SALVATION FROM SIN.
and thou shalt call his
name Jesus; for he shall save his people from their
sins. Matthew .
I would help some to understand what
Jesus came from the home of our Father to be to us
and do for us. Everything in the world is more
or less misunderstood at first: we have to learn
what it is, and come at length to see that it must
be so, that it could not be otherwise. Then we
know it; and we never know a thing really until
we know it thus.
I presume there is scarce a human
being who, resolved to speak openly, would not confess
to having something that plagued him, something from
which he would gladly be free, something rendering
it impossible for him, at the moment, to regard life
as an altogether good thing. Most men, I presume,
imagine that, free of such and such things antagonistic,
life would be an unmingled satisfaction, worthy of
being prolonged indefinitely. The causes of their
discomfort are of all kinds, and the degrees of it
reach from simple uneasiness to a misery such as makes
annihilation the highest hope of the sufferer who can
persuade himself of its possibility. Perhaps
the greater part of the energy of this world’s
life goes forth in the endeavour to rid itself of discomfort.
Some, to escape it, leave their natural surroundings
behind them, and with strong and continuous effort
keep rising in the social scale, to discover at every
new ascent fresh trouble, as they think, awaiting
them, whereas in truth they have brought the trouble
with them. Others, making haste to be rich, are
slow to find out that the poverty of their souls,
none the less that their purses are filling, will yet
keep them unhappy. Some court endless change,
nor know that on themselves the change must pass that
will set them free. Others expand their souls
with knowledge, only to find that content will not
dwell in the great house they have built. To
number the varieties of human endeavour to escape
discomfort would be to enumerate all the modes of such
life as does not know how to live. All seek the
thing whose defect appears the cause of their
misery, and is but the variable occasion of
it, the cause of the shape it takes, not of the misery
itself; for, when one apparent cause is removed, another
at once succeeds. The real cause of his trouble
is a something the man has not perhaps recognized
as even existent; in any case he is not yet acquainted
with its true nature.
However absurd the statement may appear
to one who has not yet discovered the fact for himself,
the cause of every man’s discomfort is evil,
moral evil first of all, evil in himself,
his own sin, his own wrongness, his own unrightness;
and then, evil in those he loves: with this latter
I have not now to deal; the only way to get rid of
it, is for the man to get rid of his own sin.
No special sin may be recognizable as having caused
this or that special physical discomfort which
may indeed have originated with some ancestor; but
evil in ourselves is the cause of its continuance,
the source of its necessity, and the preventive of
that patience which would soon take from it, or at
least blunt its sting. The evil is essentially
unnecessary, and passes with the attainment of the
object for which it is permitted namely,
the development of pure will in man; the suffering
also is essentially unnecessary, but while the evil
lasts, the suffering, whether consequent or merely
concomitant, is absolutely necessary. Foolish
is the man, and there are many such men, who would
rid himself or his fellows of discomfort by setting
the world right, by waging war on the evils around
him, while he neglects that integral part of the world
where lies his business, his first business namely,
his own character and conduct. Were it possible an
absurd supposition that the world should
thus be righted from the outside, it would yet be
impossible for the man who had contributed to the work,
remaining what he was, ever to enjoy the perfection
of the result; himself not in tune with the organ
he had tuned, he must imagine it still a distracted,
jarring instrument. The philanthropist who regards
the wrong as in the race, forgetting that the race
is made up of conscious and wrong individuals, forgets
also that wrong is always generated in and done by
an individual; that the wrongness exists in the individual,
and by him is passed over, as tendency, to the race;
and that no evil can be cured in the race, except
by its being cured in its individuals: tendency
is not absolute evil; it is there that it may be resisted,
not yielded to. There is no way of making three
men right but by making right each one of the three;
but a cure in one man who repents and turns, is a
beginning of the cure of the whole human race.
Even if a man’s suffering be
a far inheritance, for the curing of which by faith
and obedience this life would not be sufficiently long,
faith and obedience will yet render it endurable to
the man, and overflow in help to his fellow-sufferers.
The groaning body, wrapt in the garment of hope, will,
with outstretched neck, look for its redemption, and
endure.
The one cure for any organism, is
to be set right to have all its parts brought
into harmony with each other; the one comfort is to
know this cure in process. Rightness alone is
cure. The return of the organism to its true
self, is its only possible ease. To free a man
from suffering, he must be set right, put in health;
and the health at the root of man’s being, his
rightness, is to be free from wrongness, that is,
from sin. A man is right when there is no wrong
in him. The wrong, the evil is in him; he must
be set free from it. I do not mean set free from
the sins he has done: that will follow; I mean
the sins he is doing, or is capable of doing; the
sins in his being which spoil his nature the
wrongness in him the evil he consents to;
the sin he is, which makes him do the sin he does.
To save a man from his sins, is to
say to him, in sense perfect and eternal, ’Rise
up and walk. Be at liberty in thy essential being.
Be free as the son of God is free.’ To
do this for us, Jesus was born, and remains born to
all the ages. When misery drives a man to call
out to the source of his life, and I take
the increasing outcry against existence as a sign
of the growth of the race toward a sense of the need
of regeneration the answer, I think, will
come in a quickening of his conscience. This
earnest of the promised deliverance may not, in all
probability will not be what the man desires; he will
want only to be rid of his suffering; but that he
cannot have, save in being delivered from its essential
root, a thing infinitely worse than any suffering it
can produce. If he will not have that deliverance,
he must keep his suffering. Through chastisement
he will take at last the only way that leads into
the liberty of that which is and must be. There
can be no deliverance but to come out of his evil
dream into the glory of God.
It is true that Jesus came, in delivering
us from our sins, to deliver us also from the painful
consequences of our sins. But these consequences
exist by the one law of the universe, the true will
of the Perfect. That broken, that disobeyed by
the creature, disorganization renders suffering inevitable;
it is the natural consequence of the unnatural and,
in the perfection of God’s creation, the result
is curative of the cause; the pain at least tends
to the healing of the breach. The Lord never
came to deliver men from the consequences of their
sins while yet those sins remained: that would
be to cast out of window the medicine of cure while
yet the man lay sick; to go dead against the very
laws of being. Yet men, loving their sins, and
feeling nothing of their dread hatefulness, have,
consistently with their low condition, constantly
taken this word concerning the Lord to mean that he
came to save them from the punishment of their sins.
The idea the miserable fancy rather has
terribly corrupted the preaching of the gospel.
The message of the good news has not been truly delivered.
Unable to believe in the forgiveness of their Father
in heaven, imagining him not at liberty to forgive,
or incapable of forgiving forthright; not really believing
him God our Saviour, but a God bound, either in his
own nature or by a law above him and compulsory upon
him, to exact some recompense or satisfaction for
sin, a multitude of teaching men have taught their
fellows that Jesus came to bear our punishment and
save us from hell. They have represented a result
as the object of his mission the said result
nowise to be desired by true man save as consequent
on the gain of his object. The mission of Jesus
was from the same source and with the same object
as the punishment of our sins. He came to work
along with our punishment. He came to side with
it, and set us free from our sins. No man is safe
from hell until he is free from his sins; but a man
to whom his sins, that is the evil things in him,
are a burden, while he may indeed sometimes feel as
if he were in hell, will soon have forgotten that
ever he had any other hell to think of than that of
his sinful condition. For to him his sins are
hell; he would go to the other hell to be free of them;
free of them, hell itself would be endurable to him.
For hell is God’s and not the devil’s.
Hell is on the side of God and man, to free the child
of God from the corruption of death. Not one
soul will ever be redeemed from hell but by being
saved from his sins, from the evil in him. If
hell be needful to save him, hell will blaze, and
the worm will writhe and bite, until he takes refuge
in the will of the Father. ’Salvation from
hell, is salvation as conceived by such to whom hell
and not evil is the terror.’ But if even
for dread of hell a poor soul seek the Father, he
will be heard of him in his terror, and, taught of
him to seek the immeasurably greater gift, will in
the greater receive the less.
There is another important misapprehension
of the words of the messengers of the good tidings that
they threaten us with punishment because of the sins
we have committed, whereas their message is of forgiveness,
not of vengeance; of deliverance, not of evil to come.
Not for anything he has committed do they threaten
a man with the outer darkness. Not for any or
all of his sins that are past shall a man be condemned;
not for the worst of them needs he dread remaining
unforgiven. The sin he dwells in, the sin he will
not come out of, is the sole ruin of a man. His
present, his live sins those pervading his
thoughts and ruling his conduct; the sins he keeps
doing, and will not give up; the sins he is called
to abandon, and clings to; the same sins which are
the cause of his misery, though he may not know it these
are they for which he is even now condemned.
It is true the memory of the wrongs we have done is,
or will become very bitter; but not for those is condemnation;
and if that in our character which made them possible
were abolished, remorse would lose its worst bitterness
in the hope of future amends. ’This is
the condemnation, that light is come into the world,
and men loved darkness rather than light, because their
deeds were evil.’
It is the indwelling badness, ready
to produce bad actions, that we need to be delivered
from. Against this badness if a man will not strive,
he is left to commit evil and reap the consequences.
