

   The false notions of men of low, undeveloped nature both with regard to
   what is good and what the Power requires of them, are such that they
   cannot but fear, and devotion is lost in the sacrifices of
   ingratiation: God takes them where they are, accepts whatever they
   honestly offer, and so helps them to outgrow themselves, preparing them
   to offer the true offering, and to know him whom they ignorantly
   worship. He will not abolish their fear except with the truth of his
   own being. Till they apprehend that, and in order that they may come to
   apprehend it, he receives their sacrifices of blood, the invention of
   their sore need, only influencing for the time the modes of them. He
   will destroy the lie that is not all a lie only by the truth which is
   all true. Although he loves them utterly, he does not tell them there
   is nothing in him to make them afraid. That would be to drive them from
   him for ever. While they are such as they are, there is much in him
   that cannot but affright them; they ought, they do well to fear him. It
   is, while they remain what they are, the only true relation between
   them. To remove that fear from their hearts, save by letting them know
   his love with its purifying fire, a love which for ages, it may be,
   they cannot know, would be to give them up utterly to the power of
   evil. Persuade men that fear is a vile thing, that it is an insult to
   God, that he will none of it--while yet they are in love with their own
   will, and slaves to every movement of passionate impulse, and what will
   the consequence be? That they will insult God as a discarded idol, a
   superstition, a falsehood, as a thing under whose evil influence they
   have too long groaned, a thing to be cast out and spit upon. After that
   how much will they learn of him? Nor would it be long ere the old fear
   would return--with this difference, perhaps, that instead of trembling
   before a live energy, they would tremble before powers which formerly
   they regarded as inanimate, and have now endowed with souls after the
   imagination of their fears. Then would spiritual chaos with all its
   monsters be come again. God being what he is, a God who loves
   righteousness; a God who, rather than do an unfair thing, would lay
   down his Godhead, and assert himself in ceasing to be; a God who, that
   his creature might not die of ignorance, died as much as a God could
   die, and that is divinely more than man can die, to give him himself;
   such a God, I say, may well look fearful from afar to the creature who
   recognizes in himself no imperative good; who fears only suffering, and
   has no aspiration--only wretched ambition! But in proportion as such a
   creature comes nearer, grows towards him in and for whose likeness he
   was begun; in proportion, that is, as the eternal right begins to
   disclose itself to him; in proportion as he becomes capable of the idea
   that his kind belongs to him as he could never belong to himself;
   approaches the capacity of seeing and understanding that his
   individuality can be perfected only in the love of his neighbour, and
   that his being can find its end only in oneness with the source from
   which it came; in proportion, I do not say as he sees these things, but
   as he nears the possibility of seeing them, will his terror at the God
   of his life abate; though far indeed from surmising the bliss that
   awaits him, he is drawing more nigh to the goal of his nature, the
   central secret joy of sonship to a God who loves righteousness and
   hates iniquity, does nothing he would not permit in his creature,
   demands nothing of his creature he would not do himself.

   The fire of God, which is his essential being, his love, his creative
   power, is a fire unlike its earthly symbol in this, that it is only at
   a distance it burns--that the farther from him, it burns the worse, and
   that when we turn and begin to approach him, the burning begins to
   change to comfort, which comfort will grow to such bliss that the heart
   at length cries out with a gladness no other gladness can reach, Whom
   have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire
   besides thee!' The glory of being, the essence of life and its joy,
   shining upon the corrupt and deathly, must needs, like the sun, consume
   the dead, and send corruption down to the dust; that which it burns in
   the soul is not of the soul, yea, is at utter variance with it; yet so
   close to the soul is the foul fungous growth sprung from and subsisting
   upon it, that the burning of it is felt through every spiritual nerve:
   when the evil parasites are consumed away, that is when the man yields
   his self and all that self's low world, and returns to his lord and
   God, then that which, before, he was aware of only as burning, he will
   feel as love, comfort, strength--an eternal, ever-growing life in him.
   For now he lives, and life cannot hurt life; it can only hurt death,
   which needs and ought to be destroyed. God is life essential, eternal,
   and death cannot live in his sight; for death is corruption, and has no
   existence in itself, living only in the decay of the things of life. If
   then any child of the father finds that he is afraid before him, that
   the thought of God is a discomfort to him, or even a terror, let him
   make haste--let him not linger to put on any garment, but rush at once
   in his nakedness, a true child, for shelter from his own evil and God's
   terror, into the salvation of the Father's arms, the home whence he was
   sent that he might learn that it was home. What father being evil would
   it not win to see the child with whom he was vexed running to his
   embrace? how much more will not the Father of our spirits, who seeks
   nothing but his children themselves, receive him with open arms!

   Self, accepted as the law of self, is the one demon-enemy of life; God
   is the only Saviour from it, and from all that is not God, for God is
   life, and all that is not God is death. Life is the destruction of
   death, of all that kills, of all that is of death's kind.

   When John saw the glory of the Son of Man, he fell at his feet as one
   dead. In what way John saw him, whether in what we vaguely call a
   vision, or in as human a way as when he leaned back on his bosom and
   looked up in his face, I do not now care to ask: it would take all
   glorious shapes of humanity to reveal Jesus, and he knew the right way
   to show himself to John. It seems to me that such words as were spoken
   can have come from the mouth of no mere vision, can have been allowed
   to enter no merely tranced ear, that the mouth of the very Lord himself
   spoke them, and that none but the living present Jesus could have
   spoken or may be supposed to speak them; while plainly John received
   and felt them as a message he had to give again. There are also,
   strangely as the whole may affect us, various points in his description
   of the Lord's appearance which commend themselves even to our ignorance
   by their grandeur and fitness. Why then was John overcome with terror?
   We recall the fact that something akin to terror overwhelmed the minds
   of the three disciples who saw his glory on the mount; but since then
   John had leaned on the bosom of his Lord, had followed him to the
   judgment seat and had not denied his name, had borne witness to his
   resurrection and suffered for his sake--and was now in the isle that is
   called Patmos, for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus:' why, I
   say, was he, why should he be afraid? No glory even of God should breed
   terror; when a child of God is afraid, it is a sign that the word
   Father is not yet freely fashioned by the child's spiritual mouth. The
   glory can breed terror only in him who is capable of being terrified by
   it; while he is such it is well the terror should be bred and
   maintained, until the man seek refuge from it in the only place where
   it is not--in the bosom of the glory.

   There is one point not distinguishable in the Greek: whether is meant,
   one like unto the Son of Man,' or, one like unto a son of Man:' the
   authorized version has the former, the revised prefers the latter. I
   incline to the former, and think that John saw him like the man he had
   known so well, and that it was the too much glory, dimming his vision,
   that made him unsure, not any perceived unlikeness mingling with the
   likeness. Nothing blinds so much as light, and their very glory might
   well render him unable to distinguish plainly the familiar features of
   The Son of Man.

   But the appearance of The Son of Man was not intended to breed terror
   in the son of man to whom he came. Why then was John afraid? why did
   the servant of the Lord fall at his feet as one dead? Joy to us that he
   did, for the words that follow--surely no phantasmic outcome of
   uncertain vision or blinding terror! They bear best sign of their
   source: however given to his ears, they must be from the heart of our
   great Brother, the one Man, Christ Jesus, divinely human!

   It was still and only the imperfection of the disciple, unfinished in
   faith, so unfinished in everything a man needs, that was the cause of
   his terror. This is surely implied in the words the Lord said to him
   when he fell! The thing that made John afraid, he speaks of as the
   thing that ought to have taken from him all fear. For the glory that he
   saw, the head and hair pouring from it such a radiance of light that
   they were white as white wool--snow-white, as his garments on mount
   Hermon; in the midst of the radiance his eyes like a flame of fire, and
   his countenance as the sun shineth in his strength; the darker glow of
   the feet, yet as of fine brass burning in a furnace--as if they, in
   memory of the twilight of his humiliation, touching the earth took a
   humbler glory than his head high in the empyrean of undisturbed
   perfection; the girdle under his breast, golden between the snow and
   the brass;--what were they all but the effulgence of his glory who was
   himself the effulgence of the Father's, the poor expression of the
   unutterable verity which was itself the reason why John ought not to be
   afraid?--He laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am
   the first and the last, and the living one.'

   Endless must be our terror, until we come heart to heart with the
   fire-core of the universe, the first and the last and the living one!

   But oh, the joy to be told, by Power himself, the first and the last,
   the living one--told what we can indeed then see must be true, but
   which we are so slow to believe--that the cure for trembling is the
   presence of Power; that fear cannot stand before Strength; that the
   visible God is the destruction of death; that the one and only safety
   in the universe, is the perfect nearness of the Living One! God is
   being; death is nowhere! What a thing to be taught by the very mouth of
   him who knows! He told his servant Paul that strength is made perfect
   in weakness; here he instructs his servant John that the thing to be
   afraid of is weakness, not strength. All appearances of strength, such
   as might rightly move terror, are but false appearances; the true
   Strong is the One, even as the true Good is the One. The Living One has
   the power of life; the Evil One but the power of death--whose very
   nature is a self-necessity for being destroyed.

   But the glory of the mildest show of the Living One is such, that even
   the dearest of his apostles, the best of the children of men, is cowed
   at the sight. He has not yet learned that glory itself is a part of his
   inheritance, yea is of the natural condition of his being; that there
   is nothing in the man made in the image of God alien from the most
   glorious of heavenly shows: he has not learned this yet, and falls as
   dead before it--when lo, the voice of him that was and is and is for
   evermore, telling him not to be afraid--for the very reason, the one
   only reason, that he is the first and the last, the living one! For
   what shall be the joy, the peace, the completion of him that lives, but
   closest contact with his Life?--a contact close as ere he issued from
   that Life, only in infinitely higher kind, inasmuch as it is now willed
   on both sides. He who has had a beginning, needs the indwelling power
   of that beginning to make his being complete--not merely complete to
   his consciousness, but complete in itself--justified, rounded, ended
   where it began--with an endless ending.' Then is it complete even as
   God's is complete, for it is one with the self-existent, blossoming in
   the air of that world wherein it is rooted, wherein it lives and grows.
   Far indeed from trembling because he on whose bosom he had leaned when
   the light of his love was all but shut in now stands with the glory of
   that love streaming forth, John Boanerges ought to have felt the more
   joyful and safe as the strength of the living one was more manifested.
   It was never because Jesus was clothed in the weakness of the flesh
   that he was fit to be trusted, but because he was strong with a
   strength able to take the weakness of the flesh for the garment wherein
   it could best work its work: that strength was now shining out with its
   own light, so lately pent within the revealing veil. Had John been as
   close in spirit to the Son of Man as he had been in bodily presence, he
   would have indeed fallen at his feet, but not as one dead--as one too
   full of joy to stand before the life that was feeding his; he would
   have fallen, but not to lie there senseless with awe the most holy; he
   would have fallen to embrace and kiss the feet of him who had now a
   second time, as with a resurrection from above, arisen before him, in
   yet heavenlier plenitude of glory.

   It is the man of evil, the man of self-seeking design, not he who would
   fain do right, not he who, even in his worst time, would at once submit
   to the word of the Master, who is reasonably afraid of power. When God
   is no longer the ruler of the world, and there is a stronger than he;
   when there is might inherent in evil, and making-energy in that whose
   nature is destruction; then will be the time to stand in dread of
   power. But even then the bad man would have no security against the
   chance of crossing some scheme of the lawless moment, where
   disintegration is the sole unity of plan, and being ground up and
   destroyed for some no-idea of the Power of darkness. And then would be
   the time for the good--no, not to tremble, but to resolve with the Lord
   of light to endure all, to let every billow of evil dash and break upon
   him, nor do the smallest ill, tell the whitest lie for God--knowing
   that any territory so gained could belong to no kingdom of heaven,
   could be but a province of the kingdom of darkness. If there were two
   powers, the one of evil, the other of good, as men have not unnaturally
   in ignorance imagined, his sense of duty would reveal the being born of
   the good power, while he born of the evil could have no choice but be
   evil. But Good only can create; and if Evil were ever so much the
   stronger, the duty of men would remain the same--to hold by the Living
   One, and defy Power to its worst--like Prometheus on his rock, defying
   Jove, and for ever dying--thus for ever foiling the Evil. For Evil can
   destroy only itself and its own; it could destroy no enemy--could at
   worst but cause a succession of deaths, from each of which the defiant
   soul would rise to loftier defiance, to more victorious
   endurance--until at length it laughed Evil in the face, and the
   demon-god shrunk withered before it. In those then who believe that
   good is the one power, and that evil exists only because for a time it
   subserves, cannot help subserving the good, what place can there be for
   fear? The strong and the good are one; and if our hope coincides with
   that of God, if it is rooted in his will, what should we do but rejoice
   in the effulgent glory of the First and the Last?

   The First and the Last is the inclosing defence of the castle of our
   being; the Master is before and behind; he began, he will see that it
   be endless. He garrisons the place; he is the living, the live-making
   one.

   The reason then for not fearing before God is, that he is all-glorious,
   all-perfect. Our being needs the all-glorious, all-perfect God. The
   children can do with nothing less than the Father; they need the
   infinite one. Beyond all wherein the poor intellect can descry order;
   beyond all that the rich imagination can devise; beyond all that
   hungriest heart could long, fullest heart thank for--beyond all these,
   as the heavens are higher than the earth, rise the thought, the
   creation, the love of the God who is in Christ, his God and our God,
   his Father and our Father.

   Ages before the birth of Jesus, while, or at least where yet even Moses
   and his law were unknown, the suffering heart of humanity saw and was
   persuaded that nowhere else lay its peace than with the first, the
   last, the living one:--

   O that thou woudest hide me in the grave, . . . . and remember me! . .
   .

   Thou shalt call, and I will answer thee: thou wilt have a desire to the
   work of thine hands.
     __________________________________________________________________

  THE VOICE OF JOB.

   O that thou wouldest hide me in the grave, that thou wouldest keep me
   secret, until thy wrath be past, that thou wouldest appoint me a set
   time, and remember me! If a man die, shall he live again? all the days
   of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come. Thou shalt call,
   and I will answer thee: thou wilt have a desire to the work of thine
   hands.'--Job xiv. 13-15.

   The book of Job seems to me the most daring of poems: from a position
   of the most vantageless realism, it assaults the very citadel of the
   ideal! Its hero is a man seated among the ashes, covered with loathsome
   boils from head to foot, scraping himself with a potsherd. Sore in
   body, sore in mind, sore in heart, sore in spirit, he is the
   instance--type of humanity in the depths of its misery--all the waves
   and billows of a world of adverse circumstance rolling free over its
   head. I would not be supposed to use the word humanity either in the
   abstract, or of the mass concrete; I mean the humanity of the
   individual endlessly repeated: Job, I say, is the human being--a centre
   to the sickening assaults of pain, the ghastly invasions of fear:
   these, one time or another, I presume, threaten to overwhelm every man,
   reveal him to himself as enslaved to the external, and stir him up to
   find some way out into the infinite, where alone he can rejoice in the
   liberty that belongs to his nature. Seated in the heart of a leaden
   despair, Job cries aloud to the Might unseen, scarce known, which yet
   he regards as the God of his life. But no more that of a slave is his
   cry, than the defiance of Prometheus hurled at Jupiter from his rock.
   He is more overwhelmed than the Titan, for he is in infinite perplexity
   as well as pain; but no more than in that of Prometheus is there a
   trace of the cowardly in his cry. Before the Judge he asserts his
   innocence, and will not grovel--knowing indeed that to bear himself so
   would be to insult the holy. He feels he has not deserved such
   suffering, and will neither tell nor listen to lies for God.

   Prometheus is more stonily patient than Job. Job is nothing of a Stoic,
   but bemoans himself like a child--a brave child who seems to himself to
   suffer wrong, and recoils with horror-struck bewilderment from the
   unreason of the thing. Prometheus has to do with a tyrant whom he
   despises, before whom therefore he endures with unbewailing
   unsubmission, upheld by the consciousness that he is fighting the
   battle of humanity against an all but all-powerful Selfishness:
   endurance is the only availing weapon against him, and he will endure
   to the ever-delayed end! Job, on the other hand, is the more troubled
   because it is He who is at the head and the heart, who is the beginning
   and the end of things, that has laid his hand upon him with such a
   heavy torture that he takes his flesh in his teeth for pain. He cannot,
   will not believe him a tyrant; but, while he pleads against his dealing
   with himself, loves him, and looks to him as the source of life, the
   power and gladness of being. He dares not think God unjust, but not
   therefore can he allow that he has done anything to merit the treatment
   he is receiving at his hands. Hence is he of necessity in profoundest
   perplexity, for how can the two things be reconciled? The thought has
   not yet come to him that that which it would be unfair to lay upon him
   as punishment, may yet be laid upon him as favour--by a love supreme
   which would give him blessing beyond all possible prayer--blessing he
   would not dare to ask if he saw the means necessary to its giving, but
   blessing for which, once known and understood, he would be willing to
   endure yet again all that he had undergone. Therefore is he so sorely
   divided in himself. While he must not think of God as having mistaken
   him, the discrepancy that looks like mistake forces itself upon him
   through every channel of thought and feeling. He had nowise relaxed his
   endeavour after a godly life, yet is the hand of the God he had
   acknowledged in all his ways uplifted against him, as rarely against
   any transgressor!--nor against him alone, for his sons and daughters
   have been swept away like a generation of vipers! The possessions,
   which made him the greatest of all the men of the east, have been taken
   from him by fire and wind and the hand of the enemy! He is poor as the
   poorest, diseased as the vilest, bereft of the children which were his
   pride and his strength! The worst of all with which fear could have
   dismayed him is come upon him; and worse now than all, death is denied
   him! His prayer that, as he came naked from the womb, so he may return
   naked and sore to the bosom of the earth, is not heard; he is left to
   linger in self-loathing, to encounter at every turn of agonized thought
   the awful suggestion that God has cast him off! He does not deny that
   there is evil in him; for--Dost thou open thine eyes upon such an one,'
   he pleads, and bringest me into judgment with thee?' but he does deny
   that he has been a wicked man, a doer of the thing he knew to be evil:
   he does deny that there is any guile in him. And who, because he knows
   and laments the guile in himself, will dare deny that there was once a
   Nathanael in the world? Had Job been Calvinist or Lutheran, the book of
   Job would have been very different. His perplexity would then have
   been--how God being just, could require of a man more than he could do,
   and punish him as if his sin were that of a perfect being who chose to
   do the evil of which he knew all the enormity. For me, I will call no
   one Master but Christ--and from him I learn that his quarrel with us is
   that we will not do what we know, will not come to him that we may have
   life. How endlessly more powerful with men would be expostulation
   grounded, not on what they have done, but on what they will not do!

   Job's child-like judgment of God had never been vitiated and perverted,
   to the dishonouring of the great Father, by any taint of such low
   theories as, alas! we must call the popular: explanations of God's ways
   by such as did not understand Him, they are acceptable to such as do
   not care to know him, such as are content to stand afar off and stare
   at the cloud whence issue the thunders and the voices; but a burden
   threatening to sink them to Tophet, a burden grievous to be borne, to
   such as would arise and go to the Father. The contradiction between
   Job's idea of the justice of God and the things which had befallen him,
   is constantly haunting him; it has a sting in it far worse than all the
   other misery with which he is tormented; but it is not fixed in the
   hopelessness of hell by an accepted explanation more frightful than
   itself. Let the world-sphinx put as many riddles as she will, she can
   devour no man while he waits an answer from the world-redeemer. Job
   refused the explanation of his friends because he knew it false; to
   have accepted such as would by many in the present day be given him,
   would have been to be devoured at once of the monster. He simply holds
   on to the skirt of God's garment--besieges his door--keeps putting his
   question again and again, ever haunting the one source of true answer
   and reconciliation. No answer will do for him but the answer that God
   only can give; for who but God can justify God's ways to his creature?

   From a soul whose very consciousness is contradiction, we must not look
   for logic; misery is rarely logical; it is itself a discord; yet is it
   nothing less than natural that, feeling as if God wronged him, Job
   should yet be ever yearning after a sight of God, straining into his
   presence, longing to stand face to face with him. He would confront the
   One. He is convinced, or at least cherishes as his one hope the idea,
   that, if he could but get God to listen to him, if he might but lay his
   case clear before him, God would not fail to see how the thing was, and
   would explain the matter to him--would certainly give him peace; the
   man in the ashes would know that the foundations of the world yet stand
   sure; that God has not closed his eyes, or--horror of all
   horrors--ceased to be just! Therefore would he order his words before
   him, and hear what God had to say; surely the Just would set the mind
   of his justice-loving creature at rest!

   His friends, good men, religious men, but of the pharisaic type--that
   is, men who would pay their court to God, instead of coming into his
   presence as children; men with traditional theories which have served
   their poor turn, satisfied their feeble intellectual demands, they
   think others therefore must accept or perish; men anxious to appease
   God rather than trust in him; men who would rather receive salvation
   from God, than God their salvation--these his friends would persuade
   Job to the confession that he was a hypocrite, insisting that such
   things could not have come upon him but because of wickedness, and as
   they knew of none open, it must be for some secret vileness. They grow
   angry with him when he refuses to be persuaded against his knowledge of
   himself. They insist on his hypocrisy, he on his righteousness. Nor may
   we forget that herein lies not any overweening on the part of Job, for
   the poem prepares us for the right understanding of the man by telling
   us in the prologue, that God said thus to the accuser of men: Hast thou
   considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a
   perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?'
   God gives Job into Satan's hand with confidence in the result; and at
   the end of the trial approves of what Job has said concerning himself.
   But the very appearance of God is enough to make Job turn against
   himself: his part was to have trusted God altogether, in spite of every
   appearance, in spite of every reality! He will justify himself no more.
   He sees that though God has not been punishing him for his sins, yet is
   he far from what he ought to be, and must become: Behold,' he says, I
   am vile; what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.'

   But let us look a little closer at Job's way of thinking and speaking
   about God, and his manner of addressing him--so different from the
   pharisaic in all ages, in none more than in our own.

   Waxing indignant at the idea that his nature required such
   treatment--Am I a sea or a whale,' he cries out, that thou settest a
   watch over me?' Thou knowest that I am not wicked. Thou settest a print
   upon the heels of my feet!'--that the way I have gone may be known by
   my footprints! To his friends he cries: Will ye speak wickedly for God?
   and talk deceitfully for him?' Do you not know that I am the man I say?
   Will ye accept His person?'--siding with Him against me? Will ye
   contend for God?'--be special pleaders for him, his partisains? Is it
   good that He should search you out? or as one man mocketh another, do
   ye so mock Him?'--saying what you do not think? He will surely reprove
   you, if ye do secretly accept persons!'--even the person of God
   himself!

   Such words are pleasing in the ear of the father of spirits. He is not
   a God to accept the flattery which declares him above obligation to his
   creatures; a God to demand of them a righteousness different from his
   own; a God to deal ungenerously with his poverty-stricken children; a
   God to make severest demands upon his little ones! Job is confident of
   receiving justice. There is a strange but most natural conflict of
   feeling in him. His faith is in truth profound, yet is he always
   complaining. It is but the form his faith takes in his trouble. Even
   while he declares the hardness and unfitness of the usage he is
   receiving, he yet seems assured that, to get things set right, all he
   needs is admission to the presence of God--an interview with the Most
   High. To be heard must be to have justice. He uses language which, used
   by any living man, would horrify the religious of the present day, in
   proportion to the lack of truth in them, just as it horrified his three
   friends, the honest pharisees of the time, whose religion was doctrine'
   and rebuke. God speaks not a word of rebuke to Job for the freedom of
   his speech:--he has always been seeking such as Job to worship him. It
   is those who know only and respect the outsides of religion, such as
   never speak or think of God but as the Almighty or Providence, who will
   say of the man who would go close up to God, and speak to him out of
   the deepest in the nature he has made, he is irreverent.' To utter the
   name of God in the drama--highest of human arts, is with such men
   blasphemy. They pay court to God, not love him; they treat him as one
   far away, not as the one whose bosom is the only home. They accept
   God's person. Shall not his excellency'--another thing quite than that
   you admire--make you afraid? Shall not his dread'--another thing quite
   than that to which you show your pagan respect--fall upon you?'

   In the desolation of this man, the truth of God seems to him, yet more
   plainly than hitherto, the one thing that holds together the world
   which by the word of his mouth came first into being. If God be not
   accessible, nothing but despair and hell are left the man so lately the
   greatest in the east. Like a child escaping from the dogs of the
   street, he flings the door to the wall, and rushes, nor looks behind
   him, to seek the presence of the living one. Bearing with him the
   burden of his death, he cries, Look what thou hast laid upon me! Shall
   mortal man, the helpless creature thou hast made, bear cross like
   this?' He would cast his load at the feet of his maker!--God is the God
   of comfort, known of man as the refuge, the life-giver, or not known at
   all. But alas! he cannot come to him! Nowhere can he see his face! He
   has hid himself from him! Oh that I knew where I might find him! that I
   might come even to his seat! I would order my cause before him, and
   fill my mouth with arguments. I would know the words which he would
   answer me, and understand what he would say unto me. Will he plead
   against me with his great power? No! but he would put strength in me.
   There the righteous might dispute with him; so should I be delivered
   for ever from my judge. Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and
   backward, but I cannot perceive him: on the left hand, where he doth
   work, but I cannot behold him: he hideth himself on the right hand,
   that I cannot see him: but he knoweth the way that I take: when he hath
   tried me, I shall come forth as gold.'

   He cannot find him! Yet is he in his presence all the time, and his
   words enter into the ear of God his Saviour.

   The grandeur of the poem is that Job pleads his cause with God against
   all the remonstrance of religious authority, recognizing no one but
   God, and justified therein. And the grandest of all is this, that he
   implies, if he does not actually say, that God owes something to his
   creature. This is the beginning of the greatest discovery of all--that
   God owes himself to the creature he has made in his image, for so he
   has made him incapable of living without him. This, his creatures'
   highest claim upon him, is his divinest gift to them. For the
   fulfilling of this their claim he has sent his son, that he may
   himself, the father of him and of us, follow into our hearts. Perhaps
   the worst thing in a theology constructed out of man's dull possible,
   and not out of the being and deeds and words of Jesus Christ, is the
   impression it conveys throughout that God acknowledges no such
   obligation. Are not we the clay, and he the potter? how can the clay
   claim from the potter? We are the clay, it is true, but his clay, but
   spiritual clay, live clay, with needs and desires--and rights; we are
   clay, but clay worth the Son of God's dying for, that it might learn to
   consent to be shaped unto honour. We can have no merits--a merit is a
   thing impossible; but God has given us rights. Out of him we have
   nothing; but, created by him, come forth from him, we have even rights
   towards him--ah, never, never against him! his whole desire and labour
   is to make us capable of claiming, and induce us to claim of him the
   things whose rights he bestowed in creating us. No claim had we to be
   created: that involves an absurdity; but, being made, we have claims on
   him who made us: our needs are our claims. A man who will not provide
   for the hunger of his child, is condemned by the whole world.

   Ah, but,' says the partisan of God, the Almighty stands in a relation
   very different from that of an earthly father: there is no parallel.' I
   grant it: there is no parallel. The man did not create the child, he
   only yielded to an impulse created in himself: God is infinitely more
   bound to provide for his child than any man is to provide for his. The
   relation is infinitely, divinely closer. It is God to whom every
   hunger, every aspiration, every desire, every longing of our nature is
   to be referred; he made all our needs--made us the creatures of a
   thousand necessities--and have we no claim on him? Nay, we have claims
   innumerable, infinite; and his one great claim on us is that we should
   claim our claims of him.

   It is terrible to represent God as unrelated to us in the way of appeal
   to his righteousness. How should he be righteous without owing us
   anything? How would there be any right for the judge of all the earth
   to do if he owed nothing? Verily he owes us nothing that he does not
   pay like a God; but it is of the devil to imagine imperfection and
   disgrace in obligation. So far is God from thinking so that in every
   act of his being he lays himself under obligation to his creatures. Oh,
   the grandeur of his goodness, and righteousness, and fearless
   unselfishness! When doubt and dread invade, and the voice of love in
   the soul is dumb, what can please the father of men better than to hear
   his child cry to him from whom he came, Here I am, O God! Thou hast
   made me: give me that which thou hast made me needing.' The child's
   necessity, his weakness, his helplessness, are the strongest of all his
   claims. If I am a whale, I can claim a sea; if I am a sea, I claim room
   to roll, and break in waves after my kind; if I am a lion, I seek my
   meat from God; am I a child, this, beyond all other claims, I
   claim--that, if any of my needs are denied me, it shall be by the love
   of a father, who will let me see his face, and allow me to plead my
   cause before him. And this must be just what God desires! What would he
   have, but that his children should claim their father? To what end are
   all his dealings with them, all his sufferings with and for and in
   them, but that they should claim their birthright? Is not their
   birthright what he made them for, made in them when he made them? Is it
   not what he has been putting forth his energy to give them ever since
   first he began them to be--the divine nature, God himself? The child
   has, and must have, a claim on the father, a claim which it is the joy
   of the father's heart to acknowledge. A created need is a created
   claim. God is the origin of both need and supply, the father of our
   necessities, the abundant giver of the good things. Right gloriously he
   meets the claims of his child! The story of Jesus is the heart of his
   answer, not primarily to the prayers, but to the divine necessities of
   the children he has sent out into his universe.

   Away with the thought that God could have been a perfect, an adorable
   creator, doing anything less than he has done for his children! that
   any other kind of being than Jesus Christ could have been worthy of
   all-glorifying worship! that his nature demanded less of him than he
   has done! that his nature is not absolute love, absolute
   self-devotion--could have been without these highest splendours!