To be saved from these consequences, would be no deliverance;
it would be an immediate, ever deepening damnation.
It is the evil in our being no essential
part of it, thank God! the miserable fact
that the very child of God does not care for his father
and will not obey him, causing us to desire wrongly,
act wrongly, or, where we try not to act wrongly, yet
making it impossible for us not to feel wrongly this
is what he came to deliver us from; not
the things we have done, but the possibility of doing
such things any more. With the departure of this
possibility, and with the hope of confession hereafter
to those we have wronged, will depart also the power
over us of the evil things we have done, and so we
shall be saved from them also. The bad that lives
in us, our evil judgments, our unjust desires, our
hate and pride and envy and greed and self-satisfaction these
are the souls of our sins, our live sins, more terrible
than the bodies of our sins, namely the deeds we do,
inasmuch as they not only produce these loathsome
things, but make us loathsome as they. Our wrong
deeds are our dead works; our evil thoughts are our
live sins. These, the essential opposites of faith
and love, the sins that dwell and work in us, are
the sins from which Jesus came to deliver us.
When we turn against them and refuse to obey them,
they rise in fierce insistence, but the same moment
begin to die. We are then on the Lord’s
side, as he has always been on ours, and he begins
to deliver us from them.
Anything in you, which, in your own
child, would make you feel him not so pleasant as
you would have him, is something wrong. This may
mean much to one, little or nothing to another.
Things in a child which to one parent would not seem
worth minding, would fill another with horror.
After his moral development, where the one parent would
smile, the other would look aghast, perceiving both
the present evil, and the serpent-brood to follow.
But as the love of him who is love, transcends ours
as the heavens are higher than the earth, so must he
desire in his child infinitely more than the most
jealous love of the best mother can desire in hers.
He would have him rid of all discontent, all fear,
all grudging, all bitterness in word or thought, all
gauging and measuring of his own with a different
rod from that he would apply to another’s.
He will have no curling of the lip; no indifference
in him to the man whose service in any form he uses;
no desire to excel another, no contentment at gaining
by his loss. He will not have him receive the
smallest service without gratitude; would not hear
from him a tone to jar the heart of another, a word
to make it ache, be the ache ever so transient.
From such, as from all other sins, Jesus was born to
deliver us; not, primarily, or by itself, from the
punishment of any of them. When all are gone,
the holy punishment will have departed also. He
came to make us good, and therein blessed children.
One master-sin is at the root of all
the rest. It is no individual action, or anything
that comes of mood, or passion; it is the non-recognition
by the man, and consequent inactivity in him, of the
highest of all relations, that relation which is the
root and first essential condition of every other
true relation of or in the human soul. It is
the absence in the man of harmony with the being whose
thought is the man’s existence, whose word is
the man’s power of thought. It is true
that, being thus his offspring, God, as St Paul affirms,
cannot be far from any one of us: were we not
in closest contact of creating and created, we could
not exist; as we have in us no power to be, so have
we none to continue being; but there is a closer contact
still, as absolutely necessary to our well-being and
highest existence, as the other to our being at all,
to the mere capacity of faring well or ill. For
the highest creation of God in man is his will, and
until the highest in man meets the highest in God,
their true relation is not yet a spiritual fact.
The flower lies in the root, but the root is not the
flower. The relation exists, but while one of
the parties neither knows, loves, nor acts upon it,
the relation is, as it were, yet unborn. The
highest in man is neither his intellect nor his imagination
nor his reason; all are inferior to his will, and indeed,
in a grand way, dependent upon it: his will must
meet God’s a will distinct
from God’s, else were no harmony possible
between them. Not the less, therefore, but the
more, is all God’s. For God creates in the
man the power to will His will. It may cost God
a suffering man can never know, to bring the man to
the point at which he will will His will; but when
he is brought to that point, and declares for the truth,
that is, for the will of God, he becomes one with God,
and the end of God in the man’s creation, the
end for which Jesus was born and died, is gained.
The man is saved from his sins, and the universe flowers
yet again in his redemption. But I would not
be supposed, from what I have said, to imagine the
Lord without sympathy for the sorrows and pains which
reveal what sin is, and by means of which he would
make men sick of sin. With everything human he
sympathizes. Evil is not human; it is the defect
and opposite of the human; but the suffering that follows
it is human, belonging of necessity to the human that
has sinned: while it is by cause of sin, suffering
is for the sinner, that he may be delivered
from his sin. Jesus is in himself aware of every
human pain. He feels it also. In him too
it is pain. With the energy of tenderest love
he wills his brothers and sisters free, that he may
fill them to overflowing with that essential thing,
joy. For that they were indeed created.
But the moment they exist, truth becomes the first
thing, not happiness; and he must make them true.
Were it possible, however, for pain to continue after
evil was gone, he would never rest while one ache
was yet in the world. Perfect in sympathy, he
feels in himself, I say, the tortured presence of
every nerve that lacks its repose. The man may
recognize the evil in him only as pain; he may know
little and care nothing about his sins; yet is the
Lord sorry for his pain. He cries aloud, ’Come
unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and
I will give you rest.’ He does not say,
’Come unto me, all ye that feel the burden of
your sins;’ he opens his arms to all weary enough
to come to him in the poorest hope of rest. Right
gladly would he free them from their misery but
he knows only one way: he will teach them to be
like himself, meek and lowly, bearing with gladness
the yoke of his father’s will. This is
the one, the only right, the only possible way of freeing
them from their sins, the cause of their unrest.
With them the weariness comes first; with him the
sins: there is but one cure for both the
will of the Father. That which is his joy will
be their deliverance! He might indeed, it may
be, take from them the human, send them down to some
lower stage of being, and so free them from suffering but
that must be either a descent toward annihilation,
or a fresh beginning to grow up again toward the region
of suffering they have left; for that which is not
growing must at length die out of creation. The
disobedient and selfish would fain in the hell of
their hearts possess the liberty and gladness that
belong to purity and love, but they cannot have them;
they are weary and heavy-laden, both with what they
are, and because of what they were made for but are
not. The Lord knows what they need; they know
only what they want. They want ease; he knows
they need purity. Their very existence is an
evil, of which, but for his resolve to purify them,
their maker must rid his universe. How can he
keep in his sight a foul presence? Must the creator
send forth his virtue to hold alive a thing that will
be evil a thing that ought not to be, that
has no claim but to cease? The Lord himself would
not live save with an existence absolutely good.
It may be my reader will desire me
to say how the Lord will deliver him from his
sins. That is like the lawyer’s ‘Who
is my neighbour?’ The spirit of such a mode
of receiving the offer of the Lord’s deliverance,
is the root of all the horrors of a corrupt theology,
so acceptable to those who love weak and beggarly
hornbooks of religion. Such questions spring
from the passion for the fruit of the tree of knowledge,
not the fruit of the tree of life. Men would
understand: they do not care to obey, understand
where it is impossible they should understand save
by obeying. They would search into the work of
the Lord instead of doing their part in it thus
making it impossible both for the Lord to go on with
his work, and for themselves to become capable of seeing
and understanding what he does. Instead of immediately
obeying the Lord of life, the one condition upon which
he can help them, and in itself the beginning of their
deliverance, they set themselves to question their
unenlightened intellects as to his plans for their
deliverance and not merely how he means
to effect it, but how he can be able to effect it.
They would bind their Samson until they have scanned
his limbs and thews. Incapable of understanding
the first motions of freedom in themselves, they proceed
to interpret the riches of his divine soul in terms
of their own beggarly notions, to paraphrase his glorious
verse into their own paltry commercial prose; and
then, in the growing presumption of imagined success,
to insist upon their neighbours’ acceptance
of their distorted shadows of ‘the plan of salvation’
as the truth of him in whom is no darkness, and the
one condition of their acceptance with him. They
delay setting their foot on the stair which alone
can lead them to the house of wisdom, until they shall
have determined the material and mode of its construction.
For the sake of knowing, they postpone that which
alone can enable them to know, and substitute for
the true understanding which lies beyond, a false
persuasion that they already understand. They
will not accept, that is, act upon, their highest
privilege, that of obeying the Son of God. It
is on them that do his will, that the day dawns; to
them the day-star arises in their hearts. Obedience
is the soul of knowledge.
By obedience, I intend no kind of
obedience to man, or submission to authority claimed
by man or community of men. I mean obedience to
the will of the Father, however revealed in our conscience.
God forbid I should seem to despise
understanding. The New Testament is full of urgings
to understand. Our whole life, to be life at all,
must be a growth in understanding. What I cry
out upon is the misunderstanding that comes of man’s
endeavour to understand while not obeying. Upon
obedience our energy must be spent; understanding will
follow. Not anxious to know our duty, or knowing
it and not doing it, how shall we understand that
which only a true heart and a clean soul can ever
understand? The power in us that would understand
were it free, lies in the bonds of imperfection and
impurity, and is therefore incapable of judging the
divine. It cannot see the truth. If it could
see it, it would not know it, and would not have it.
Until a man begins to obey, the light that is in him
is darkness.