   In the light of this truth, let us then look at the words at the head
   of this sermon: Oh that thou wouldest hide me in the grave!' Job
   appeals to his creator, whom his sufferings compel him to regard as
   displeased with him, though he knows not why. We know he was not
   displeased but Job had not read the preface to his own story. He prays
   him to hide him, and forget him for a time, that the desire of the
   maker to look again upon the creature he had made, to see once more the
   work of his hands, may awake within him; that silence and absence and
   loss may speak for the buried one, and make the heart of the parent
   remember and long after the face of the child; then thou shalt call and
   I will answer thee: thou wilt have a desire to the work of thine
   hands;' then will he rise in joy, to plead with confidence the cause of
   his righteousness. For God is nigher to the man than is anything God
   has made: what can be closer than the making and the made? that which
   is, and that which is because the other is? that which wills, and that
   which answers, owing to the will, the heart, the desire of the other,
   its power to answer? What other relation imaginable could give claims
   to compare with those arising from such a relation? God must love his
   creature that looks up to him with hungry eyes--hungry for life, for
   acknowledgment, for justice, for the possibilities of living that life
   which the making life has made him alive for the sake of living. The
   whole existence of a creature is a unit, an entirety of claim upon his
   creator:--just therefore, let him do with me as he will--even to
   seating me in the ashes, and seeing me scrape myself with a
   potsherd!--not the less but ever the more will I bring forward my
   claim! assert it--insist on it--assail with it the ear and the heart of
   the father. Is it not the sweetest music ear of maker can hear?--except
   the word of perfect son, Lo, I come to do thy will, O God!' We,
   imperfect sons, shall learn to say the same words too: that we may grow
   capable and say them, and so enter into our birthright, yea, become
   partakers of the divine nature in its divinest element, that Son came
   to us--died for the slaying of our selfishness, the destruction of our
   mean hollow pride, the waking of our childhood. We are his father's
   debtors for our needs, our rights, our claims, and he will have us pay
   the uttermost farthing. Yea, so true is the Father, he will even compel
   us, through misery if needful, to put in our claims, for he knows we
   have eternal need of these things: without the essential rights of his
   being, who can live?

   I protest, therefore, against all such teaching as, originating in and
   fostered by the faithlessness of the human heart, gives the impression
   that the exceeding goodness of God towards man is not the natural and
   necessary outcome of his being. The root of every heresy popular in the
   church draws its nourishment merely and only from the soil of unbelief.
   The idea that God would be God all the same, as glorious as he needed
   to be, had he not taken upon himself the divine toil of bringing home
   his wandered children, had he done nothing to seek and save the lost,
   is false as hell. Lying for God could go no farther. As if the idea of
   God admitted of his being less than he is, less than perfect, less than
   all-in-all, less than Jesus Christ! less than Love absolute, less than
   entire unselfishness! As if the God revealed to us in the New Testament
   were not his own perfect necessity of loving-kindness, but one who has
   made himself better than, by his own nature, by his own love, by the
   laws which he willed the laws of his existence, he needed to be! They
   would have it that, being unbound, he deserves the greater homage! So
   it might be, if he were not our father. But to think of the living God
   not as our father, but as one who has condescended greatly, being
   nowise, in his own willed grandeur of righteous nature, bound to do as
   he has done, is killing to all but a slavish devotion. It is to think
   of him as nothing like the God we see in Jesus Christ.

   It will be answered that we have fallen, and God is thereby freed from
   any obligation, if any ever were. It is but another lie. No amount of
   wrong-doing in a child can ever free a parent from the divine necessity
   of doing all he can to deliver his child; the bond between them cannot
   be broken. It is the vulgar, slavish, worldly idea of freedom, that it
   consists in being bound to nothing. Not such is God's idea of liberty!
   To speak as a man--the more of vital obligation he lays on himself, the
   more children he creates, with the more claims upon him, the freer is
   he as creator and giver of life, which is the essence of his Godhead:
   to make scope for his essence is to be free. Our Lord teaches us that
   the truth, known by obedience to him, will make us free: our freedom
   lies in living the truth of our relations to God and man. For a man to
   be alone in the universe would be to be a slave to unspeakable longings
   and lonelinesses. And again to speak after the manner of men: God could
   not be satisfied with himself without doing all that a God and Father
   could do for the creatures he had made--that is, without doing just
   what he has done, what he is doing, what he will do, to deliver his
   sons and daughters, and bring them home with rejoicing. To answer the
   cry of the human heart, Would that I could see him! would that I might
   come before him, and look upon him face to face!' he sent his son, the
   express image of his person. And again, that we might not be limited in
   our understanding of God by the constant presence to our weak and
   dullable spiritual sense of any embodiment whatever, he took him away.
   Having seen him, in his absence we understand him better. That we might
   know him he came; that we might go to him he went. If we dare, like
   Job, to plead with him in any of the heart-eating troubles that arise
   from the impossibility of loving such misrepresentation of him as is
   held out to us to love by our would-be teachers; if we think and speak
   out before him that which seems to us to be right, will he not be
   heartily pleased with his children's love of righteousness--with the
   truth that will not part him and his righteousness? Verily he will not
   plead against us with his great power, but will put strength in us, and
   where we are wrong will instruct us. For the heart that wants to do and
   think aright, the heart that seeks to worship him as no tyrant, but as
   the perfectly, absolutely righteous God, is the delight of the Father.
   To the heart that will not call that righteousness which it feels to be
   unjust, but clings to the skirt of his garment, and lifts pleading eyes
   to his countenance--to that heart he will lay open the riches of his
   being--riches which it has not entered that heart to conceive. O Lord,
   they tell me I have so offended against thy law that, as I am, thou
   canst not look upon me, but threatenest me with eternal banishment from
   thy presence. But if thou look not upon me, how can I ever be other
   than I am? Lord, remember I was born in sin: how then can I see sin as
   thou seest it? Remember, Lord, that I have never known myself clean:
   how can I cleanse myself? Thou must needs take me as I am and cleanse
   me. Is it not impossible that I should behold the final goodness of
   good, the final evilness of evil? how then can I deserve eternal
   torment? Had I known good and evil, seeing them as thou seest them,
   then chosen the evil, and turned away from the good, I know not what I
   should not deserve; but thou knowest it has ever been something good in
   the evil that has enticed my selfish heart--nor mine only, but that of
   all my kind. Thou requirest of us to forgive: surely thou forgivest
   freely! Bound thou mayest be to destroy evil, but art thou bound to
   keep the sinner alive that thou mayest punish him, even if it make him
   no better? Sin cannot be deep as life, for thou art the life; and
   sorrow and pain go deeper than sin, for they reach to the divine in us:
   thou canst suffer, though thou wilt not sin. To see men suffer might
   make us shun evil, but it never could make us hate it. We might see
   thereby that thou hatest sin, but we never could see that thou lovest
   the sinner. Chastise us, we pray thee, in loving kindness, and we shall
   not faint. We have done much that is evil, yea, evil is very deep in
   us, but we are not all evil, for we love righteousness; and art not
   thou thyself, in thy Son, the sacrifice for our sins, the atonement of
   our breach? Thou hast made us subject to vanity, but hast thyself taken
   thy godlike share of the consequences. Could we ever have come to know
   good as thou knowest it, save by passing through the sea of sin and the
   fire of cleansing? They tell me I must say for Christ's sake, or thou
   wilt not pardon: it takes the very heart out of my poor love to hear
   that thou wilt not pardon me except because Christ has loved me; but I
   give thee thanks that nowhere in the record of thy gospel, does one of
   thy servants say any such word. In spite of all our fears and
   grovelling, our weakness, and our wrongs, thou wilt be to us what thou
   art--such a perfect Father as no most loving child-heart on earth could
   invent the thought of! Thou wilt take our sins on thyself, giving us
   thy life to live withal. Thou bearest our griefs and carriest our
   sorrows; and surely thou wilt one day enable us to pay every debt we
   owe to each other! Thou wilt be to us a right generous, abundant
   father! Then truly our hearts shall be jubilant, because thou art what
   thou art--infinitely beyond all we could imagine. Thou wilt humble and
   raise us up. Thou hast given thyself to us that, having thee, we may be
   eternally alive with thy life. We run within the circle of what men
   call thy wrath, and find ourselves clasped in the zone of thy love!'

   But be it well understood that when I say rights, I do not mean
   merits--of any sort. We can deserve from him nothing at all, in the
   sense of any right proceeding from ourselves. All our rights are such
   as the bounty of love inconceivable has glorified our being
   with--bestowed for the one only purpose of giving the satisfaction, the
   fulfilment of the same--rights so deep, so high, so delicate, that
   their satisfaction cannot be given until we desire it--yea long for it
   with our deepest desire. The giver of them came to men, lived with men,
   and died by the hands of men, that they might possess these rights
   abundantly: more not God could do to fulfil his part--save indeed what
   he is doing still every hour, every moment, for every individual. Our
   rights are rights with God himself at the heart of them. He could
   recall them if he pleased, but only by recalling us, by making us
   cease. While we exist, by the being that is ours, they are ours. If he
   could not fulfil our rights to us--because we would not have them, that
   is--if he could not make us such as to care for these rights which he
   has given us out of the very depth of his creative being, I think he
   would have to uncreate us. But as to deserving, that is absurd: he had
   to die in the endeavour to make us listen and receive. When ye shall
   have done all the things that are commanded you, say, We are
   unprofitable servants; we have done that which it was our duty to do.'
   Duty is a thing prepaid: it can never have desert. There is no claim on
   God that springs from us: all is from him.

   But, lest it should be possible that any unchildlike soul might, in
   arrogance and ignorance, think to stand upon his rights against God,
   and demand of him this or that after the will of the flesh, I will lay
   before such a possible one some of the things to which he has a right,
   yea, perhaps has first of all a right to, from the God of his life,
   because of the beginning he has given him--because of the divine germ
   that is in him. He has a claim on God, then, a divine claim, for any
   pain, want, disappointment, or misery, that would help to show him to
   himself as the fool he is; he has a claim to be punished to the last
   scorpion of the whip, to be spared not one pang that may urge him
   towards repentance; yea, he has a claim to be sent out into the outer
   darkness, whether what we call hell, or something speechlessly worse,
   if nothing less will do. He has a claim to be compelled to repent; to
   be hedged in on every side; to have one after another of the strong,
   sharp-toothed sheep-dogs of the great shepherd sent after him, to
   thwart him in any desire, foil him in any plan, frustrate him of any
   hope, until he come to see at length that nothing will ease his pain,
   nothing make life a thing worth having, but the presence of the living
   God within him; that nothing is good but the will of God; nothing noble
   enough for the desire of the heart of man but oneness with the eternal.
   For this God must make him yield his very being, that He may enter in
   and dwell with him.

   That the man would enforce none of these claims, is nothing; for it is
   not a man who owes them to him, but the eternal God, who by his own
   will of right towards the creature he has made, is bound to discharge
   them. God has to answer to himself for his idea; he has to do with the
   need of the nature he made, not with the self-born choice of the
   self-ruined man. His candle yet burns dim in the man's soul; that
   candle must shine as the sun. For what is the all-pervading
   dissatisfaction of his wretched being but an unrecognized hunger after
   the righteousness of his father. The soul God made is thus hungering,
   though the selfish, usurping self, which is its consciousness, is
   hungering only after low and selfish things, ever trying, but in vain,
   to fill its mean, narrow content, with husks too poor for its
   poverty-stricken desires. For even that most degraded chamber of the
   soul which is the temple of the deified Self, cannot be filled with
   less than God; even the usurping Self must be miserable until it cease
   to look at itself in the mirror of Satan, and open the door of its
   innermost closet to the God who means to dwell there, and make peace.

   He that has looked on the face of God in Jesus Christ, whose heart
   overflows, if ever so little, with answering love, sees God standing
   with full hands to give the abundance for which he created his
   children, and those children hanging back, refusing to take, doubting
   the God-heart which knows itself absolute in truth and love.

   It is not at first easy to see wherein God gives Job any answer; I
   cannot find that he offers him the least explanation of why he has so
   afflicted him. He justifies him in his words; he says Job has spoken
   what is right concerning him, and his friends have not; and he calls up
   before him, one after another, the works of his hands. The answer, like
   some of our Lord's answers if not all of them, seems addressed to Job
   himself, not to his intellect; to the revealing, God-like imagination
   in the man, and to no logical faculty whetever. It consists in a
   setting forth of the power of God, as seen in his handywork, and
   wondered at by the men of the time; and all that is said concerning
   them has to do with their show of themselves to the eyes of men. In
   what belongs to the deeper meanings of nature and her mediation between
   us and God, the appearances of nature are the truths of nature, far
   deeper than any scientific discoveries in and concerning them. The show
   of things is that for which God cares most, for their show is the face
   of far deeper things than they; we see in them, in a distant way, as in
   a glass darkly, the face of the unseen. It is through their show, not
   through their analysis, that we enter into their deepest truths. What
   they say to the childlike soul is the truest thing to be gathered of
   them. To know a primrose is a higher thing than to know all the botany
   of it--just as to know Christ is an infinitely higher thing than to
   know all theology, all that is said about his person, or babbled about
   his work. The body of man does not exist for the sake of its hidden
   secrets; its hidden secrets exist for the sake of its outside--for the
   face and the form in which dwells revelation: its outside is the
   deepest of it. So Nature as well exists primarily for her face, her
   look, her appeals to the heart and the imagination, her simple service
   to human need, and not for the secrets to be discovered in her and
   turned to man's farther use. What in the name of God is our knowledge
   of the elements of the atmosphere to our knowledge of the elements of
   Nature? What are its oxygen, its hydrogen, its nitrogen, its carbonic
   acid, its ozone, and all the possible rest, to the blowing of the wind
   on our faces? What is the analysis of water to the babble of a running
   stream? What is any knowledge of things to the heart, beside its
   child-play with the Eternal! And by an infinite decomposition we should
   know nothing more of what a thing really is, for, the moment we
   decompose it, it ceases to be, and all its meaning is vanished.
   Infinitely more than astronomy even, which destroys nothing, can do for
   us, is done by the mere aspect and changes of the vault over our heads.
   Think for a moment what would be our idea of greatness, of God, of
   infinitude, of aspiration, if, instead of a blue, far withdrawn,
   light-spangled firmament, we were born and reared under a flat white
   ceiling! I would not be supposed to depreciate the labours of science,
   but I say its discoveries are unspeakably less precious than the merest
   gifts of Nature, those which, from morning to night, we take unthinking
   from her hands. One day, I trust, we shall be able to enter into their
   secrets from within them--by natural contact between our heart and
   theirs. When we are one with God we may well understand in an hour
   things that no man of science, prosecuting his investigations from the
   surface with all the aids that keenest human intellect can supply,
   would reach in the longest lifetime. Whether such power will ever come
   to any man in this world, or can come only in some state of existence
   beyond it, matters nothing to me: the question does not interest me;
   life is one, and things will be then what they are now; for God is one
   and the same there and here; and I shall be the same there I am here,
   however larger the life with which it may please the Father of my being
   to endow me.