Any honest soul may understand this
much, however for it is a thing we may
of ourselves judge to be right that the
Lord cannot save a man from his sins while he holds
to his sins. An omnipotence that could do and
not do the same thing at the same moment, were an idea
too absurd for mockery; an omnipotence that could
at once make a man a free man, and leave him a self-degraded
slave make him the very likeness of God,
and good only because he could not help being good,
would be an idea of the same character equally
absurd, equally self-contradictory.
But the Lord is not unreasonable;
he requires no high motives where such could not yet
exist. He does not say, ’You must be sorry
for your sins, or you need not come to me:’
to be sorry for his sins a man must love God and man,
and love is the very thing that has to be developed
in him. It is but common sense that a man, longing
to be freed from suffering, or made able to bear it,
should betake himself to the Power by whom he is.
Equally is it common sense that, if a man would be
delivered from the evil in him, he must himself begin
to cast it out, himself begin to disobey it, and work
righteousness. As much as either is it common
sense that a man should look for and expect the help
of his Father in the endeavour. Alone, he might
labour to all eternity and not succeed. He who
has not made himself, cannot set himself right without
him who made him. But his maker is in him, and
is his strength. The man, however, who, instead
of doing what he is told, broods speculating on the
metaphysics of him who calls him to his work, stands
leaning his back against the door by which the Lord
would enter to help him. The moment he sets about
putting straight the thing that is crooked I
mean doing right where he has been doing wrong, he
withdraws from the entrance, gives way for the Master
to come in. He cannot make himself pure, but
he can leave that which is impure; he can spread out
the ‘defiled, discoloured web’ of his
life before the bleaching sun of righteousness; he
cannot save himself, but he can let the Lord save him.
The struggle of his weakness is as essential to the
coming victory as the strength of Him who resisted
unto death, striving against sin.
The sum of the whole matter is this: The
Son has come from the Father to set the children free
from their sins; the children must hear and obey him,
that he may send forth judgment unto victory.
Son of our Father, help us to do what
thou sayest, and so with thee die unto sin, that we
may rise to the sonship for which we were created.
Help us to repent even to the sending away of our sins.
THE REMISSION OF SINS.
John did baptize in the wilderness,
and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission
of sins. Mark .
God and man must combine for salvation
from sin, and the same word, here and elsewhere translated
remission, seems to be employed in the New
Testament for the share of either in the great deliverance.
But first let me say something concerning
the word here and everywhere translated repentance.
I would not even suggest a mistranslation; but the
idea intended by the word has been so misunderstood
and therefore mistaught, that it requires some consideration
of the word itself to get at a right recognition of
the moral fact it represents.
The Greek word then, of which the
word repentance is the accepted synonym and
fundamentally the accurate rendering, is made up of
two words, the conjoint meaning of which is, a
change of mind or thought. There is
in it no intent of, or hint at sorrow or shame,
or any other of the mental conditions that, not unfrequently
accompanying repentance, have been taken for essential
parts of it, sometimes for its very essence.
Here, the last of the prophets, or the evangelist
who records his doings, qualifies the word, as if he
held it insufficient in itself to convey the Baptist’s
meaning, with the three words that follow it [Greek:
eis aPhesin amartion: kaerusson Baptisma
metauoias eis aphesin amartion] ’preaching
a baptism of repentance unto a sending
away of sins’. I do not say the phrase [Greek:
aphesis amartion] never means forgiveness,
one form at least of God’s sending away
of sins; neither do I say that the taking of the phrase
to mean repentance for the remission of sins,
namely, repentance in order to obtain the pardon of
God, involves any inconsistency; but I say that the
word [Greek: eis] rather unto than
for; that the word [Greek: aphesis],
translated remission, means, fundamentally,
a sending away, a dismissal; and that
the writer seems to use the added phrase to make certain
what he means by repentance; a repentance,
namely, that reaches to the sending away, or abjurement
of sins. I do not think a change of mind unto
the remission or pardon of sin would be nearly
so logical a phrase as a change of mind unto the
dismission of sinning. The revised version refuses
the word for and chooses unto, though
it retains remission, which word, now, conveys
no meaning except the forgiveness of God. I think
that here the same word is used for man’s dismission
of his sins, as is elsewhere used for God’s
dismission or remission of them. In both uses,
it is a sending away of sins, with the difference of
meaning that comes from the differing sources of the
action. Both God and man send away sins, but
in the one case God sends away the sins of the man,
and in the other the man sends away his own sins.
I do not enter into the question whether God’s
aphesis may or may not mean as well the sending of
his sins out of a man, as the pardon of them; whether
it may not sometimes mean dismission, and sometimes
remission: I am sure the one deed cannot
be separated from the other.
That the phrase here intends repentance
unto the ceasing from sin, the giving up of what is
wrong, I will try to show at least probable.
In the first place, the user of the
phrase either defines the change of mind he means
as one that has for its object the pardon of God, or
as one that reaches to a new life: the latter
seems to me the more natural interpretation by far.
The kind and scope of the repentance or change, and
not any end to be gained by it, appears intended.
The change must be one of will and conduct a
radical change of life on the part of the man:
he must repent that is, change his mind not
to a different opinion, not even to a mere betterment
of his conduct not to anything less than
a sending away of his sins. This interpretation
of the preaching of the Baptist seems to me, I repeat,
the more direct, the fuller of meaning, the more logical.
Next, in St Matthew’s gospel,
the Baptist’s buttressing argument, or imminent
motive for the change he is pressing upon the people
is, that the kingdom of heaven is at hand: ’Because
the king of heaven is coming, you must give up your
sinning.’ The same argument for immediate
action lies in his quotation from Isaiah, ’Prepare
ye the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert
a highway for our God.’ The only true, the
only possible preparation for the coming Lord, is to
cease from doing evil, and begin to do well to
send away sin. They must cleanse, not the streets
of their cities, not their houses or their garments
or even their persons, but their hearts and their
doings. It is true the Baptist did not see that
the kingdom coming was not of this world, but of the
higher world in the hearts of men; it is true that
his faith failed him in his imprisonment, because
he heard of no martial movement on the part of the
Lord, no assertion of his sovereignty, no convincing
show of his power; but he did see plainly that righteousness
was essential to the kingdom of heaven. That
he did not yet perceive that righteousness is
the kingdom of heaven; that he did not see that the
Lord was already initiating his kingdom by sending
away sin out of the hearts of his people, is not wonderful.
The Lord’s answer to his fore-runner’s
message of doubt, was to send his messenger back an
eye-witness of what he was doing, so to wake or clarify
in him the perception that his kingdom was not of
this world that he dealt with other means
to another end than John had yet recognized as his
mission or object; for obedient love in the heart
of the poorest he healed or persuaded, was his kingdom
come.
Again, observe that, when the Pharisees
came to John, he said to them, ‘Bring forth
therefore fruits meet for repentance:’ is
not this the same as, ‘Repent unto the sending
away of your sins’?
Note also, that, when the multitudes
came to the prophet, and all, with the classes most
obnoxious to the rest, the publicans and the soldiers,
asked what he would have them do thus plainly
recognizing that something was required of them his
instruction was throughout in the same direction:
they must send away their sins; and each must begin
with the fault that lay next him. The kingdom
of heaven was at hand: they must prepare the
way of the Lord by beginning to do as must be done
in his kingdom.
They could not rid themselves of their
sins, but they could set about sending them away;
they could quarrel with them, and proceed to turn
them out of the house: the Lord was on his way
to do his part in their final banishment. Those
who had repented to the sending away of their sins,
he would baptize with a holy power to send them away
indeed. The operant will to get rid of them would
be baptized with a fire that should burn them up.
When a man breaks with his sins, then the wind of
the Lord’s fan will blow them away, the fire
of the Lord’s heart will consume them.
I think, then, that the part of the
repentant man, and not the part of God, in the sending
away of sins, is intended here. It is the man’s
one preparation for receiving the power to overcome
them, the baptism of fire.
Not seldom, what comes in the name
of the gospel of Jesus Christ, must seem, even to
one not far from the kingdom of heaven, no good news
at all. It does not draw him; it wakes in him
not a single hope. He has no desire after what
it offers him as redemption. The God it gives
him news of, is not one to whom he would draw nearer.
But when such a man comes to see that the very God
must be his Life, the heart of his consciousness;
when he perceives that, rousing himself to put from
him what is evil, and do the duty that lies at his
door, he may fearlessly claim the help of him who
‘loved him into being,’ then his will
immediately sides with his conscience; he begins to
try to be; and first thing toward
being to rid himself of what is antagonistic
to all being, namely wrong. Multitudes
will not even approach the appalling task, the labour
and pain of being. God is doing his part,
is undergoing the mighty toil of an age-long creation,
endowing men with power to be; but few as yet are
those who take up their part, who respond to the call
of God, who will to be, who put forth a divine effort
after real existence. To the many, the spirit
of the prophet cries, ’Turn ye, and change your
way! The kingdom of heaven is near you.
Let your king possess his own. Let God throne
himself in you, that his liberty be your life, and
you free men. That he may enter, clear the house
for him. Send away the bad things out of it.
Depart from evil, and do good. The duty that
lieth at thy door, do it, be it great or small.’
For indeed in this region there is
no great or small. ’Be content with your
wages,’ said the Baptist to the soldiers.
To many people now, the word would be, ‘Rule
your temper;’ or, ‘Be courteous to all;’
or, ’Let each hold the other better than himself;’
or, ’Be just to your neighbour that you may
love him.’ To make straight in the desert
a highway for our God, we must bestir ourselves in
the very spot of the desert on which we stand; we
must cast far from us our evil thing that blocks the
way of his chariot-wheels. If we do not, never
will those wheels roll through our streets; never
will our desert blossom with his roses.
The message of John to his countrymen,
was then, and is yet, the one message to the world: ’Send
away your sins, for the kingdom of heaven is near.’
Some of us I cannot say all, for
I do not know who have already repented,
who have long ago begun to send away our sins, need
fresh repentance every day how many times
a day, God only knows. We are so ready to get
upon some path that seems to run parallel with the
narrow way, and then take no note of its divergence!
What is there for us when we discover that we are
out of the way, but to bethink ourselves and turn?
By those ‘who need no repentance,’ the
Lord may have meant such as had repented perfectly,
had sent away all their sins, and were now with him
in his Father’s house; also such as have never
sinned, and such as no longer turn aside for any temptation.
We shall now, perhaps, be able to
understand the relation of the Lord himself to the
baptism of John.
He came to John to be baptized; and
most would say John’s baptism was of repentance
for the remission or pardon of sins. But the Lord
could not be baptized for the remission of sins, for
he had never done a selfish, an untrue, or an unfair
thing. He had never wronged his Father, any more
than ever his Father had wronged him. Happy, happy
Son and Father, who had never either done the other
wrong, in thought, word, or deed! As little had
he wronged brother or sister. He needed no forgiveness;
there was nothing to forgive. No more could he
be baptized for repentance: in him repentance
would have been to turn to evil! Where then was
the propriety of his coming to be baptized by John,
and insisting on being by him baptized? It must
lie elsewhere.
If we take the words of John to mean
’the baptism of repentance unto the sending
away of sins;’ and if we bear in mind that in
his case repentance could not be, inasmuch as what
repentance is necessary to bring about in man, was
already existent in Jesus; then, altering the words
to fit the case, and saying, ’the baptism of
willed devotion to the sending away of sin,’
we shall see at once how the baptism of Jesus was
a thing right and fit.
That he had no sin to repent of, was
not because he was so constituted that he could not
sin if he would; it was because, of his own will and
judgment, he sent sin away from him sent
it from him with the full choice and energy of his
nature. God knows good and evil, and, blessed
be his name, chooses good. Never will his righteous
anger make him unfair to us, make him forget that
we are dust. Like him, his son also chose good,
and in that choice resisted all temptation to help
his fellows otherwise than as their and his father
would. Instead of crushing the power of evil
by divine force; instead of compelling justice and
destroying the wicked; instead of making peace on the
earth by the rule of a perfect prince; instead of
gathering the children of Jerusalem under his wings
whether they would or not, and saving them from the
horrors that anguished his prophetic soul he
let evil work its will while it lived; he contented
himself with the slow unencouraging ways of help essential;
making men good; casting out, not merely controlling
Satan; carrying to their perfect issue on earth the
old primeval principles because of which the Father
honoured him: ’Thou hast loved righteousness
and hated iniquity; therefore God, even thy God, hath
anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.’
To love righteousness is to make it grow, not to avenge
it; and to win for righteousness the true victory,
he, as well as his brethren, had to send away evil.
Throughout his life on earth, he resisted every impulse
to work more rapidly for a lower good, strong
perhaps when he saw old age and innocence and righteousness
trodden under foot. What but this gives any worth
of reality to the temptation in the wilderness, to
the devil’s departing from him for a season,
to his coming again to experience a like failure?
Ever and ever, in the whole attitude of his being,
in his heart always lifted up, in his unfailing readiness
to pull with the Father’s yoke, he was repelling,
driving away sin away from himself, and,
as Lord of men, and their saviour, away from others
also, bringing them to abjure it like himself.
No man, least of all any lord of men, can be good
without willing to be good, without setting himself
against evil, without sending away sin. Other
men have to send it away out of them; the Lord had
to send it away from before him, that it should not
enter into him. Therefore is the stand against
sin common to the captain of salvation and the soldiers
under him.
What did Jesus come into the world
to do? The will of God in saving his people from
their sins not from the punishment of their
sins, that blessed aid to repentance, but from their
sins themselves, the paltry as well as the heinous,
the venial as well as the loathsome. His whole
work was and is to send away sin to banish
it from the earth, yea, to cast it into the abyss
of non-existence behind the back of God. His was
the holy war; he came carrying it into our world;
he resisted unto blood; the soldiers that followed
him he taught and trained to resist also unto blood,
striving against sin; so he became the captain of their
salvation, and they, freed themselves, fought and suffered
for others. This was the task to which he was
baptized; this is yet his enduring labour. ’This
is my blood of the new covenant which is shed for many
unto the sending away of sins.’ What was
the new covenant? ’I will make a new covenant
with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah;
not according to the covenant which they brake, but
this: I will put my law in their inward parts,
and write it in their hearts, and will be their God,
and they shall be my people.’
John baptized unto repentance because
those to whom he was sent had to repent. They
must bethink themselves, and send away the sin that
was in them. But had there been a man, aware
of no sin in him, but aware that life would be no
life were not sin kept out of him, that man would have
been right in receiving the baptism of John unto the
continuous dismission of the sin ever wanting to enter
in at his door. The object of the baptism was
the sending away of sin; its object was repentance
only where necessary to, only as introducing, as resulting
in that. He to whom John was not sent, He whom
he did not call, He who needed no repentance, was
baptized for the same object, to the same conflict
for the same end the banishment of sin
from the dominions of his father and that
first by his own sternest repudiation of it in himself.
Thence came his victory in the wilderness: he
would have his fathers way, not his own. Could
he be less fitted to receive the baptism of John,
that the object of it was no new thing with him, who
had been about it from the beginning, yea, from all
eternity? We shall be about it, I presume, to
all eternity.
Such, then, as were baptized by John,
were initiated into the company of those whose work
was to send sin out of the world, and first, by sending
it out of themselves, by having done with it.
Their earliest endeavour in this direction would,
as I have said, open the door for that help to enter
without which a man could never succeed in the divinely
arduous task could not, because the region
in which the work has to be wrought lies in the very
roots of his own being, where, knowing nothing of the
secrets of his essential existence, he can immediately
do nothing, where the maker of him alone is potent,
alone is consciously present. The change that
must pass in him more than equals a new creation, inasmuch
as it is a higher creation. But its necessity
is involved in the former creation; and thence we
have a right to ask help of our creator, for he requires
of us what he has created us unable to effect without
him. Nay, nay! could we do anything
without him, it were a thing to leave undone.
Blessed fact that he hath made us so near him! that
the scale of our being is so large, that we are completed
only by his presence in it! that we are not men without
him! that we can be one with our self-existent creator!
that we are not cut off from the original Infinite!
that in him we must share infinitude, or be enslaved
by the finite! The very patent of our royalty
is, that not for a moment can we live our true life
without the eternal life present in and with our spirits.
Without him at our unknown root, we cease to be.
True, a dog cannot live without the presence of God;
but I presume a dog may live a good dog-life without
knowing the presence of his origin: man is dead
if he know not the Power which is his cause, his deepest
selfing self; the Presence which is not himself, and
is nearer to him than himself; which is infinitely
more himself, more his very being, than he is himself.
The being of which we are conscious, is not our full
self; the extent of our consciousness of our self
is no measure of our self; our consciousness is infinitely
less than we; while God is more necessary even to that
poor consciousness of self than our self-consciousness
is necessary to our humanity. Until a man become
the power of his own existence, become his own God,
the sole thing necessary to his existing is the will
of God; for the well-being and perfecting of that
existence, the sole thing necessary is, that the man
should know his maker present in him. All that
the children want is their Father.
The one true end of all speech concerning
holy things is the persuading of the individual
man to cease to do evil, to set himself to do well,
to look to the lord of his life to be on his side
in the new struggle. Supposing the suggestions
I have made correct, I do not care that my reader
should understand them, except it be to turn against
the evil in him, and begin to cast it out. If
this be not the result, it is of no smallest consequence
whether he agree with my interpretation or not.
If he do thus repent, it is of equally little consequence;
for, setting himself to do the truth, he is on the
way to know all things. Real knowledge has begun
to grow possible for him.
I am not sure what the Lord means
in the words, ’Thus it becometh us to fulfil
all righteousness.’ Baptism could not be
the fulfilling of all righteousness! Perhaps
he means, ’We must, by a full act of the will,
give ourselves altogether to righteousness. We
must make it the business of our lives to send away
sin, and do the will of the Father. That is my
work as much as the work of any man who must repent
ere he can begin. I will not be left out when
you call men to be pure as our father is pure.’
To be certain whom he intends by us
might perhaps help us to see his meaning. Does
he intend all of us men? Does he intend
’my father and me’? Or does he intend
‘you and me, John’? If the saying
mean what I have suggested, then the us would
apply to all that have the knowledge of good and evil.