   The argument implied, not expressed, in the poem, seems to be
   this--that Job, seeing God so far before him in power, and his works so
   far beyond his understanding that they filled him with wonder and
   admiration--the vast might of the creation, the times and the seasons,
   the marvels of the heavens, the springs of the sea, and the gates of
   death; the animals, their generations and providing, their beauties and
   instincts; the strange and awful beasts excelling the rest, behemoth on
   the land, leviathan in the sea, creatures, perhaps, now vanished from
   the living world;--that Job, beholding these things, ought to have
   reasoned that he who could work so grandly beyond his understanding,
   must certainly use wisdom in things that touched him nearer, though
   they came no nearer his understanding: shall he that contendeth with
   the Almighty instruct him? he that reproveth God, let him answer it.'
   Wilt thou also disannul my judgment? wilt thou condemn me that thou
   mayest be righteous?' In this world power is no proof of righteousness;
   but was it likely that he who could create should be unrighteous? Did
   not all he made move the delight of the beholding man? Did such things
   foreshadow injustice towards the creature he had made in his image? If
   Job could not search his understanding in these things, why should he
   conclude his own case wrapt in the gloom of injustice? Did he
   understand his own being, history, and destiny? Should not God's ways
   in these also be beyond his understanding? Might he not trust him to do
   him justice? In such high affairs as the rights of a live soul, might
   not matters be involved too high for Job? The maker of Job was so much
   greater than Job, that his ways with him might well be beyond his
   comprehension! God's thoughts were higher than his thoughts, as the
   heavens were higher than the earth!

   The true child, the righteous man, will trust absolutely, against all
   appearances, the God who has created in him the love of righteousness.

   God does not, I say, tell Job why he had afflicted him: he rouses his
   child-heart to trust. All the rest of Job's life on earth, I imagine,
   his slowly vanishing perplexities would yield him ever fresh
   meditations concerning God and his ways, new opportunities of trusting
   him, light upon many things concerning which he had not as yet begun to
   doubt, added means of growing in all directions into the knowledge of
   God. His perplexities would thus prove of divinest gift. Everything, in
   truth, which we cannot understand, is a closed book of larger knowledge
   and blessedness, whose clasps the blessed perplexity urges us to open.
   There is, there can be, nothing which is not in itself a righteous
   intelligibility--whether an intelligibility for us, matters nothing.
   The awful thing would be, that anything should be in its nature
   unintelligible: that would be the same as no God. That God knows is
   enough for me; I shall know, if I can know. It would be death to think
   God did not know; it would be as much as to conclude there was no God
   to know.

   How much more than Job are we bound, who know him in his Son as Love,
   to trust God in all the troubling questions that force themselves upon
   us concerning the motions and results of things! With all those about
   the lower animals, with all those about such souls as seem never to
   wake from, or seem again to fall into the sleep of death, we will trust
   him.

   In the confusion of Job's thoughts--how could they be other than
   confused, in the presence of the awful contradiction of two such facts
   staring each other in the face, that God was just, yet punishing a
   righteous man as if he were wicked?--while he was not yet able to
   generate, or to receive the thought, that approving love itself might
   be inflicting or allowing the torture--that such suffering as his was
   granted only to a righteous man, that he might be made perfect--I can
   well imagine that at times, as the one moment he doubted God's
   righteousness, and the next cried aloud, Though he slay me, yet will I
   trust in him,' there must in the chaos have mingled some element of
   doubt as to the existence of God. Let not such doubt be supposed a yet
   further stage in unbelief. To deny the existence of God may,
   paradoxical as the statement will at first seem to some, involve less
   unbelief than the smallest yielding to doubt of his goodness. I say
   yielding; for a man may be haunted with doubts, and only grow thereby
   in faith. Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to rouse the
   honest. They are the first knock at our door of things that are not
   yet, but have to be, understood; and theirs in general is the
   inhospitable reception of angels that do not come in their own
   likeness. Doubt must precede every deeper assurance; for uncertainties
   are what we first see when we look into a region hitherto unknown,
   unexplored, unannexed. In all Job's begging and longing to see God,
   then, may well be supposed to mingle the mighty desire to be assured of
   God's being. To acknowledge is not to be sure of God. One great point
   in the poem is--that when Job hears the voice of God, though it utters
   no word of explanation, it is enough to him to hear it: he knows that
   God is, and that he hears the cry of his creature. That he is there,
   knowing all about him, and what had befallen him, is enough; he needs
   no more to reconcile seeming contradictions, and the worst ills of
   outer life become endurable. Even if Job could not at first follow his
   argument of divine probability, God settled everything for him when, by
   answering him out of the whirlwind, he showed him that he had not
   forsaken him. It is true that nothing but a far closer divine presence
   can ever make life a thing fit for a son of man--and that for the
   simplest of all reasons, that he is made in the image of God, and it is
   for him absolutely imperative that he should have in him the reality of
   which his being is the image: while he has it not in him, his being,
   his conscious self, is but a mask, a spiritual emptiness; but for the
   present, Job, yielding to God, was calmed and satisfied. Perhaps he
   came at length to see that, if anything God could do to him would
   trouble him so as to make him doubt God--if he knew him so imperfectly
   who could do nothing ill, then it was time that he should be so
   troubled, that the imperfection of his knowledge of God and his lack of
   faith in him should be revealed to him--that an earthquake of his being
   should disclose its hollowness, and at the same time bring to the
   surface the gold of God that was in him. To know that our faith is weak
   is the first step towards its strengthening; to be capable of
   distrusting is death; to know that we are, and cry out, is to begin to
   live--to begin to be made such that we cannot distrust--such that God
   may do anything with us and we shall never doubt him. Until doubt is
   impossible, we are lacking in the true, the childlike knowledge of God;
   for either God is such that one may distrust him, or he is such that to
   distrust him is the greatest injustice of which a man can be guilty. If
   then we are able to distrust him, either we know God imperfect, or we
   do not know him. Perhaps Job learned something like this; anyhow, the
   result of what he had had to endure was a greater nearness to God. But
   all that he was required to receive at the moment was the argument from
   God's loving wisdom in his power, to his loving wisdom in everything
   else. For power is a real and a good thing, giving an immediate
   impression that it proceeds from goodness. Nor, however long it may
   last after goodness is gone, was it ever born of anything but goodness.
   In a very deep sense, power and goodness are one. In the deepest fact
   they are one.

   Seeing God, Job forgets all he wanted to say, all he thought he would
   say if he could but see him. The close of the poem is grandly abrupt.
   He had meant to order his cause before him; he had longed to see him
   that he might speak and defend himself, imagining God as well as his
   righteous friends wrongfully accusing him; but his speech is gone from
   him; he has not a word to say. To justify himself in the presence of
   Him who is Righteousness, seems to him what it is--foolishness and
   worthless labour. If God do not see him righteous, he is not righteous,
   and may hold his peace. If he is righteous, God knows it better than he
   does himself. Nay, if God do not care to justify him, Job has lost his
   interest in justifying himself. All the evils and imperfections of his
   nature rise up before him in the presence of the one pure, the one who
   is right, and has no selfishness in him. Behold,' he cries, I am vile;
   what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth. Once have
   I spoken; but I will not answer: yea, twice; but I will proceed no
   further.' Then again, after God has called to witness for him behemoth
   and leviathan, he replies, I know that thou canst do everything, and
   that no thought can be withholden from thee. Who is he that hideth
   counsel without knowledge?' This question was the word with which first
   God made his presence known to him; and in the mouth of Job now
   repeating the question, it is the humble confession, I am that foolish
   man.'--Therefore,' he goes on, have I uttered that I understood not;
   things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.' He had not knowledge
   enough to have a right to speak. Hear, I beseech thee, and I will
   speak:'--In the time to come, he will yet cry--to be taught, not to
   justify himself. I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me.'--The
   more diligently yet will he seek to know the counsel of God. That he
   cannot understand will no longer distress him; it will only urge him to
   fresh endeavour after the knowledge of him who in all his doings is
   perfect. I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine
   eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and
   ashes.'

   Job had his desire: he saw the face of God--and abhorred himself in
   dust and ashes. He sought justification; he found self-abhorrence. Was
   this punishment? The farthest from it possible. It was the best
   thing--to begin with--that the face of God could do for him. Blessedest
   gift is self-contempt, when the giver of it is the visible glory of the
   Living One. For there to see is to partake; to be able to behold that
   glory is to live; to turn from and against self is to begin to be pure
   of heart. Job was in the right when he said that he did not deserve to
   be in such wise punished for his sins: neither did he deserve to see
   the face of God, yet had he that crown of all gifts given him--and it
   was to see himself vile, and abhor himself. By very means of the
   sufferings against which he had cried out, the living one came near to
   him, and he was silent. Oh the divine generosity that will grant us to
   be abashed and self-condemned before the Holy!--to come so nigh him as
   to see ourselves dark spots against his brightness! Verily we must be
   of his kind, else no show of him could make us feel small and ugly and
   unclean! Oh the love of the Father, that he should give us to compare
   ourselves with him, and be buried in humility and shame! To be rebuked
   before him is to be his. Good man as Job was, he had never yet been
   right near to God; now God has come near to him, has become very real
   to him; he knows now in very deed that God is he with whom he has to
   do. He had laid all these troubles upon him that He might through them
   draw nigh to him, and enable him to know him.

   Two things are clearly contained in, and manifest from this poem:--that
   not every man deserves for his sins to be punished everlastingly from
   the presence of the Lord; and that the best of men, when he sees the
   face of God, will know himself vile. God is just, and will never deal
   with the sinner as if he were capable of sinning the pure sin; yet if
   the best man be not delivered from himself, that self will sink him
   into Tophet.

   Any man may, like Job, plead his cause with God--though possibly it may
   not be to like justification: he gives us liberty to speak, and will
   hear with absolute fairness. But, blessed be God, the one result for
   all who so draw nigh to him will be--to see him plainly, surely right,
   the perfect Saviour, the profoundest refuge even from the wrongs of
   their own being, yea, nearer to them always than any wrong they could
   commit; so seeing him, they will abhor themselves, and rejoice in him.
   And, as the poem indicates, when we turn from ourselves to him,
   becoming true, that is, being to God and to ourselves what we are, he
   will turn again our captivity; they that have sown in tears shall reap
   in joy; they shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing their
   sheaves with them. Then will the waters that rise from God's fountains,
   run in God's channels.

   For the prosperity that follows upon Job's submission, is the
   embodiment of a great truth. Although a man must do right if it send
   him to Hades, yea, even were it to send him for ever to hell itself,
   yet, while the Lord liveth, we need not fear: all good things must grow
   out of and hang upon the one central good, the one law of life--the
   Will, the One Good. To submit absolutely to him is the only reason:
   circumstance as well as all being must then bud and blossom as the
   rose. And it will!--what matter whether in this world or the next, if
   one day I know my life as a perfect bliss, having neither limitation
   nor hindrance nor pain nor sorrow more than it can dominate in peace
   and perfect assurance?

   I care not whether the book of Job be a history or a poem. I think it
   is both--I do not care how much relatively of each. It was probably, in
   the childlike days of the world, a well-known story in the east, which
   some man, whom God had made wise to understand his will and his ways,
   took up, and told after the fashion of a poet. What its age may be, who
   can certainly tell!--it must have been before Moses. I would gladly
   throw out the part of Elihu as an interpolation. One in whom, of all
   men I have known, I put the greatest trust, said to me once what
   amounted to this: There is as much difference between the language of
   the rest of the poem and that of Elihu, as between the language of
   Chaucer and that of Shakspere.'

   The poem is for many reasons difficult, and in the original to me
   inaccessible; but, through all the evident inadequacy of our
   translation, who can fail to hear two souls, that of the poet and that
   of Job, crying aloud with an agonized hope that, let the evil shows
   around them be what they may, truth and righteousness are yet the heart
   of things. The faith, even the hope of Job seems at times on the point
   of giving way; he struggles like a drowning man when the billow goes
   over him, but with the rising of his head his courage revives.
   Christians we call ourselves!--what would not our faith be, were it as
   much greater than Job's as the word from the mouth of Jesus is mightier
   than that he heard out of the whirlwind! Here is a book of faith
   indeed, ere the law was given by Moses: Grace and Truth have visited
   us--but where is our faith?

   Friends, our cross may be heavy, and the via dolorosa rough; but we
   have claims on God, yea the right to cry to him for help. He has spent,
   and is spending himself to give us our birthright, which is
   righteousness. Though we shall not be condemned for our sins, we cannot
   be saved but by leaving them; though we shall not be condemned for the
   sins that are past, we shall be condemned if we love the darkness
   rather than the light, and refuse to come to him that we may have life.
   God is offering us the one thing we cannot live without--his own self:
   we must make room for him; we must cleanse our hearts that he may come
   in; we must do as the Master tells us, who knew all about the Father
   and the way to him--we must deny ourselves, and take up our cross
   daily, and follow him.
     __________________________________________________________________

  SELF-DENIAL.

   And he said unto all, If any man would come after me, let him deny
   himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. For whosoever
   would save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life
   for my sake, the same shall save it.'--St. Luke ix. 23, 24.

   Christ is the way out, and the way in; the way from slavery, conscious
   or unconscious, into liberty; the way from the unhomeliness of things
   to the home we desire but do not know; the way from the stormy skirts
   of the Father's garments to the peace of his bosom. To picture him, we
   need not only endless figures, but sometimes quite opposing figures: he
   is not only the door of the sheepfold, but the shepherd of the sheep;
   he is not only the way, but the leader in the way, the rock that
   followed, and the captain of our salvation. We must become as little
   children, and Christ must be born in us; we must learn of him, and the
   one lesson he has to give is himself: he does first all he wants us to
   do; he is first all he wants us to be. We must not merely do as he did;
   we must see things as he saw them, regard them as he regarded them; we
   must take the will of God as the very life of our being; we must
   neither try to get our own way, nor trouble ourselves as to what may be
   thought or said of us. The world must be to us as nothing.

   I would not be misunderstood if I may avoid it: when I say the world, I
   do not mean the world God makes and means, yet less the human hearts
   that live therein; but the world man makes by choosing the perversion
   of his own nature--a world apart from and opposed to God's world. By
   the world I mean all ways of judging, regarding, and thinking, whether
   political, economical, ecclesiastical, social, or individual, which are
   not divine, which are not God's ways of thinking, regarding, or
   judging; which do not take God into account, do not set his will
   supreme, as the one only law of life; which do not care for the truth
   of things, but the customs of society, or the practice of the trade;
   which heed not what is right, but the usage of the time. From
   everything that is against the teaching and thinking of Jesus, from the
   world in the heart of the best man in it, specially from the world in
   his own heart, the disciple must turn to follow him. The first thing in
   all progress is to leave something behind; to follow him is to leave
   one's self behind. If any man would come after me, let him deny
   himself.'