’Every being that can, must devote himself to
righteousness. To be right is no adjunct of completeness;
it is the ground and foundation of existence.’
But perhaps it was a lesson for John himself, who,
mighty preacher of righteousness as he was, did not
yet count it the all of life. I cannot tell.
Note that when the Lord began his
teaching, he employed, neither using nor inculcating
any rite, the same words as John, ’Repent,
for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’
That kingdom had been at hand all
his infancy, boyhood, and young manhood: he was
in the world with his father in his heart: that
was the kingdom of heaven. Lonely man on the
hillside, or boy the cynosure of doctor-eyes, his
father was everything to him: ’Wist
ye not that I must be in my father’s things?’
JESUS IN THE WORLD.
’Son, why hast thou thus dealt
with us? behold, thy father and I have sought thee
sorrowing.’ And he said unto them, ’How
is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be
about my father’s business?’ And they
understood not the saying which he spake unto them. Luke
i-50.
Was that his saying? Why did
they not understand it? Do we understand it?
What did his saying mean? The Greek is not absolutely
clear. Whether the Syriac words he used were
more precise, who in this world can tell? But
had we heard his very words, we too, with his father
and mother, would have failed to understand them.
Must we fail still?
It will show at once where our initial
difficulty lies, if I give the latter half of the
saying as presented in the revised English version:
its departure from the authorized reveals the point
of obscurity: ’Wist ye not that I
must be in my father’s house?’ His parents
had his exact words, yet did not understand.
We have not his exact words, and are in doubt as to
what the Greek translation of them means.
If the authorized translation be true
to the intent of the Greek, and therefore to that
of the Syriac, how could his parents, knowing him as
they did from all that had been spoken before concerning
him, from all they had seen in him, from the ponderings
in Mary’s own heart, and from the precious thoughts
she and Joseph cherished concerning him, have failed
to understand him when he said that wherever he was,
he must be about his father’s business?
On the other hand, supposing them to know and feel
that he must be about his father’s business,
would that have been reason sufficient, in view of
the degree of spiritual development to which they
had attained, for the Lord’s expecting them not
to be anxious about him when they had lost him?
Thousands on thousands who trust God for their friends
in things spiritual, do not trust him for them in
regard of their mere health or material well-being.
His parents knew how prophets had always been treated
in the land; or if they did not think in that direction,
there were many dangers to which a boy like him would
seem exposed, to rouse an anxiety that could be met
only by a faith equal to saying, ’Whatever has
happened to him, death itself, it can be no evil to
one who is about his father’s business;’
and such a faith I think the Lord could not yet have
expected of them. That what the world counts
misfortune might befall him on his father’s business,
would have been recognized by him, I think, as reason
for their parental anxiety so long as they
had not learned God that he is what he is the
thing the Lord had come to teach his father’s
men and women. His words seem rather to imply
that there was no need to be anxious about his personal
safety. Fear of some accident to him seems to
have been the cause of their trouble; and he did not
mean, I think, that they ought not to mind if he died
doing his father’s will, but that he was in no
danger as regarded accident or misfortune. This
will appear more plainly as we proceed. So much
for the authorized version.
Let us now take the translation given
us by the Revisers: ’Wist ye not
that I must be in my father’s house?’
Are they authorized in translating
the Greek thus? I know no justification for it,
but am not learned enough to say they have none.
That the Syriac has it so, is of little weight; seeing
it is no original Syriac, but retranslation.
If he did say ‘my father’s house’,
could he have meant the temple and his parents not
have known what he meant? And why should he have
taken it for granted they would know, or judge that
they ought to have known, that he was there? So
little did the temple suggest itself to them, that
either it was the last place in which they sought
him, or they had been there before, and had not
found him. If he meant that they might have known
this without being told, why was it that, even when
he set the thing before them, they did not understand
him? I do not believe he meant the temple; I do
not think he said or meant ’in my fathers
house’.
What then makes those who give us
this translation, prefer it to the phrase in the authorized
version, ‘about my Father’s business’?
One or other of two causes most
likely both together: an ecclesiastical fancy,
and the mere fact that he was found in the temple.
A mind ecclesiastical will presume the temple the
fittest, therefore most likely place, for the Son
of God to betake himself to, but such a mind would
not be the first to reflect that the temple was a place
where the Father was worshipped neither in spirit
nor in truth a place built by one of the
vilest rulers of this world, less fit than many another
spot for the special presence of him of whom the prophet
bears witness: ’Thus saith the high and
lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is
Holy; I dwell in the high and holy place, with him
also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive
the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart
of the contrite ones.’ Jesus himself, with
the same breath in which once he called it his father’s
house, called it a den of thieves. His expulsion
from it of the buyers and sellers, was the first waft
of the fan with which he was come to purge his father’s
dominions. Nothing could ever cleanse that house;
his fanning rose to a tempest, and swept it out of
his father’s world.
For the second possible cause of the
change from business to temple the
mere fact that he was found in the temple, can hardly
be a reason for his expecting his parents to know
that he was there; and if it witnessed to some way
of thought or habit of his with which they were acquainted,
it is, I repeat, difficult to see why the parents should
fail to perceive what the interpreters have found so
easily. But the parents looked for a larger meaning
in the words of such a son whose meaning
at the same time was too large for them to find.
When, according to the Greek, the
Lord, on the occasion already alluded to, says ‘my
father’s house,’ he says it plainly; he
uses the word house: here he does not.
Let us see what lies in the Greek
to guide us to the thought in the mind of the Lord
when he thus reasoned with the apprehensions of his
father and mother. The Greek, taken literally,
says, ’Wist ye not that I must be in the of
my father?’ The authorized version supplies business;
the revised, house. There is no noun in
the Greek, and the article ‘the’ is in
the plural. To translate it as literally as it
can be translated, making of it an English sentence,
the saying stands, ’Wist ye not that I must
be in the things of my father?’ The plural article
implies the English things; and the question
is then, What things does he mean? The
word might mean affairs or business;
but why the plural article should be contracted to
mean house, I do not know. In a
great wide sense, no doubt, the word house might
be used, as I am about to show, but surely not as
meaning the temple.
He was arguing for confidence in God
on the part of his parents, not for a knowledge of
his whereabout. The same thing that made them
anxious concerning him, prevented them from understanding
his words lack, namely, of faith in the
Father. This, the one thing he came into the
world to teach men, those words were meant to teach
his parents. They are spirit and life, involving
the one principle by which men shall live. They
hold the same core as his words to his disciples in
the storm, ‘Oh ye of little faith!’ Let
us look more closely at them.
’Why did you look for me?
Did you not know that I must be among my father’s
things?’ What are we to understand by ‘my
father’s things’? The translation
given in the authorized version is, I think, as to
the words themselves, a thoroughly justifiable one:
’I must be about my father’s business,’
or ‘my father’s affairs’; I refuse
it for no other reason than that it does not fit the
logic of the narrative, as does the word things,
which besides opens to us a door of large and joyous
prospect. Of course he was about his father’s
business, and they might know it and yet be anxious
about him, not having a perfect faith in that father.
But, as I have said already, it was not anxiety as
to what might befall him because of doing the will
of the Father; he might well seem to them as yet too
young for danger from that source; it was but the
vague perils of life beyond their sight that appalled
them; theirs was just the uneasiness that possesses
every parent whose child is missing; and if they,
like him, had trusted in their father, they would have
known what their son now meant when he said that he
was in the midst of his father’s things namely,
that the very things from which they dreaded evil
accident, were his own home-surroundings; that he was
not doing the Father’s business in a foreign
country, but in the Father’s own house.
Understood as meaning the world, or the universe, the
phrase, ‘my father’s house,’ would
be a better translation than the authorized; understood
as meaning the poor, miserable, God-forsaken temple no
more the house of God than a dead body is the house
of a man it is immeasurably inferior.
It seems to me, I say, that the Lord
meant to remind them, or rather to make them feel,
for they had not yet learned the fact, that he was
never away from home, could not be lost, as they had
thought him; that he was in his father’s house
all the time, where no hurt could come to him.
‘The things’ about him were the furniture
and utensils of his home; he knew them all and how
to use them. ’I must be among my father’s
belongings.’ The world was his home because
his father’s house. He was not a stranger
who did not know his way about in it. He was no
lost child, but with his father all the time.
Here we find one main thing wherein
the Lord differs from us: we are not at home
in this great universe, our father’s house.
We ought to be, and one day we shall be, but we are
not yet. This reveals Jesus more than man, by
revealing him more man than we. We are not complete
men, we are not anything near it, and are therefore
out of harmony, more or less, with everything in the
house of our birth and habitation. Always struggling
to make our home in the world, we have not yet succeeded.
We are not at home in it, because we are not at home
with the lord of the house, the father of the family,
not one with our elder brother who is his right hand.
It is only the son, the daughter, that abideth ever
in the house. When we are true children, if not
the world, then the universe will be our home, felt
and known as such, the house we are satisfied with,
and would not change. Hence, until then, the hard
struggle, the constant strife we hold with Nature as
we call the things of our father; a strife invaluable
for our development, at the same time manifesting
us not yet men enough to be lords of the house built
for us to live in. We cannot govern or command
in it as did the Lord, because we are not at one with
his father, therefore neither in harmony with his
things, nor rulers over them. Our best power in
regard to them is but to find out wonderful facts
concerning them and their relations, and turn these
facts to our uses on systems of our own. For
we discover what we seem to discover, by working inward
from without, while he works outward from within;
and we shall never understand the world, until we
see it in the direction in which he works making it namely
from within outward. This of course we cannot
do until we are one with him. In the meantime,
so much are both we and his things his, that we can
err concerning them only as he has made it possible
for us to err; we can wander only in the direction
of the truth if but to find that we can
find nothing.
Think for a moment how Jesus was at
home among the things of his father. It seems
to me, I repeat, a spiritless explanation of his words that
the temple was the place where naturally he was at
home. Does he make the least lamentation over
the temple? It is Jerusalem he weeps over the
men of Jerusalem, the killers, the stoners. What
was his place of prayer? Not the temple, but
the mountain-top. Where does he find symbols
whereby to speak of what goes on in the mind and before
the face of his father in heaven? Not in the
temple; not in its rites; not on its altars; not in
its holy of holies; he finds them in the world and
its lovely-lowly facts; on the roadside, in the field,
in the vineyard, in the garden, in the house; in the
family, and the commonest of its affairs the
lighting of the lamp, the leavening of the meal, the
neighbour’s borrowing, the losing of the coin,
the straying of the sheep. Even in the unlovely
facts also of the world which he turns to holy use,
such as the unjust judge, the false steward, the faithless
labourers, he ignores the temple. See how he drives
the devils from the souls and bodies of men, as we
the wolves from our sheepfolds! how before him the
diseases, scaly and spotted, hurry and flee! The
world has for him no chamber of terror. He walks
to the door of the sepulchre, the sealed cellar of
his father’s house, and calls forth its four
days dead. He rebukes the mourners, he stays
the funeral, and gives back the departed children
to their parents’ arms. The roughest of
its servants do not make him wince; none of them are
so arrogant as to disobey his word; he falls asleep
in the midst of the storm that threatens to swallow
his boat. Hear how, on that same occasion, he
rebukes his disciples! The children to tremble
at a gust of wind in the house! God’s little
ones afraid of a storm! Hear him tell the watery
floor to be still, and no longer toss his brothers!
see the watery floor obey him and grow still!
See how the wandering creatures under it come at his
call! See him leave his mountain-closet, and go
walking over its heaving surface to the help of his
men of little faith! See how the world’s
water turns to wine! how its bread grows more bread
at his word! See how he goes from the house for
a while, and returning with fresh power, takes what
shape he pleases, walks through its closed doors, and
goes up and down its invisible stairs!
All his life he was among his father’s
things, either in heaven or in the world not
then only when they found him in the temple at Jerusalem.
He is still among his father’s things, everywhere
about in the world, everywhere throughout the wide
universe. Whatever he laid aside to come to us,
to whatever limitations, for our sake, he stooped his
regal head, he dealt with the things about him in
such lordly, childlike manner as made it clear they
were not strange to him, but the things of his father.
He claimed none of them as his own, would not have
had one of them his except through his father.
Only as his father’s could he enjoy them; only
as coming forth from the Father, and full of the Father’s
thought and nature, had they to him any existence.
That the things were his fathers, made them precious
things to him. He had no care for having, as
men count having. All his having was in the Father.
I wonder if he ever put anything in his pocket:
I doubt if he had one. Did he ever say, ‘This
is mine, not yours’? Did he not say, ’All
things are mine, therefore they are yours’?
Oh for his liberty among the things of the Father!
Only by knowing them the things of our Father, can
we escape enslaving ourselves to them. Through
the false, the infernal idea of having, of
possessing them, we make them our tyrants, make
the relation between them and us an evil thing.
The world was a blessed place to Jesus, because everything
in it was his father’s. What pain must
it not have been to him, to see his brothers so vilely
misuse the Father’s house by grasping, each
for himself, at the family things! If the knowledge
that a spot in the landscape retains in it some pollution,
suffices to disturb our pleasure in the whole, how
must it not have been with him, how must it not be
with him now, in regard to the disfigurements and
défilements caused by the greed of men, by their
haste to be rich, in his father’s lovely house!
Whoever is able to understand Wordsworth,
or Henry Vaughan, when either speaks of the glorious
insights of his childhood, will be able to imagine
a little how Jesus must, in his eternal childhood,
regard the world.
Hear what Wordsworth says:
Our birth is but a sleep and
a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us,
our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And
cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds
of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about
us in our infancy!
Shades
of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds
the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who
daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s
Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives
it die away,
And fade into the light of
common day.
Hear what Henry Vaughan says:
Happy those early dayes, when
I
Shin’d in my angell-infancy!
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy
ought
But a white, celestiall thought;
When yet I had not walkt above
A mile or two, from my first
love,
And looking back at
that short space
Could see a glimpse of His
bright-face;
When on some gilded cloud,
or flowre
My gazing soul would dwell
an houre,
And in those weaker glories
spy
Some shadows of eternity;
Before I taught my tongue
to wound
My conscience with a sinfull
sound,
Or had the black art to dispence
A sev’rall sinne to
ev’ry sence,
But felt through all this
fleshly dresse
Bright shootes of everlastingnesse.
O how I long to
travell back,
And tread again that ancient
track!
That I might once more reach
that plaine,
Where first I left my glorious
traîne;
From whence th’ inlightned
spirit sees
That shady City of palme
trees.
Whoever has thus gazed on flower or
cloud; whoever can recall poorest memory of the trail
of glory that hung about his childhood, must have
some faint idea how his father’s house and the
things in it always looked, and must still look to
the Lord. With him there is no fading into the
light of common day. He has never lost his childhood,
the very essence of childhood being nearness to the
Father and the outgoing of his creative love; whence,
with that insight of his eternal childhood of which
the insight of the little ones here is a fainter repetition,
he must see everything as the Father means it.
The child sees things as the Father means him to see
them, as he thought of them when he uttered them.
For God is not only the father of the child, but of
the childhood that constitutes him a child, therefore
the childness is of the divine nature. The child
may not indeed be capable of looking into the father’s
method, but he can in a measure understand his work,
has therefore free entrance to his study and workshop
both, and is welcome to find out what he can, with
fullest liberty to ask him questions. There are
men too, who, at their best, see, in their lower measure,
things as they are as God sees them always.
Jesus saw things just as his father saw them in his
creative imagination, when willing them out to the
eyes of his children. But if he could always
see the things of his father even as some men and
more children see them at times, he might well feel
almost at home among them. He could not
cease to admire, cease to love them. I say love,
because the life in them, the presence of the creative
one, would ever be plain to him. In the Perfect,
would familiarity ever destroy wonder at things essentially
wonderful because essentially divine? To cease
to wonder is to fall plumb-down from the childlike
to the commonplace the most undivine of
all moods intellectual. Our nature can never
be at home among things that are not wonderful to
us.
Could we see things always as we have
sometimes seen them and as one day we must
always see them, only far better should
we ever know dullness? Greatly as we might enjoy
all forms of art, much as we might learn through the
eyes and thoughts of other men, should we fly to these
for deliverance from ennui, from any haunting
discomfort? Should we not just open our own child-eyes,
look upon the things themselves, and be consoled?
Jesus, then, would have his parents
understand that he was in his father’s world
among his father’s things, where was nothing
to hurt him; he knew them all, was in the secret of
them all, could use and order them as did his father.
To this same I think all we humans are destined to
rise. Though so many of us now are ignorant what
kind of home we need, what a home we are capable of
having, we too shall inherit the earth with the Son
eternal, doing with it as we would willing
with the will of the Father. To such a home as
we now inhabit, only perfected, and perfectly beheld,
we are travelling never to reach it save
by the obedience that makes us the children, therefore
the heirs of God. And, thank God! there the father
does not die that the children may inherit; for, bliss
of heaven! we inherit with the Father.
All the dangers of Jesus came from
the priests, and the learned in the traditional law,
whom his parents had not yet begun to fear on his
behalf. They feared the dangers of the rugged
way, the thieves and robbers of the hill-road.
For the scribes and the pharisees, the priests and
the rulers they would be the first to acknowledge
their Messiah, their king! Little they imagined,
when they found him where he ought to have been safest
had it been indeed his father’s house, that there
he sat amid lions the great doctors of
the temple! He could rule all the things
in his father’s house, but not the men of religion,
the men of the temple, who called his father their
Father. True, he might have compelled them with
a word, withered them by a glance, with a finger-touch
made them grovel at his feet; but such supremacy over
his brothers the Lord of life despised. He must
rule them as his father ruled himself; he would have
them know themselves of the same family with himself;
have them at home among the things of God, caring for
the things he cared for, loving and hating as he and
his father loved and hated, ruling themselves by the
essential laws of being. Because they would not
be such, he let them do to him as they would, that
he might get at their hearts by some unknown unguarded
door in their diviner part. ’I will be
God among you; I will be myself to you. You
will not have me? Then do to me as you will.
The created shall have power over him through whom
they were created, that they may be compelled to know
him and his father. They shall look on him whom
they have pierced.’