   Some seem to take this to mean that the disciple must go against his
   likings because they are his likings; must be unresponsive to the
   tendencies and directions and inclinations that are his, because they
   are such, and his; they seem to think something is gained by abstinence
   from what is pleasant, or by the doing of what is disagreeable--that to
   thwart the lower nature is in itself a good. Now I will not dare say
   what a man may not get good from, if the thing be done in simplicity
   and honesty. I believe that when a man, for the sake of doing the thing
   that is right, does in mistake that which is not right, God will take
   care that he be shown the better way--will perhaps use the very thing
   which is his mistake to reveal to him the mistake it is. I will allow
   that the mere effort of will, arbitrary and uninformed of duty,
   partaking of the character of tyranny and even schism, may add to the
   man's power over his lower nature; but in that very nature it is God
   who must rule and not the man, however well he may mean. From a man's
   rule of himself, in smallest opposition, however devout, to the law of
   his being, arises the huge danger of nourishing, by the pride of
   self-conquest, a far worse than even the unchained animal self--the
   demoniac self. True victory over self is the victory of God in the man,
   not of the man alone. It is not subjugation that is enough, but
   subjugation by God. In whatever man does without God, he must fail
   miserably--or succeed more miserably. No portion of a man can rule
   another portion, for God, not the man, created it, and the part is
   greater than the whole. In effecting what God does not mean, a man but
   falls into fresh ill conditions. In crossing his natural, therefore in
   themselves right inclinations, a man may develop a self-satisfaction
   which in its very nature is a root of all sin. Doing the thing God does
   not require of him, he puts himself in the place of God, becoming not a
   law but a law-giver to himself, one who commands, not one who obeys.
   The diseased satisfaction which some minds feel in laying burdens on
   themselves, is a pampering, little as they may suspect it, of the most
   dangerous appetite of that self which they think they are mortifying.
   All the creatures of God are good, received with thanksgiving; then
   only can any one of them become evil, when it is used in relations in
   which a higher law forbids it, or when it is refused for the sake of
   self-discipline, in relations in which no higher law forbids, and God
   therefore allows it. For a man to be his own schoolmaster, is a right
   dangerous position; the pupil cannot be expected to make
   progress--except, indeed, in the wrong direction. To enjoy heartily and
   thankfully, and do cheerfully without, when God wills we should, is the
   way to live in regard to things of the lower nature; these must nowise
   be confounded with the things of the world. If any one say this is
   dangerous doctrine, I answer, The law of God is enough for me, and for
   laws invented by man, I will none of them. They are false, and come all
   of rebellion. God and not man is our judge.'

   Verily it is not to thwart or tease the poor self Jesus tells us. That
   was not the purpose for which God gave it to us! He tells us we must
   leave it altogether--yield it, deny it, refuse it, lose it: thus only
   shall we save it, thus only have a share in our own being. The self is
   given to us that we may sacrifice it; it is ours that we like Christ
   may have somewhat to offer--not that we should torment it, but that we
   should deny it; not that we should cross it, but that we should abandon
   it utterly: then it can no more be vexed.

   What can this mean?--we are not to thwart, but to abandon? How abandon,
   without thwarting?'

   It means this:--we must refuse, abandon, deny self altogether as a
   ruling, or determining, or originating element in us. It is to be no
   longer the regent of our action. We are no more to think, What should I
   like to do?' but What would the Living One have me do?' It is not
   selfish to take that which God has made us to desire; neither are we
   very good to yield it--we should only be very bad not to do so, when he
   would take it from us; but to yield it heartily, without a struggle or
   regret, is not merely to deny the Self a thing it would like, but to
   deny the Self itself, to refuse and abandon it. The Self is God's
   making--only it must be the slave of Christ,' that the Son may make it
   also the free son of the same Father; it must receive all from him--not
   as from nowhere; as well as the deeper soul, it must follow him, not
   its own desires. It must not be its own law; Christ must be its law.
   The time will come when it shall be so possessed, so enlarged, so
   idealized, by the indwelling God, who is its deeper, its deepest self,
   that there will be no longer any enforced denial of it needful; it has
   been finally denied and refused and sent into its own obedient place;
   it has learned to receive with thankfulness, to demand nothing; to turn
   no more upon its own centre, or any more think to minister to its own
   good. God's eternal denial of himself, revealed in him who for our
   sakes in the flesh took up his cross daily, will have been developed in
   the man; his eternal rejoicing will be in God--and in his fellows,
   before whom he will cast his glad self to be a carpet for their walk, a
   footstool for their rest, a stair for their climbing.

   To deny oneself then, is to act no more from the standing--ground of
   self; to allow no private communication, no passing influence between
   the self and the will; not to let the right hand know what the left
   hand doeth. No grasping or seeking, no hungering of the individual,
   shall give motion to the will; no desire to be conscious of worthiness
   shall order the life; no ambition whatever shall be a motive of action;
   no wish to surpass another be allowed a moment's respite from death; no
   longing after the praise of men influence a single throb of the heart.
   To deny the self is to shrink from no dispraise or condemnation or
   contempt of the community, or circle, or country, which is against the
   mind of the Living one; for no love or entreaty of father or mother,
   wife or child, friend or lover, to turn aside from following him, but
   forsake them all as any ruling or ordering power in our lives; we must
   do nothing to please them that would not first be pleasing to him.
   Right deeds, and not the judgment thereupon; true words, and not what
   reception they may have, shall be our care. Not merely shall we not
   love money, or trust in it, or seek it as the business of life, but,
   whether we have it or have it not, we must never think of it as a
   windfall from the tree of event or the cloud of circumstance, but as
   the gift of God. We must draw our life, by the uplooking, acknowledging
   will, every moment fresh from the living one, the causing life, not
   glory in the mere consciousness of health and being. It is God feeds
   us, warms us, quenches our thirst. The will of God must be to us all in
   all; to our whole nature the life of the Father must be the joy of the
   child; we must know our very understanding his--that we live and feed
   on him every hour in the closest, veriest way: to know these things in
   the depth of our knowing, is to deny ourselves, and take God instead.
   To try after them is to begin the denial, to follow him who never
   sought his own. So must we deny all anxieties and fears. When young we
   must not mind what the world calls failure; as we grow old, we must not
   be vexed that we cannot remember, must not regret that we cannot do,
   must not be miserable because we grow weak or ill: we must not mind
   anything. We have to do with God who can, not with ourselves where we
   cannot; we have to do with the Will, with the Eternal Life of the
   Father of our spirits, and not with the being which we could not make,
   and which is his care. He is our care; we are his; our care is to will
   his will; his care, to give us all things. This is to deny ourselves.
   Self, I have not to consult you, but him whose idea is the soul of you,
   and of which as yet you are all unworthy. I have to do, not with you,
   but with the source of you, by whom it is that any moment you
   exist--the Causing of you, not the caused you. You may be my
   consciousness, but you are not my being. If you were, what a poor,
   miserable, dingy, weak wretch I should be! but my life is hid with
   Christ in God, whence it came, and whither it is returning--with you
   certainly, but as an obedient servant, not a master. Submit, or I will
   cast you from me, and pray to have another consciousness given me. For
   God is more to me than my consciousness of myself. He is my life; you
   are only so much of it as my poor half--made being can grasp--as much
   of it as I can now know at once. Because I have fooled and spoiled you,
   treated you as if you were indeed my own self, you have dwindled
   yourself and have lessened me, till I am ashamed of myself. If I were
   to mind what you say, I should soon be sick of you; even now I am ever
   and anon disgusted with your paltry, mean face, which I meet at every
   turn. No! let me have the company of the Perfect One, not of you! of my
   elder brother, the Living One! I will not make a friend of the mere
   shadow of my own being! Good-bye, Self! I deny you, and will do my best
   every day to leave you behind me.'

   And in this regard we must not fail to see, or seeing ever forget,
   that, when Jesus tells us we must follow him, we must come to him, we
   must believe in him, he speaks first and always as the Son of the
   Father--and that in the active sense, as the obedient God, not merely
   as one who claims the sonship for the ground of being and so of further
   claim. He is the Son of the Father as the Son who obeys the Father, as
   the Son who came expressly and only to do the will of the Father, as
   the messenger whose delight it is to do the will of him that sent him.
   At the moment he says Follow me, he is following the Father; his face
   is set homeward. He would have us follow him because he is bent on the
   will of the Blessed. It is nothing even thus to think of him, except
   thus we believe in him--that is, so do. To believe in him is to do as
   he does, to follow him where he goes. We must believe in him
   practically--altogether practically, as he believed in his Father; not
   as one concerning whom we have to hold something, but as one whom we
   have to follow out of the body of this death into life eternal. It is
   not to follow him to take him in any way theoretically, to hold this or
   that theory about why he died, or wherein lay his atonement: such
   things can be revealed only to those who follow him in his active being
   and the principle of his life--who do as he did, live as he lived.
   There is no other following. He is all for the Father; we must be all
   for the Father too, else are we not following him. To follow him is to
   be learning of him, to think his thoughts, to use his judgments, to see
   things as he saw them, to feel things as he felt them, to be hearted,
   souled, minded, as he was--that so also we may be of the same mind with
   his Father. This it is to deny self and go after him; nothing less,
   even if it be working miracles and casting out devils, is to be his
   disciple. Busy from morning to night doing great things for him on any
   other road, we should but earn the reception, I never knew you.' When
   he says, Take my yoke upon you,' he does not mean a yoke which he would
   lay upon our shoulders; it is his own yoke he tells us to take, and to
   learn of him--it is the yoke he is himself carrying, the yoke his
   perfect Father had given him to carry. The will of the Father is the
   yoke he would have us take, and bear also with him. It is of this yoke
   that he says, It is easy, of this burden, It is light. He is not
   saying, The yoke I lay upon you is easy, the burden light;' what he
   says is, The yoke I carry is easy, the burden on my shoulders is
   light.' With the garden of Gethsemane before him, with the hour and the
   power of darkness waiting for him, he declares his yoke easy, his
   burden light. There is no magnifying of himself. He first denies
   himself, and takes up his cross--then tells us to do the same. The
   Father magnifies the Son, not the Son himself; the Son magnifies the
   Father.

   We must be jealous for God against ourselves, and look well to the
   cunning and deceitful Self--ever cunning and deceitful until it is
   informed of God--until it is thoroughly and utterly denied, and God is
   to it also All-in-all--till we have left it quite empty of our will and
   our regard, and God has come into it, and made it--not indeed an
   adytum, but a pylon for himself. Until then, its very denials, its very
   turnings from things dear to it for the sake of Christ, will tend to
   foster its self-regard, and generate in it a yet deeper self-worship.
   While it is not denied, only thwarted, we may through satisfaction with
   conquered difficulty and supposed victory, minister yet more to its
   self-gratulation. The Self, when it finds it cannot have honour because
   of its gifts, because of the love lavished upon it, because of its
   conquests, and the golden opinions bought from all sorts of people,'
   will please itself with the thought of its abnegations, of its
   unselfishness, of its devotion to God, of its forsakings for his sake.
   It may not call itself, but it will soon feel itself a saint, a
   superior creature, looking down upon the foolish world and its ways,
   walking on high above the smoke and stir of this dim spot;'--all the
   time dreaming a dream of utter folly, worshipping itself with the more
   concentration that it has yielded the approbation of the world, and
   dismissed the regard of others: even they are no longer necessary to
   its assurance of its own worths and merits! In a thousand ways will
   Self delude itself, in a thousand ways befool its own slavish being.
   Christ sought not his own, sought not anything but the will of his
   Father: we have to grow diamond-clear, true as the white light of the
   morning. Hopeless task!--were it not that he offers to come himself,
   and dwell in us.

   I have wondered whether the word of the Lord, take up his cross,' was a
   phrase in use at the time: when he used it first he had not yet told
   them that he would himself be crucified. I can hardly believe this form
   of execution such a common thing that the figure of bearing the cross
   had come into ordinary speech. As the Lord's idea was new to men, so I
   think was the image in which he embodied it. I grant it might, being
   such a hateful thing in the eyes of the Jews, have come to represent
   the worst misery of a human being; but would they be ready to use as a
   figure a fact which so sorely manifested their slavery? I hardly think
   it. Certainly it had not come to represent the thing he was now
   teaching, that self-abnegation which he had but newly brought to
   light--nay, hardly to the light yet--only the twilight; and nothing
   less, it seems to me, can have suggested the terrible symbol!

   But we must note that, although the idea of the denial of self is an
   entire and absolute one, yet the thing has to be done daily: we must
   keep on denying. It is a deeper and harder thing than any sole effort
   of most herculean will may finally effect. For indeed the will itself
   is not pure, is not free, until the Self is absolutely denied. It takes
   long for the water of life that flows from the well within us, to
   permeate every outlying portion of our spiritual frame, subduing
   everything to itself, making it all of the one kind, until at last,
   reaching the outermost folds of our personality, it casts out disease,
   our bodies by indwelling righteousness are redeemed, and the creation
   delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory
   of the children of God. Every day till then we have to take up our
   cross; every hour to see that we are carrying it. A birthright may be
   lost for a mess of pottage, and what Satan calls a trifle must be a
   thing of eternal significance.

   Is there not many a Christian who, having begun to deny himself, yet
   spends much strength in the vain and evil endeavour to accommodate
   matters between Christ and the dear Self-seeking to save that which so
   he must certainly lose--in how different a way from that in which the
   Master would have him lose it! It is one thing to have the loved self
   devoured of hell in hate and horror and disappointment; another to
   yield it to conscious possession by the living God himself, who will
   raise it then first and only to its true individuality, freedom, and
   life. With its cause within it, then, indeed, it shall be saved!--how
   then should it but live! Here is the promise to those who will leave
   all and follow him: Whosoever shall lose his life, for my sake, the
   same shall save it,'--in St. Matthew, find it.' What speech of men or
   angels will serve to shadow the dimly glorious hope! To lose ourselves
   in the salvation of God's heart! to be no longer any care to ourselves,
   but know God taking divinest care of us, his own! to be and feel just a
   resting-place for the divine love--a branch of the tree of life for the
   dove to alight upon and fold its wings! to be an open air of love, a
   thoroughfare for the thoughts of God and all holy creatures! to know
   one's self by the reflex action of endless brotherly presence--yearning
   after nothing from any, but ever pouring out love by the natural motion
   of the spirit! to revel in the hundredfold of everything good we may
   have had to leave for his sake--above all, in the unsought love of
   those who love us as we love them--circling us round, bathing us in
   bliss--never reached after, ever received, ever welcomed, altogether
   and divinely precious! to know that God and we mean the same thing,
   that we are in the secret, the child's secret of existence, that we are
   pleasing in the eyes and to the heart of the Father! to live nestling
   at his knee, climbing to his bosom, blessed in the mere and simple
   being which is one with God, and is the outgoing of his will,
   justifying the being by the very facts of the being, by its awareness
   of itself as bliss!--what a self is this to receive again from him for
   that we left, forsook, refused! We left it paltry, low, mean; he took
   up the poor cinder of a consciousness, carried it back to the workshop
   of his spirit, made it a true thing, radiant, clear, fit for eternal
   companying and indwelling, and restored it to our having and holding
   for ever!

   All high things can be spoken only in figures; these figures, having to
   do with matters too high for them, cannot fit intellectually; they can
   be interpreted truly, understood aright, only by such as have the
   spiritual fact in themselves. When we speak of a man and his soul, we
   imply a self and a self, reacting on each other: we cannot divide
   ourselves so; the figure suits but imperfectly. It was never the design
   of the Lord to explain things to our understanding--nor would that in
   the least have helped our necessity; what we require is a means, a
   word, whereby to think with ourselves of high things: that is what a
   true figure, for a figure may be true while far from perfect, will
   always be to us. But the imperfection of his figures cannot lie in
   excess. Be sure that, in dealing with any truth, its symbol, however
   high, must come short of the glorious meaning itself holds. It is the
   low stupidity of an unspiritual nature that would interpret the Lord's
   meaning as less than his symbols. The true soul sees, or will come to
   see, that his words, his figures always represent more than they are
   able to present; for, as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are
   the heavenly things higher than the earthly signs of them, let the
   signs be good as ever sign may be.