His parents found him in the temple;
they never really found him until he entered the true
temple their own adoring hearts. The
temple that knows not its builder, is no temple; in
it dwells no divinity. But at length he comes
to his own, and his own receive him; comes
to them in the might of his mission to preach good
tidings to the poor, to heal the broken-hearted, to
preach deliverance, and sight, and liberty, and the
Lord’s own good time.
JESUS AND HIS FELLOW TOWNSMEN.
And he came to Nazareth, where he
had been brought up: and, as his custom was,
he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and
stood up for to read. And there was delivered
unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And
when he had opened the book, he found the place where
it was written, ’The spirit of the Lord is upon
me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel
to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted,
to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering
of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that
are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the
Lord.’ And he closed the book, and he gave
it again to the minister, and sat down. And the
eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened
on him. And he began to say unto them, ’This
day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.’ Luke
i-21.
The Lord’s sermon upon the mount
seems such an enlargement of these words of the prophet
as might, but for the refusal of the men of Nazareth
to listen to him, have followed his reading of them
here recorded. That, as given by the evangelist,
they correspond to neither of the differing originals
of the English and Greek versions, ought to be enough
in itself to do away with the spiritually vulgar notion
of the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures.
The point at which the Lord stops
in his reading, is suggestive: he closes the
book, leaving the words ’and the day of vengeance
of our God,’ or, as in the Septuagint, ‘the
day of recompense,’ unread: God’s
vengeance is as holy a thing as his love, yea, is love,
for God is love and God is not vengeance; but, apparently,
the Lord would not give the word a place in his announcement
of his mission: his hearers would not recognize
it as a form of the Father’s love, but as vengeance
on their enemies, not vengeance on the selfishness
of those who would not be their brother’s keeper.
He had not begun with Nazareth, neither
with Galilee. ’A prophet has no honour
in his own country,’ he said, and began to teach
where it was more likely he would be heard. It
is true that he wrought his first miracle in Cana,
but that was at his mother’s request, not of
his own intent, and he did not begin his teaching
there. He went first to Jerusalem, there cast
out the buyers and sellers from the temple, and did
other notable things alluded to by St John; then went
back to Galilee, where, having seen the things he
did in Jerusalem, his former neighbours were now prepared
to listen to him. Of these the Nazarenes, to
whom the sight of him was more familiar, retained the
most prejudice against him: he belonged to their
very city! they had known him from a child! and
low indeed are they in whom familiarity with the high
and true breeds contempt! they are judged already.
Yet such was the fame of the new prophet, that even
they were willing to hear in the synagogue what he
had to say to them thence to determine for
themselves what claim he had to an honourable reception.
But the eye of their judgment was not single, therefore
was their body full of darkness. Should Nazareth
indeed prove, to their self-glorifying satisfaction,
the city of the great Prophet, they were more than
ready to grasp at the renown of having produced him:
he was indeed the great Prophet, and within a few
minutes they would have slain him for the honour of
Israel. In the ignoble even the love of their
country partakes largely of the ignoble.
There was a shadow of the hateless
vengeance of God in the expulsion of the dishonest
dealers from the temple with which the Lord initiated
his mission: that was his first parable to Jerusalem;
to Nazareth he comes with the sweetest words of the
prophet of hope in his mouth good tidings
of great joy of healing and sight and liberty;
followed by the godlike announcement, that what the
prophet had promised he was come to fulfil. His
heart, his eyes, his lips, his hands his
whole body is full of gifts for men, and that day
was that scripture fulfilled in their ears. The
prophecy had gone before that he should save his people
from their sins; he brings an announcement they will
better understand: he is come, he says, to deliver
men from sorrow and pain, ignorance and oppression,
everything that makes life hard and unfriendly.
What a gracious speech, what a daring pledge to a
world whelmed in tyranny and wrong! To the women
of it, I imagine, it sounded the sweetest, in them
woke the highest hopes. They had scarce had a
hearing when the Lord came; and thereupon things began
to mend with them, and are mending still, for the
Lord is at work, and will be. He is the refuge
of the oppressed. By its very woes, as by bitterest
medicine, he is setting the world free from sin and
woe. This very hour he is curing its disease,
the symptoms of which are so varied and so painful;
working none the less faithfully that the sick, taking
the symptoms for the disease, cry out against the
incompetence of their physician. ’What power
can heal the broken-hearted?’ they cry.
And indeed it takes a God to do it, but the God is
here! In yet better words than those of the prophet,
spoken straight from his own heart, he cries:
’Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy
laden, and I will give you rest.’ He calls
to him every heart knowing its own bitterness, speaks
to the troubled consciousness of every child of the
Father. He is come to free us from everything
that makes life less than bliss essential. No
other could be a gospel worthy of the God of men.
Every one will, I presume, confess
to more or less misery. Its apparent source may
be this or that; its real source is, to use a poor
figure, a dislocation of the juncture between the
created and the creating life. This primal evil
is the parent of evils unnumbered, hence of miseries
multitudinous, under the weight of which the arrogant
man cries out against life, and goes on to misuse
it, while the child looks around for help and
who shall help him but his father! The Father
is with him all the time, but it may be long ere the
child knows himself in his arms. His heart may
be long troubled as well as his outer life. The
dank mists of doubtful thought may close around his
way, and hide from him the Light of the world! cold
winds from the desert of foiled endeavour may sorely
buffet and for a time baffle his hope; but every now
and then the blue pledge of a great sky will break
through the clouds over his head; and a faint aurora
will walk his darkest East. Gradually he grows
more capable of imagining a world in which every good
thing thinkable may be a fact. Best of all, the
story of him who is himself the good news, the gospel
of God, becomes not only more and more believable to
his heart, but more and more ministrant to his life
of conflict, and his assurance of a living father
who hears when his children cry. The gospel according
to this or that expounder of it, may repel him unspeakably;
the gospel according to Jesus Christ, attracts him
supremely, and ever holds where it has drawn him.
To the priest, the scribe, the elder, exclaiming against
his self-sufficiency in refusing what they teach, he
answers, ’It is life or death to me. Your
gospel I cannot take. To believe as you would
have me believe, would be to lose my God. Your
God is no God to me. I do not desire him.
I would rather die the death than believe in such
a God. In the name of the true God, I cast your
gospel from me; it is no gospel, and to believe it
would be to wrong him in whom alone lies my hope.’
‘But to believe in such a man,’
he might go on to say, ’with such a message,
as I read of in the New Testament, is life from the
dead. I have yielded myself, to live no more
in the idea of self, but with the life of God.
To him I commit the creature he has made, that he may
live in it, and work out its life develop
it according to the idea of it in his own creating
mind. I fall in with his ways for me. I believe
in him. I trust him. I try to obey him.
I look to be rendered capable of and receive a pure
vision of his will, freedom from the prison-house of
my limitation, from the bondage of a finite existence.
For the finite that dwells in the infinite and in
which the infinite dwells, is finite no longer.
Those who are thus children indeed, are little Gods,
the divine brood of the infinite Father. No mere
promise of deliverance from the consequences of sin,
would be any gospel to me. Less than the liberty
of a holy heart, less than the freedom of the Lord
himself, will never satisfy one human soul. Father,
set me free in the glory of thy will, so that I will
only as thou willest. Thy will be at once thy
perfection and mine. Thou alone art deliverance absolute
safety from every cause and kind of trouble that ever
existed, anywhere now exists, or ever can exist in
thy universe.’
But the people of the Lord’s
town, to whom he read, appropriating them, the gracious
words of the prophet, were of the wise and prudent
of their day. With one and the same breath, they
seem to cry, ’These things are good, it is true,
but they must come after our way. We must have
the promise to our fathers fulfilled that
we shall rule the world, the chosen of God, the children
of Abraham and Israel. We want to be a free people,
manage our own affairs, live in plenty, and do as we
please. Liberty alone can ever cure the woes
of which you speak. We do not need to be better;
we are well enough. Give us riches and honour,
and keep us content with ourselves, that we may be
satisfied with our own likeness, and thou shalt be
the Messiah.’ Never, perhaps, would such
be men’s spoken words, but the prevailing condition
of their minds might often well take form in such
speech. Whereon will they ground their complaint
should God give them their hearts’ desire?
When that desire given closes in upon them with a
torturing sense of slavery; when they find that what
they have imagined their own will, was but a suggestion
they knew not whence; when they discover that life
is not good, yet they cannot die; will they not then
turn and entreat their maker to save them after his
own fashion?
Let us try to understand the brief,
elliptical narrative of what took place in the synagogue
of Nazareth on the occasion of our Lord’s announcement
of his mission.
‘This day,’ said Jesus,
‘is this scripture fulfilled in your ears;’
and went on with his divine talk. We shall yet
know, I trust, what ’the gracious words’
were ‘which proceeded out of his mouth’:
surely some who heard them, still remember them, for
’all bare him witness, and wondered at’
them! How did they bear him witness? Surely
not alone by the intensity of their wondering gaze!
Must not the narrator mean that their hearts bore
witness to the power of his presence, that they felt
the appeal of his soul to theirs, that they said in
themselves, ’Never man spake like this man’?