   There is no joy belonging to human nature, as God made it, that shall
   not be enhanced a hundredfold to the man who gives up himself--though,
   in so doing, he may seem to be yielding the very essence of life. To
   yield self is to give up grasping at things in their second causes, as
   men call them, but which are merely God's means, and to receive them
   direct from their source--to take them seeing whence they come, and not
   as if they came from nowhere, because no one appears presenting them.
   The careless soul receives the Father's gifts as if it were a way
   things had of dropping into his hand. He thus grants himself a slave,
   dependent on chance and his own blundering endeavour--yet is he ever
   complaining, as if some one were accountable for the checks which meet
   him at every turn. For the good that comes to him, he gives no
   thanks--who is there to thank? at the disappointments that befall him
   he grumbles--there must be some one to blame! He does not think to what
   Power it could be of any consequence, nay, what power would not be
   worse than squandered, to sustain him after his own fashion, in his
   paltry, low--aimed existence! How could a God pour out his being to
   uphold the merest waste of his creatures? No world could ever be built
   or sustained on such an idea. It is the children who shall inherit the
   earth; such as will not be children, cannot possess. The hour is coming
   when all that art, all that science, all that nature, all that animal
   nature, in ennobling subjugation to the higher even as man is subject
   to the Father, can afford, shall be the possession, to the endless
   delight, of the sons and daughters of God: to him to whom he is all in
   all, God is able to give these things; to another he cannot give them,
   for he is unable to receive them who is outside the truth of them.
   Assuredly we are not to love God for the sake of what he can give us;
   nay, it is impossible to love him save because he is our God, and
   altogether good and beautiful; but neither may we forget what the Lord
   does not forget, that, in the end, when the truth is victorious, God
   will answer his creature in the joy of his heart. For what is joy but
   the harmony of the spirit! The good Father made his children to be
   joyful; only, ere they can enter into his joy, they must be like
   himself, ready to sacrifice joy to truth. No promise of such joy is an
   appeal to selfishness. Every reward held out by Christ is a pure thing;
   nor can it enter the soul save as a death to selfishness. The heaven of
   Christ is a loving of all, a forgetting of self, a dwelling of each in
   all, and all in each. Even in our nurseries, a joyful child is rarely
   selfish, generally righteous. It is not selfish to be joyful. What
   power could prevent him who sees the face of God from being
   joyful?--that bliss is his which lies behind all other bliss, without
   which no other bliss could ripen or last. The one bliss of the universe
   is the presence of God--which is simply God being to the man, and felt
   by the man as being, that which in his own nature he is--the indwelling
   power of his life. God must be to his creature what he is in himself,
   for it is by his essential being alone, that by which he is, that he
   can create. His presence is the unintermittent call and response of the
   creative to the created, of the father to the child. Where can be the
   selfishness in being so made happy? It may be deep selfishness to
   refuse to be happy. Is there selfishness in the Lord's seeing of the
   travail of his soul and being satisfied? Selfishness consists in taking
   the bliss from another; to find one's bliss in the bliss of another is
   not selfishness. Joy is not selfishness; and the greater the joy thus
   reaped, the farther is that joy removed from selfishness. The one
   bliss, next to the love of God, is the love of our neighbour. If any
   say, You love because it makes you blessed,' I deny it: We are blessed,
   I say, because we love.' No one could attain to the bliss of loving his
   neighbour who was selfish and sought that bliss from love of himself.
   Love is unselfishness. In the main we love because we cannot help it.
   There is no merit in it: how should there be in any love?--but neither
   is it selfish. There are many who confound righteousness with merit,
   and think there is nothing righteous where there is nothing
   meritorious. If it makes you happy to love,' they say, where is your
   merit? It is only selfishness!' There is no merit, I reply, yet the
   love that is born in us is our salvation from selfishness. It is of the
   very essence of righteousness. Because a thing is joyful, it does not
   follow that I do it for the joy of it; yet when the joy is in others,
   the joy is pure. That certain joys should be joys, is the very denial
   of selfishness. The man would be a demoniacally selfish man, whom love
   itself did not make joyful. It is selfish to enjoy in content beholding
   others lack; even in the highest spiritual bliss, to sit careless of
   others would be selfishness, and the higher the bliss, the worse the
   selfishness; but surely that bliss is right altogether of which a great
   part consists in labour that others may share it. Such, I will not
   doubt--the labour to bring others in to share with us, will be a great
   part of our heavenly content and gladness. The making, the redeeming
   Father will find plenty of like work for his children to do. Dull are
   those, little at least can they have of Christian imagination, who
   think that where all are good, things must be dull. It is because there
   is so little good yet in them, that they know so little of the power or
   beauty of merest life divine. Let such make haste to be true. Interest
   will there be and variety enough, not without pain, in the ministration
   of help to those yet wearily toiling up the heights of truth--perhaps
   yet unwilling to part with miserable self, which cherishing they are
   not yet worth being, or capable of having.

   Some of the things a man may have to forsake in following Christ, he
   has not to forsake because of what they are in themselves. Neither
   nature, art, science, nor fit society, is of those things a man will
   lose in forsaking himself: they are God's, and have no part in the
   world of evil, the false judgments, low wishes, and unrealities
   generally, that make up the conscious life of the self which has to be
   denied: such will never be restored to the man. But in forsaking
   himself to do what God requires of him--his true work in the world,
   that is, a man may find he has to leave some of God's things--not to
   repudiate them, but for the time to forsake them, because they draw his
   mind from the absolute necessities of the true life in himself or in
   others. He may have to deny himself in leaving them--not as bad things,
   but as things for which there is not room until those of paramount
   claim have been so heeded, that these will no longer impede but further
   them. Then he who knows God, will find that knowledge open the door of
   his understanding to all things else. He will become able to behold
   them from within, instead of having to search wearily into them from
   without. This gave to king David more understanding than had all his
   teachers. Then will the things he has had to leave, be restored to him
   a hundred fold. So will it be in the forsaking of friends. To forsake
   them for Christ, is not to forsake them as evil. It is not to cease to
   love them, for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how
   can he love God whom he hath not seen?' it is--not to allow their love
   to cast even a shadow between us and our Master; to be content to lose
   their approval, their intercourse, even their affection, where the
   Master says one thing and they another. It is to learn to love them in
   a far higher, deeper, tenderer, truer way than before--a way which
   keeps all that was genuine in the former way, and loses all that was
   false. We shall love their selves, and disregard our own.

   I do not forget the word of the Lord about hating father and mother: I
   have a glimpse of the meaning of it, but dare not attempt explaining it
   now. It is all against the self--not against the father and mother.

   There is another kind of forsaking that may fall to the lot of some,
   and which they may find very difficult: the forsaking of such notions
   of God and his Christ as they were taught in their youth--which they
   held, nor could help holding, at such time as they began to believe--of
   which they have begun to doubt the truth, but to cast which away seems
   like parting with every assurance of safety.

   There are so-called doctrines long accepted of good people, which how
   any man can love God and hold, except indeed by fast closing of the
   spiritual eyes, I find it hard to understand. If a man care more for
   opinion than for life, it is not worth any other man's while to
   persuade him to renounce the opinions he happens to entertain; he would
   but put other opinions in the same place of honour--a place which can
   belong to no opinion whatever: it matters nothing what such a man may
   or may not believe, for he is not a true man. By holding with a school
   he supposes to be right, he but bolsters himself up with the worst of
   all unbelief--opinion calling itself faith--unbelief calling itself
   religion. But for him who is in earnest about the will of God, it is of
   endless consequence that he should think rightly of God. He cannot come
   close to him, cannot truly know his will, while his notion of him is in
   any point that of a false god. The thing shows itself absurd. If such a
   man seem to himself to be giving up even his former assurance of
   salvation, in yielding such ideas of God as are unworthy of God, he
   must none the less, if he will be true, if he would enter into life,
   take up that cross also. He will come to see that he must follow no
   doctrine, be it true as word of man could state it, but the living
   Truth, the Master himself.

   Good souls many will one day be horrified at the things they now
   believe of God. If they have not thought about them, but given
   themselves to obedience, they may not have done them much harm as yet;
   but they can make little progress in the knowledge of God, while, if
   but passively, holding evil things true of him. If, on the other hand,
   they do think about them, and find in them no obstruction, they must
   indeed be far from anything to be called a true knowledge of God. But
   there are those who find them a terrible obstruction, and yet imagine,
   or at least fear them true: such must take courage to forsake the false
   in any shape, to deny their old selves in the most seemingly sacred of
   prejudices, and follow Jesus, not as he is presented in the tradition
   of the elders, but as he is presented by himself, his apostles, and the
   spirit of truth. There are traditions of men' after Christ as well as
   before him, and far worse, as making of none effect' higher and better
   things; and we have to look to it, how we have learned Christ.
     __________________________________________________________________

  THE TRUTH IN JESUS.

   But ye did not so learn Christ; if so be that ye heard him, and were
   taught in him, even as truth is in Jesus: that ye put away, as
   concerning your former manner of life, the old man, which waxeth
   corrupt after the lusts of deceit.'--Eph. iv. 20-22.

   How have we learned Christ? It ought to be a startling thought, that we
   may have learned him wrong. That must be far worse than not to have
   learned him at all: his place is occupied by a false Christ, hard to
   exorcise! The point is, whether we have learned Christ as he taught
   himself, or as men have taught him who thought they understood, but did
   not understand him. Do we think we know him--with notions fleshly,
   after low, mean human fancies and explanations, or do we indeed know
   him--after the spirit, in our measure as God knows him? The Christian
   religion, throughout its history, has been open to more corrupt
   misrepresentation than ever the Jewish could be, for as it is higher
   and wider, so must it yield larger scope to corruption:--have we
   learned Christ in false statements and corrupted lessons about him, or
   have we learned himself? Nay, true or false, is only our brain full of
   things concerning him, or does he dwell himself in our hearts, a
   learnt, and ever being learnt lesson, the power of our life?

   I have been led to what I am about to say, by a certain utterance of
   one in the front rank of those who assert that we can know nothing of
   the Infinite and Eternal energy from which all things proceed;' and the
   utterance is this:--

   The visiting on Adam's descendants through hundreds of generations
   dreadful penalties for a small transgression which they did not commit;
   the damning of all men who do not avail themselves of an alleged mode
   of obtaining forgiveness, which most men have never heard of; and the
   effecting a reconciliation by sacrificing a son who was perfectly
   innocent, to satisfy the assumed necessity for a propitiatory victim;
   are modes of action which, ascribed to a human ruler, would call forth
   expressions of abhorrence; and the ascription of them to the Ultimate
   Cause of things, even not felt to be full of difficulties, must become
   impossible.'

   I do not quote the passage with the design of opposing either clause of
   its statement, for I entirely agree with it: almost it feels an
   absurdity to say so. Neither do I propose addressing a word to the
   writer of it, or to any who hold with him. The passage bears out what I
   have often said--that I never yet heard a word from one of that way of
   thinking, which even touched anything I hold. One of my earliest
   recollections is of beginning to be at strife with the false system
   here assailed. Such paganism I scorn as heartily in the name of Christ,
   as I scorn it in the name of righteousness. Rather than believe a
   single point involving its spirit, even with the assurance thereby of
   such salvation as the system offers, I would join the ranks of those
   who know nothing,' and set myself with hopeless heart to what I am now
   trying with an infinite hope in the help of the pure originating
   One--to get rid of my miserable mean self, comforted only by the chance
   that death would either leave me without thought more, or reveal
   something of the Ultimate Cause which it would not be an insult to him,
   or a dishonour to his creature, to hold concerning him. Even such a
   chance alone might enable one to live.

   I will not now enquire how it comes that the writer of the passage
   quoted seems to put forward these so-called beliefs as representing
   Christianity, or even the creed of those who call themselves
   Christians, seeing so many, and some of them of higher rank in
   literature than himself, believing in Christ with true hearts, believe
   not one of such things as he has set down, but hold them in at least as
   great abhorrence as he: his answer would probably be, that, even had he
   been aware of such being the fact, what he had to deal with was the
   forming and ruling notions of religious society;--and that such are the
   things held by the bulk of both educated and uneducated calling
   themselves Christians, however many of them may vainly think by an
   explanatory clause here and there to turn away the opprobrium of their
   falsehood, while they remain virtually the same--that such are the
   things so held, I am, alas! unable to deny. It helps nothing, I repeat,
   that many, thinking little on the matter, use quasi mitigated forms to
   express their tenets, and imagine that so they indicate a different
   class of ideas: it would require but a brief examination to be
   convinced that they are not merely analogous--they are ultimately
   identical.

   But had I to do with the writer, I should ask how it comes that,
   refusing these dogmas as abominable, and in themselves plainly false,
   yet knowing that they are attributed to men whose teaching has done
   more to civilize the world than that of any men besides--how it comes
   that, seeing such teaching as this could not have done so, he has not
   taken such pains of enquiry as must surely have satisfied a man of his
   faculty that such was not their teaching; that it was indeed so
   different, and so good, that even the forced companionship of such
   horrible lies as those he has recounted, has been unable to destroy its
   regenerative power. I suppose he will allow that there was a man named
   Jesus, who died for the truth he taught: can he believe he died for
   such alleged truth as that? Would it not be well, I would ask him, to
   enquire what he did really teach, according to the primary sources of
   our knowledge of him? If he answered that the question was
   uninteresting to him, I should have no more to say; nor did I now start
   to speak of him save with the object of making my position plain to
   those to whom I would speak--those, namely, who call themselves
   Christians.

   If of them I should ask, How comes it that such opinions are held
   concerning the Holy One, whose ways you take upon you to set forth?' I
   should be met by most with the answer, Those are the things he tells us
   himself in his word; we have learned them from the Scriptures;' by many
   with explanations which seem to them so to explain the things that they
   are no longer to be reprobated; and by others with the remark that
   better ideas, though largely held, had not yet had time to show
   themselves as the belief of the thinkers of the nation. Of those whose
   presentation of Christian doctrine is represented in the quotation
   above, there are two classes--such as are content it should be so, and
   such to whom those things are grievous, but who do not see how to get
   rid of them. To the latter it may be some little comfort to have one
   who has studied the New Testament for many years and loves it beyond
   the power of speech to express, declare to them his conviction that
   there is not an atom of such teaching in the whole lovely, divine
   utterance; that such things are all and altogether the invention of
   men--honest invention, in part at least, I grant, but yet not true.
   Thank God, we are nowise bound to accept any man's explanation of God's
   ways and God's doings, however good the man may be, if it do not
   commend itself to our conscience. The man's conscience may be a better
   conscience than ours, and his judgment clearer; nothing the more can we
   accept while we cannot see good: to do so would be to sin.

   But it is by no means my object to set forth what I believe or do not
   believe; a time may come for that; my design is now very different
   indeed. I desire to address those who call themselves Christians, and
   expostulate with them thus:--

   Whatever be your opinions on the greatest of all subjects, is it well
   that the impression with regard to Christianity made upon your
   generation, should be that of your opinions, and not of something
   beyond opinion? Is Christianity capable of being represented by
   opinion, even the best? If it were, how many of us are such as God
   would choose to represent his thoughts and intents by our opinions
   concerning them? Who is there of his friends whom any thoughtful man
   would depute to represent his thoughts to his fellows? If you answer,
   The opinions I hold and by which I represent Christianity, are those of
   the Bible,' I reply, that none can understand, still less represent,
   the opinions of another, but such as are of the same mind with
   him--certainly none who mistake his whole scope and intent so far as in
   supposing opinion to be the object of any writer in the Bible. Is
   Christianity a system of articles of belief, let them be correct as
   language can give them? Never. So far am I from believing it, that I
   would rather have a man holding, as numbers of you do, what seem to me
   the most obnoxious untruths, opinions the most irreverent and gross, if
   at the same time he lived in the faith of the Son of God, that is,
   trusted in God as the Son of God trusted in him, than I would have a
   man with every one of whose formulas of belief I utterly coincided, but
   who knew nothing of a daily life and walk with God. The one, holding
   doctrines of devils, is yet a child of God; the other, holding the
   doctrines of Christ and his Apostles, is of the world, yea, of the
   devil.

   How! a man hold the doctrine of devils, and yet be of God?'

   Yes; for to hold a thing with the intellect, is not to believe it. A
   man's real belief is that which he lives by; and that which the man I
   mean lives by, is the love of God, and obedience to his law, so far as
   he has recognized it. Those hideous doctrines are outside of him; he
   thinks they are inside, but no matter; they are not true, and they
   cannot really be inside any good man. They are sadly against him; for
   he cannot love to dwell upon any of those supposed characteristics of
   his God; he acts and lives nevertheless in a measure like the true God.
   What a man believes, is the thing he does. This man would shrink with
   loathing from actions such as he thinks God justified in doing; like
   God, he loves and helps and saves. Will the living God let such a man's
   opinions damn him? No more than he will let the correct opinions of
   another, who lives for himself, save him. The best salvation even the
   latter could give would be but damnation. What I come to and insist
   upon is, that, supposing your theories right, and containing all that
   is to be believed, yet those theories are not what makes you
   Christians, if Christians indeed you are. On the contrary, they are,
   with not a few of you, just what keeps you from being Christians. For
   when you say that, to be saved, a man must hold this or that, then are
   you leaving the living God and his will, and putting trust in some
   notion about him or his will. To make my meaning clearer,--some of you
   say we must trust in the finished work of Christ; or again, our faith
   must be in the merits of Christ--in the atonement he has made--in the
   blood he has shed: all these statements are a simple repudiation of the
   living Lord, in whom we are told to believe, who, by his presence with
   and in us, and our obedience to him, lifts us out of darkness into
   light, leads us from the kingdom of Satan into the glorious liberty of
   the sons of God. No manner or amount of belief about him is the faith
   of the New Testament. With such teaching I have had a lifelong
   acquaintance, and declare it most miserably false. But I do not now
   mean to dispute against it; except the light of the knowledge of the
   glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus make a man sick of his
   opinions, he may hold them to doomsday for me; for no opinion, I
   repeat, is Christianity, and no preaching of any plan of salvation is
   the preaching of the glorious gospel of the living God. Even if your
   plan, your theories, were absolutely true, the holding of them with
   sincerity, the trusting in this or that about Christ, or in anything he
   did or could do, the trusting in anything but himself, his own living
   self, is a delusion. Many will grant this heartily, and yet the moment
   you come to talk with them, you find they insist that to believe in
   Christ is to believe in the atonement, meaning by that only and
   altogether their special theory about the atonement; and when you say
   we must believe in the atoning Christ, and cannot possibly believe in
   any theory concerning the atonement, they go away and denounce you,
   saying, He does not believe in the atonement!' If I explain the
   atonement otherwise than they explain it, they assert that I deny the
   atonement; nor count it of any consequence that I say I believe in the
   atoner with my whole heart, and soul, and strength, and mind. This they
   call contending for the truth! Because I refuse an explanation which is
   not in the New Testament, though they believe it is, because they can
   think of no other, one which seems to me as false in logic as
   detestable in morals, not to say that there is no spirituality in it
   whatever, therefore I am not a Christian! What wonder men such as I
   have quoted refuse the Christianity they suppose such believers' to
   represent! I do not say that with this sad folly may not mingle a
   potent faith in the Lord himself; but I do say that the importance they
   place on theory is even more sadly obstructive to true faith than such
   theories themselves: while the mind is occupied in enquiring,

   Do I believe or feel this thing right?'--the true question is
   forgotten: Have I left all to follow him?' To the man who gives himself
   to the living Lord, every belief will necessarily come right; the Lord
   himself will see that his disciple believe aright concerning him. If a
   man cannot trust him for this, what claim can he make to faith in him?
   It is because he has little or no faith, that he is left clinging to
   preposterous and dishonouring ideas, the traditions of men concerning
   his Father, and neither his teaching nor that of his apostles. The
   living Christ is to them but a shadow; the all but obliterated Christ
   of their theories no soul can thoroughly believe in: the disciple of
   such a Christ rests on his work, or his merits, or his atonement!

   What I insist upon is, that a man's faith shall be in the living,
   loving, ruling, helping Christ, devoted to us as much as ever he was,
   and with all the powers of the Godhead for the salvation of his
   brethren. It is not faith that he did this, that his work wrought
   that--it is faith in the man who did and is doing everything for us
   that will save him: without this he cannot work to heal spiritually,
   any more than he would heal physically, when he was present to the eyes
   of men. Do you ask, What is faith in him?' I answer, The leaving of
   your way, your objects, your self, and the taking of his and him; the
   leaving of your trust in men, in money, in opinion, in character, in
   atonement itself, and doing as he tells you. I can find no words strong
   enough to serve for the weight of this necessity--this obedience. It is
   the one terrible heresy of the church, that it has always been
   presenting something else than obedience as faith in Christ. The work
   of Christ is not the Working Christ, any more than the clothing of
   Christ is the body of Christ. If the woman who touched the hem of his
   garment had trusted in the garment and not in him who wore it, would
   she have been healed? And the reason that so many who believe about
   Christ rather than in him, get the comfort they do, is that, touching
   thus the mere hem of his garment, they cannot help believing a little
   in the live man inside the garment. It is not wonderful that such
   believers should so often be miserable; they lay themselves down to
   sleep with nothing but the skirt of his robe in their hand--a robe too,
   I say, that never was his, only by them is supposed his--when they
   might sleep in peace with the living Lord in their hearts. Instead of
   so knowing Christ that they have him in them saving them, they lie
   wasting themselves in soul-sickening self-examination as to whether
   they are believers, whether they are really trusting in the atonement,
   whether they are truly sorry for their sins--the way to madness of the
   brain, and despair of the heart. Some even ponder the
   imponderable--whether they are of the elect, whether they have an
   interest in the blood shed for sin, whether theirs is a saving
   faith--when all the time the man who died for them is waiting to begin
   to save them from every evil--and first from this self which is
   consuming them with trouble about its salvation; he will set them free,
   and take them home to the bosom of the Father--if only they will mind
   what he says to them--which is the beginning, middle, and end of faith.
   If, instead of searching into the mysteries of corruption in their own
   charnel-houses, they would but awake and arise from the dead, and come
   out into the light which Christ is waiting to give them, he would begin
   at once to fill them with the fulness of God.

   But I do not know how to awake and arise!'

   I will tell you:--Get up, and do something the master tells you; so
   make yourself his disciple at once. Instead of asking yourself whether
   you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have this day done one
   thing because he said, Do it, or once abstained because he said, Do not
   do it. It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe
   in him, if you do not anything he tells you. If you can think of
   nothing he ever said as having had an atom of influence on your doing
   or not doing, you have too good ground to consider yourself no disciple
   of his. Do not, I pray you, worse than waste your time in trying to
   convince yourself that you are his disciple notwithstanding--that for
   this reason or that you still have cause to think you believe in him.
   What though you should succeed in persuading yourself to absolute
   certainty that you are his disciple, if, after all, he say to you, Why
   did you not do the things I told you? Depart from me; I do not know
   you!' Instead of trying to persuade yourself, if the thing be true you
   can make it truer; if it be not true, you can begin at once to make it
   true, to be a disciple of the Living One--by obeying him in the first
   thing you can think of in which you are not obeying him. We must learn
   to obey him in everything, and so must begin somewhere: let it be at
   once, and in the very next thing that lies at the door of our
   conscience! Oh fools and slow of heart, if you think of nothing but
   Christ, and do not set yourselves to do his words! you but build your
   houses on the sand. What have such teachers not to answer for who have
   turned your regard away from the direct words of the Lord himself,
   which are spirit and life, to contemplate plans of salvation tortured
   out of the words of his apostles, even were those plans as true as they
   are false! There is but one plan of salvation, and that is to believe
   in the Lord Jesus Christ; that is, to take him for what he is--our
   master, and his words as if he meant them, which assuredly he did. To
   do his words is to enter into vital relation with him, to obey him is
   the only way to be one with him. The relation between him and us is an
   absolute one; it can nohow begin to live but in obedience: it is
   obedience. There can be no truth, no reality, in any initiation of
   at-one-ment with him, that is not obedience. What! have I the poorest
   notion of a God, and dare think of entering into relations with him,
   the very first of which is not that what he saith, I will do? The thing
   is eternally absurd, and comes of the father of lies. I know what he
   whispers to those to whom such teaching as this is distasteful: It is
   the doctrine of works!' But one word of the Lord humbly heard and
   received will suffice to send all the demons of false theology into the
   abyss. He says the man that does not do the things he tells him, builds
   his house to fall in utter ruin. He instructs his messengers to go and
   baptize all nations, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I
   have commanded you.' Tell me it is faith he requires: do I not know it?
   and is not faith the highest act of which the human mind is capable?
   But faith in what? Faith in what he is, in what he says--a faith which
   can have no existence except in obedience--a faith which is obedience.
   To do what he wishes is to put forth faith in him. For this the
   teaching of men has substituted this or that belief about him, faith in
   this or that supposed design of his manifestation in the flesh. It was
   himself, and God in him that he manifested; but faith in him and his
   father thus manifested, they make altogether secondary to acceptance of
   the paltry contrivance of a juggling morality, which they attribute to
   God and his Christ, imagining it the atonement, and the plan of
   salvation.' Do you put faith in him,' I ask, or in the doctrines and
   commandments of men?' If you say In him,'--Is it then possible,' I
   return, that you do not see that, above all things and all thoughts,
   you are bound to obey him?' Do you not mourn that you cannot trust in
   him as you would, that you find it too hard? Too hard it is for you,
   and too hard it will remain, while the things he tells you to do--the
   things you can do--even those you will not try! How should you be
   capable of trusting in the true one while you are nowise true to him?
   How are you to believe he will do his part by you, while you are not
   such as to do your part by him? How are you to believe while you are
   not faithful? How, I say, should you be capable of trusting in him? The
   very thing to make you able to trust in him, and so receive all things
   from him, you turn your back upon: obedience you decline, or at least
   neglect. You say you do not refuse to obey him? I care not whether you
   refuse or not, while you do not obey. Remember the parable: I go, sir,
   and went not.' What have you done this day because it was the will of
   Christ? Have you dismissed, once dismissed, an anxious thought for the
   morrow? Have you ministered to any needy soul or body, and kept your
   right hand from knowing what your left hand did? Have you begun to
   leave all and follow him? Did you set yourself to judge righteous
   judgment? Are you being ware of covetousness? Have you forgiven your
   enemy? Are you seeking the kingdom of God and his righteousness before
   all other things? Are you hungering and thirsting after righteousness?
   Have you given to some one that asked of you? Tell me something that
   you have done, are doing, or are trying to do because he told you. If
   you do nothing that he says, it is no wonder that you cannot trust in
   him, and are therefore driven to seek refuge in the atonement, as if
   something he had done, and not he himself in his doing were the
   atonement. That is not as you understand it? What does it matter how
   you understand, or what you understand, so long as you are not of one
   mind with the Truth, so long as you and God are not at one, do not
   atone together? How should you understand? Knowing that you do not heed
   his word, why should I heed your explanation of it? You do not his
   will, and so you cannot understand him; you do not know him, that is
   why you cannot trust in him. You think your common sense enough to let
   you know what he means? Your common sense ought to be enough to know
   itself unequal to the task. It is the heart of the child that alone can
   understand the Father. Would you have me think you guilty of the sin
   against the Holy Ghost--that you understand Jesus Christ and yet will
   not obey him? That were too dreadful. I believe you do not understand
   him. No man can do yet what he tells him aright--but are you trying?
   Obedience is not perfection, but trying. You count him a hard master,
   and will not stir. Do you suppose he ever gave a commandment knowing it
   was of no use for it could not be done? He tells us a thing knowing
   that we must do it, or be lost; that not his Father himself could save
   us but by getting us at length to do everything he commands, for not
   otherwise can we know life, can we learn the holy secret of divine
   being. He knows that you can try, and that in your trying and failing
   he will be able to help you, until at length you shall do the will of
   God even as he does it himself. He takes the will in the imperfect
   deed, and makes the deed at last perfect. Correctest notions without
   obedience are worthless. The doing of the will of God is the way to
   oneness with God, which alone is salvation. Sitting at the gate of
   heaven, sitting on the footstool of the throne itself, yea, clasping
   the knees of the Father, you could not be at peace, except in their
   every vital movement, in every their smallest point of consciousness,
   your heart, your soul, your mind, your brain, your body, were one with
   the living God. If you had one brooding thought that was not a joy in
   him, you would not be at peace; if you had one desire you could not
   leave absolutely to his will you would not be at peace; you would not
   be saved, therefore could not feel saved. God, all and in all, ours to
   the fulfilling of our very being, is the religion of the perfect,
   son-hearted Lord Christ.

   Well do I know it is faith that saves us--but not faith in any work of
   God--it is faith in God himself. If I did not believe God as good as
   the tenderest human heart, the fairest, the purest, the most unselfish
   human heart could imagine him, yea, an infinitude better, higher than
   we as the heavens are higher than the earth--believe it, not as a
   proposition, or even as a thing I was convinced of, but with the
   responsive condition and being of my whole nature; if I did not feel
   every fibre of heart and brain and body safe with him because he is the
   Father who made me that I am--I would not be saved, for this faith is
   salvation; it is God and the man one. God and man together, the vital
   energy flowing unchecked from the creator into his creature--that is
   the salvation of the creature. But the poorest faith in the living God,
   the God revealed in Christ Jesus, if it be vital, true, that is
   obedient, is the beginning of the way to know him, and to know him is
   eternal life. If you mean by faith anything of a different kind, that
   faith will not save you. A faith, for instance, that God does not
   forgive me because he loves me, but because he loves Jesus Christ,
   cannot save me, because it is a falsehood against God: if the thing
   were true, such a gospel would be the preaching of a God that was not
   love, therefore in whom was no salvation, a God to know whom could not
   be eternal life. Such a faith would damn, not save a man; for it would
   bind him to a God who was anything but perfect. Such assertions going
   by the name of Christianity, are nothing but the poor remnants of
   paganism; and it is only with that part of our nature not yet Christian
   that we are able to believe them--so far indeed as it is possible a lie
   should be believed. We must forsake all our fears and distrusts for
   Christ. We must receive his teaching heartily, nor let the
   interpretation of it attributed to his apostles make us turn aside from
   it. I say interpretation attributed to them; for what they teach is
   never against what Christ taught, though very often the exposition of
   it is--and that from no fault in the apostles, but from the grievous
   fault of those who would understand, and even explain, rather than
   obey. We may be sure of this, that no man will be condemned for any sin
   that is past; that, if he be condemned, it will be because he would not
   come to the light when the light came to him; because he would not
   cease to do evil and learn to do well; because he hid his unbelief in
   the garment of a false faith, and would not obey; because he imputed to
   himself a righteousness that was not his; because he preferred
   imagining himself a worthy person, to confessing himself everywhere in
   the wrong, and repenting. We may be sure also of this, that, if a man
   becomes the disciple of Christ, he will not leave him in ignorance as
   to what he has to believe; he shall know the truth of everything it is
   needful for him to understand. If we do what he tells us, his light
   will go up in our hearts. Till then we could not understand even if he
   explained to us. If you cannot trust him to let you know what is right,
   but think you must hold this or that before you can come to him, then I
   justify your doubts in what you call your worst times, but which I
   suspect are your best times in which you come nearest to the
   truth--those, namely, in which you fear you have no faith.

   So long as a man will not set himself to obey the word spoken, the word
   written, the word printed, the word read, of the Lord Christ, I would
   not take the trouble to convince him concerning the most obnoxious
   doctrines that they were false as hell. It is those who would fain
   believe, but who by such doctrines are hindered, whom I would help.
   Disputation about things but hides the living Christ who alone can
   teach the truth, who is the truth, and the knowledge of whom is life; I
   write for the sake of those whom the false teaching that claims before
   all to be true has driven away from God--as well it might, for the God
   so taught is not a God worthy to be believed in. A stick, or a stone,
   or a devil, is all that some of our brethren of mankind have to believe
   in: he who believes in a God not altogether unselfish and good, a God
   who does not do all he can for his creatures, belongs to the same
   class; his is not the God who made the heaven and the earth and the sea
   and the fountains of water--not the God revealed in Christ. If a man
   see in God any darkness at all, and especially if he defend that
   darkness, attempting to justify it as one who respects the person of
   God, I cannot but think his blindness must have followed his mockery of
   Lord! Lord!' Surely, if he had been strenuously obeying Jesus, he would
   ere now have received the truth that God is light, and in him is no
   darkness--a truth which is not acknowledged by calling the darkness
   attributed to him light, and the candle of the Lord in the soul of man
   darkness. It is one thing to believe that God can do nothing wrong,
   quite another to call whatever presumption may attribute to him right.

   The whole secret of progress is the doing of the thing we know. There
   is no other way of progress in the spiritual life; no other way of
   progress in the understanding of that life: only as we do, can we know.

   Is there then anything you will not leave for Christ? You cannot know
   him--and yet he is the Truth, the one thing alone that can be known! Do
   you not care to be imperfect? would you rather keep this or that, with
   imperfection, than part with it to be perfect? You cannot know Christ,
   for the very principle of his life was the simple absolute relation of
   realities; his one idea was to be a perfect child to his Father. He who
   will not part with all for Christ, is not worthy of him, and cannot
   know him; and the Lord is true, and cannot acknowledge him: how could
   he receive to his house, as one of his kind, a man who prefers
   something to his Father; a man who is not for God; a man who will
   strike a bargain with God, and say, I will give up so much, if thou
   wilt spare me'! To yield all to him who has only made us and given us
   everything, yea his very self by life and by death, such a man counts
   too much. His conduct says, I never asked thee to do so much for me,
   and I cannot make the return thou demandest.' The man will have to be
   left to himself. He must find what it is to be without God! Those who
   know God, or have but begun to catch a far-off glimmer of his
   gloriousness, of what he is, regard life as insupportable save God be
   the All in all, the first and the last.

   To let their light shine, not to force on them their interpretations of
   God's designs, is the duty of Christians towards their fellows. If you
   who set yourselves to explain the theory of Christianity, had set
   yourselves instead to do the will of the Master, the one object for
   which the Gospel was preached to you, how different would now be the
   condition of that portion of the world with which you come into
   contact! Had you given yourselves to the understanding of his word that
   you might do it, and not to the quarrying from it of material wherewith
   to buttress your systems, in many a heart by this time would the name
   of the Lord be loved where now it remains unknown. The word of life
   would then by you have been held out indeed. Men, undeterred by your
   explanations of Christianity, for you would not be forcing them on
   their acceptance, and attracted by your behaviour, would be saying to
   each other, as Moses said to himself when he saw the bush that burned
   with fire and was not consumed, I will now turn aside and see this
   great sight!' they would be drawing nigh to behold how these Christians
   loved one another, and how just and fair they were to every one that
   had to do with them! to note that their goods were the best, their
   weight surest, their prices most reasonable, their word most certain!
   that in their families was neither jealousy nor emulation! that mammon
   was not there worshipped! that in their homes selfishness was neither
   the hidden nor the openly ruling principle; that their children were as
   diligently taught to share, as some are to save, or to lay out only
   upon self--their mothers more anxious lest a child should hoard than
   lest he should squander; that in no house of theirs was religion one
   thing, and the daily life another; that the ecclesiastic did not think
   first of his church, nor the peer of his privileges.

   What do I hear you say?--How then shall the world go on?' The Lord's
   world will go on, and that without you; the devil's world will go on,
   and that with you. The objection is but another and overwhelming proof
   of your unbelief. Either you do not believe the word the Lord
   spake--that, if we seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness,
   all things needful will be added to us; or what he undertakes does not
   satisfy you; it is not enough; you want more; you prefer the offers of
   Mammon. You are nowise anxious to be saved from the too-much that is a
   snare; you want what you call a fortune--the freedom of the world. You
   would not live under such restrictions as the Lord might choose to lay
   upon you if he saw that something might be made of you precious in his
   sight! You would inherit the earth, and not by meekness; you would have
   the life of this world sweet, come of the life eternal, the life that
   God shares with you, what may: so much as that comes to, you would
   gladly leave God to look after, if only you might be sure of not
   sharing with the rich man when you die. But you find that, unable to
   trust him for this world, neither can you trust him for the world to
   come. Refusing to obey him in your life, how can you trust him for your
   life? Hence the various substitutes you seek for faith in him: you
   would hold him to his word, bind him by his promises, appeal to the
   atonement, to the satisfaction made to his justice, as you call
   it--while you will take no trouble to fulfil the absolutely reasonable
   and necessary condition, yea, morally and spiritually imperative
   condition--condition and means in one--on which he offers, and through
   which alone he can offer you deliverance from the burden of life into
   the strength and glory of life--that you shall be true, and to him
   obedient children. You say Christ has satisfied the law,' but you will
   not satisfy him! He says, Come unto me,' and you will not rise and go
   to him. You say, Lord I believe; help mine unbelief,' but when he says,
   Leave everything behind you, and be as I am towards God, and you shall
   have peace and rest,' you turn away, muttering about figurative
   language. If you had been true, had been living the life, had been
   Christians indeed, you would, however little, have drawn the world
   after you. In your churches you would be receiving truest nourishment,
   yea strength to live--thinking far less of serving God on the Sunday,
   and far more of serving your neighbour in the week. The sociable vile,
   the masterful rich, the deceitful trader, the ambitious poor, whom you
   have attracted to your communities with the offer of a salvation other
   than deliverance from sin, would not be lording it over them and
   dragging them down; they would be the cleaner and the stronger for
   their absence; while the publicans and the sinners would have been
   drawn instead, and turned into true men and women; and the Israelite
   indeed, who is yet more repelled by your general worldliness than by
   your misrepresentations of God, showing him selfish like yourselves who
   is the purity of the creation--the Israelite in whom is no guile would
   have hastened to the company of the loving men and true, eager to learn
   what it was that made them so good, so happy, so unselfish, so free of
   care, so ready to die, so willing to live, so hopeful, so helpful, so
   careless to possess, so undeferential to possession. Finding you to
   hold, from the traditional force of false teaching, such things as you
   do, he would have said, No! such beliefs can never account for such
   mighty results!' You would have answered, Search the Scriptures and
   see.' He would have searched, and found--not indeed the things you
   imagine there, but things infinitely better and higher, things that
   indeed account for the result he wondered at; he would have found such
   truth as he who has found will hold for ever as the only gladness of
   his being. There you would have had your reward for being true
   Christians in spite of the evil doctrines you had been taught and
   teaching: you would have been taught in return the truth of the matter
   by him whom your true Christianity had enticed to itself, and sent to
   the fountainhead free of the prejudices that disabled your judgment.
   Thus delivered from the false notions which could not fail to have
   stunted your growth hitherto, how rapid would it not have become!

   If any of you tell me my doctrine is presumptuous, that it is contrary
   to what is taught in the New Testament, and what the best of men have
   always believed, I will not therefore proceed to defend even my
   beliefs, the principles on which I try to live--how much less my
   opinions! I appeal to you instead, whether or not I have spoken the
   truth concerning our paramount obligation to do the word of Christ. If
   you answer that I have not, I have nothing more to say; there is no
   other ground on which we can meet. But if you allow that it is a prime,
   even if you do not allow it the prime duty, then what I insist upon is,
   that you should do it, so and not otherwise recommending the knowledge
   of him. I do not attempt to change your opinions; if they are wrong,
   the obedience alone on which I insist can enable you to set them right;
   I only pray you to obey, and assert that thus only can you fit
   yourselves for understanding the mind of Christ. I say none but he who
   does right, can think right; you cannot know Christ to be right until
   you do as he does, as he tells you to do; neither can you set him
   forth, until you know him as he means himself to be known, that is, as
   he is. If you are serving and trusting in Mammon, how can you know the
   living God who, the source of life, is alone to be trusted in! If you
   do not admit that it is the duty of a man to do the word of Christ, or
   if, admitting the duty, you yet do not care to perform it, why should I
   care to convince you that my doctrine is right? What is it to any true
   man what you think of his doctrine? What does it matter what you think
   of any doctrine? If I could convince your judgment, your hearts
   remaining as they are, I should but add to your condemnation. The true
   heart must see at once, that, however wrong I may or may not be in
   other things, at least I am right in this, that Jesus must be obeyed,
   and at once obeyed, in the things he did say: it will not long imagine
   to obey him in things he did not say. If a man do what is unpleasing to
   Christ, believing it his will, he shall yet gain thereby, for it gives
   the Lord a hold of him, which he will use; but before he can reach
   liberty, he must be delivered from that falsehood. For him who does not
   choose to see that Christ must be obeyed, he must be left to the
   teaching of the Father, who brings all that hear and learn of him to
   Christ, that they may learn what he is who has taught them and brought
   them. He will leave no man to his own way, however much he may prefer
   it. The Lord did not die to provide a man with the wretched heaven he
   may invent for himself, or accept invented for him by others; he died
   to give him life, and bring him to the heaven of the Father's peace;
   the children must share in the essential bliss of the Father and the
   Son. This is and has been the Father's work from the beginning--to
   bring us into the home of his heart, where he shares the glories of
   life with the Living One, in whom was born life to light men back to
   the original life. This is our destiny; and however a man may refuse,
   he will find it hard to fight with God--useless to kick against the
   goads of his love. For the Father is goading him, or will goad him, if
   needful, into life by unrest and trouble; hell-fire will have its turn
   if less will not do: can any need it more than such as will neither
   enter the kingdom of heaven themselves, nor suffer them to enter it
   that would? The old race of the Pharisees is by no means extinct; they
   were St Paul's great trouble, and are yet to be found in every
   religious community under the sun.

   The one only thing truly to reconcile all differences is, to walk in
   the light. So St Paul teaches us in his epistle to the Philippians, the
   third chapter and sixteenth verse. After setting forth the loftiest
   idea of human endeavour in declaring the summit of his own aspiration,
   he says--not, This must be your endeavour also, or you cannot be
   saved;' but, If in anything ye be otherwise minded, God shall reveal
   even this unto you. Nevertheless whereto we have already attained, let
   us walk by that same.' Observe what widest conceivable scope is given
   by the apostle to honest opinion, even in things of grandest
   import!--the one only essential point with him is, that whereto we have
   attained, what we have seen to be true, we walk by that. In such
   walking, and in such walking only, love will grow, truth will grow; the
   soul, then first in its genuine element and true relation towards God,
   will see into reality that was before but a blank to it; and he who has
   promised to teach, will teach abundantly. Faster and faster will the
   glory of the Lord dawn upon the hearts and minds of his people so
   walking--then his people indeed; fast and far will the knowledge of him
   spread, for truth of action, both preceding and following truth of
   word, will prepare the way before him. The man walking in that whereto
   he has attained, will be able to think aright; the man who does not
   think right, is unable because he has not been walking right; only when
   he begins to do the thing he knows, does he begin to be able to think
   aright; then God comes to him in a new and higher way, and works along
   with the spirit he has created. The soul, without its heaven above its
   head, without its life-breath around it, without its love-treasure in
   its heart, without its origin one with it and bound up in it, without
   its true self and originating life, cannot think to any real
   purpose--nor ever would to all eternity. When man joins with God, then
   is all impotence and discord cast out. Until then, there can be but
   jar; God is in contest with the gates of hell that open in the man, and
   can but hold his own; when the man joins him, then is Satan foiled. For
   then first nature receives her necessity: no such necessity has she as
   this law of all laws--that God and man are one. Until they begin to be
   one in the reality as in the divine idea, in the flower as in the root,
   in the finishing as in the issuing creation, nothing can go right with
   the man, and God can have no rest from his labour in him. As the
   greatest orbs in heaven are drawn by the least, God himself must be
   held in divine disquiet until every one of his family be brought home
   to his heart, to be one with him in a unity too absolute, profound,
   far-reaching, fine, and intense, to be understood by any but the God
   from whom it comes, yet to be guessed at by the soul from the
   unspeakableness of its delight when at length it is with the only that
   can be its own, the one that it can possess, the one that can possess
   it. For God is the heritage of the soul in the ownness of origin; man
   is the offspring of his making will, of his life; God himself is his
   birthplace; God is the self that makes the soul able to say I too, I
   myself. This absolute unspeakable bliss of the creature is that for
   which the Son died, for which the Father suffered with him. Then only
   is life itself; then only is it right, is it one; then only is it as
   designed and necessitated by the eternal life-outgiving Life.

   Whereto then we have attained let us walk by that same!

   END OF THE SECOND SERIES.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                    Indexes
     __________________________________________________________________

Index of Scripture References

   Job

   [1]14:13-15

   Isaiah

   [2]6:9-10

   Matthew

   [3]5:26   [4]13:14-15   [5]19:21

   Mark

   [6]8:21   [7]10:10   [8]10:24

   Luke

   [9]9:23-24   [10]18:1   [11]18:1

   John

   [12]10:10

   Romans

   [13]8:15

   Ephesians

   [14]4:20-22

   Philippians

   [15]3:2

   Revelation

   [16]1:17-18
     __________________________________________________________________

Index of Scripture Commentary

   Job

   [17]14:13-15

   Matthew

   [18]5:26   [19]19:21

   Mark

   [20]8:21   [21]10:24

   Luke

   [22]9:23-24   [23]18:1   [24]18:1

   John

   [25]10:10

   Romans

   [26]8:15

   Ephesians

   [27]4:20-22

   Revelation

   [28]1:17-18
     __________________________________________________________________

            This document is from the Christian Classics Ethereal
               Library at Calvin College, http://www.ccel.org,
                   generated on demand from ThML source.

References

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