Must not the light of truth in his face, beheld of
such even as knew not the truth, have lifted their
souls up truthward? Was it not the something
true, common to all hearts, that bore the wondering
witness to the graciousness of his words? Had
not those words found a way to the pure human, that
is, the divine in the men? Was it not therefore
that they were drawn to him all but ready
to accept him? on their own terms, alas,
not his! For a moment he seemed to them a true
messenger, but truth in him was not truth to them:
had he been what they took him for, he would have
been no saviour. They were, however, though partly
by mistake, well disposed toward him, and it was with
a growing sense of being honoured by his relation to
them, and the property they had in him, that they
said, ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’
But the Lord knew what was in their
hearts; he knew the false notion with which they were
almost ready to declare for him; he knew also the
final proof to which they were in their wisdom and
prudence about to subject him. He did not look
likely to be a prophet, seeing he had grown up among
them, and had never shown any credentials: they
had a right to proof positive! They had heard
of wonderful things he had done in other places:
why had they not first of all been done in their
sight? Who had a claim equal to theirs? who so
capable as they to pronounce judgment on his mission
whether false or true: had they not known him
from childhood? His words were gracious, but words
were nothing: he must do something something
wonderful! Without such conclusive, satisfying
proof, Nazareth at least would never acknowledge him!
They were quite ready for the honour
of having any true prophet, such as it seemed not
impossible the son of Joseph might turn out to be,
recognized as their towns-man, one of their own people:
if he were such, theirs was the credit of having produced
him! Then indeed they were ready to bear witness
to him, take his part, adopt his cause, and before
the world stand up for him! As to his being the
Messiah, that was merest absurdity: did they
not all know his father, the carpenter? He might,
however, be the prophet whom so many of the best in
the nation were at the moment expecting! Let
him do something wonderful!
They were not a gracious people, or
a good. The Lord saw their thought, and it was
far from being to his mind. He desired no such
reception as they were at present equal to giving
a prophet. His mighty works were not meant for
such as they to convince them of what they
were incapable of understanding or welcoming!
Those who would not believe without signs and wonders,
could never believe worthily with any number of them,
and none should be given them! His mighty works
were to rouse the love, and strengthen the faith of
the meek and lowly in heart, of such as were ready
to come to the light, and show that they were of the
light. He knew how poor the meaning the Nazarenes
put on the words he had read; what low expectations
they had of the Messiah when most they longed for
his coming. They did not hear the prophet while
he read the prophet! At sight of a few poor little
wonders, nothing to him, to them sufficient to prove
him such a Messiah as they looked for, they
would burst into loud acclaim, and rush to their arms,
eager, his officers and soldiers, to open the one
triumphant campaign against the accursed Romans, and
sweep them beyond the borders of their sacred country.
Their Messiah would make of their nation the redeemed
of the Lord, themselves the favourites of his court,
and the tyrants of the world! Salvation from
their sins was not in their hearts, not in their imaginations,
not at all in their thoughts. They had heard
him read his commission to heal the broken-hearted;
they would rush to break hearts in his name. The
Lord knew them, and their vain expectations. He
would have no such followers no followers
on false conceptions no followers whom wonders
would delight but nowise better! The Nazarenes
were not yet of the sort that needed but one change
to be his people. He had come to give them help;
until they accepted his, they could have none to give
him.
The Lord never did mighty work in
proof of his mission; to help a growing faith in himself
and his father, he would do anything! He healed
those whom healing would deeper heal those
in whom suffering had so far done its work, that its
removal also would carry it on. To the Nazarenes
he would not manifest his power; they were not in a
condition to get good from such manifestation:
it would but confirm their present arrogance and ambition.
Wonderful works can only nourish a faith already existent;
to him who believes without it, a miracle may
be granted. It was the Israelite indeed, whom
the Lord met with miracle: ’Because I said
unto thee, I saw thee under the fig-tree, believest
thou? Thou shalt see the angels of God ascending
and descending on the Son of Man.’ Those
who laughed him to scorn were not allowed to look on
the resurrection of the daughter of Jairus. Peter,
when he would walk on the water, had both permission
and power given him to do so. The widow received
the prophet, and was fed; the Syrian went to the prophet,
and was cured. In Nazareth, because of unbelief,
the Lord could only lay his hands on a few sick folk;
in the rest was none of that leaning toward the truth,
which alone can make room for the help of a miracle.
This they soon made manifest.
The Lord saw them on the point of
challenging a display of his power, and anticipated
the challenge with a refusal.
For the better understanding of his
words, let me presume to paraphrase them: ’I
know you will apply to me the proverb, Physician, heal
thyself, requiring me to prove what is said of me
in Capernaum, by doing the same here; but there is
another proverb, No prophet is accepted in his own
country. Unaccepted I do nothing wonderful.
In the great famine, Elijah was sent to no widow of
the many in Israel, but to a Sidonian; and Elisha
cured no leper of the many in Israel, but Naaman the
Syrian. There are those fit to see signs and
wonders; they are not always the kin of the prophet.’
The Nazarenes heard with indignation.
Their wonder at his gracious words was changed to
bitterest wrath. The very beams of their ugly
religion were party-spirit, exclusiveness, and pride
in the fancied favour of God for them only of all
the nations: to hint at the possibility of a
revelation of the glory of God to a stranger; far more,
to hint that a stranger might be fitter to receive
such a revelation than a Jew, was an offence reaching
to the worst insult; and it was cast in their teeth
by a common man of their own city! ’Thou
art but a well-known carpenter’s son, and dost
thou teach us! Darest thou imply a
divine preference for Capernaum over Nazareth?’
In bad odour with the rest of their countrymen, they
were the prouder of themselves.
The whole synagogue, observe,
rose in a fury. Such a fellow a prophet!
He was worse than the worst of Gentiles! he was a false
Jew! a traitor to his God! a friend of the idol-worshipping
Romans! Away with him! His townsmen led
the van in his rejection by his own. The men of
Nazareth would have forestalled his crucifixion by
them of Jerusalem. What! a Sidonian woman fitter
to receive the prophet than any Jewess! a heathen
worthier to be kept alive by miracle in time of famine,
than a worshipper of the true God! a leper of Damascus
less displeasing to God than the lepers of his chosen
race! It was no longer condescending approval
that shone in their eyes. He a prophet! They
had seen through him! Soon had they found him
out! The moment he perceived it useless to pose
for a prophet with them, who had all along known the
breed of him, he had turned to insult them! He
dared not attempt in his own city the deceptions with
which, by the help of Satan, he had made such a grand
show, and fooled the idiots of Capernaum! He saw
they knew him too well, were too wide-awake to be
cozened by him, and to avoid their expected challenge,
fell to reviling the holy nation. Let him take
the consequences! To the brow of the hill with
him!
How could there be any miracle for
such! They were well satisfied with themselves,
and
Nothing
almost sees miracles
But misery.
Need and the upward look, the mood
ready to believe when and where it can, the embryonic
faith, is dear to Him whose love would have us trust
him. Let any man seek him not in curious
inquiry whether the story of him may be true or cannot
be true in humble readiness to accept him
altogether if only he can, and he shall find him; we
shall not fail of help to believe because we doubt.
But if the questioner be such that the dispersion
of his doubt would but leave him in disobedience, the
Power of truth has no care to effect his conviction.
Why cast out a devil that the man may the better do
the work of the devil? The childlike doubt will,
as it softens and yields, minister nourishment with
all that was good in it to the faith-germ at its heart;
the wise and prudent unbelief will be left to develop
its own misery. The Lord could easily have satisfied
the Nazarenes that he was the Messiah: they would
but have hardened into the nucleus of an army for
the subjugation of the world. To a warfare with
their own sins, to the subjugation of their doing
and desiring to the will of the great Father, all the
miracles in his power would never have persuaded them.
A true convincement is not possible to hearts and
minds like theirs. Not only is it impossible for
a low man to believe a thousandth part of what a noble
man can, but a low man cannot believe anything as
a noble man believes it. The men of Nazareth
could have believed in Jesus as their saviour from
the Romans; as their saviour from their sins they
could not believe in him, for they loved their sins.
The king of heaven came to offer them a share in his
kingdom; but they were not poor in spirit, and the
kingdom of heaven was not for them. Gladly would
they have inherited the earth; but they were not meek,
and the earth was for the lowly children of the perfect
Father.
THE HEIRS OF HEAVEN AND EARTH.
And he opened his mouth and taught
them, saying, ’Blessed are the poor in spirit;
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ ...’Blessed
are the meek; for they shall inherit the earth.’ Matthew
, 3, 5.
The words of the Lord are the seed
sown by the sower. Into our hearts they must
fall that they may grow. Meditation and prayer
must water them, and obedience keep them in the sunlight.
Thus will they bear fruit for the Lord’s gathering.
Those of his disciples, that is, obedient
hearers, who had any experience in trying to live,
would, in part, at once understand them; but as they
obeyed and pondered, the meaning of them would keep
growing. This we see in the writings of the apostles.
It will be so with us also, who need to understand
everything he said neither more nor less than they
to whom first he spoke; while our obligation to understand
is far greater than theirs at the time, inasmuch as
we have had nearly two thousand years’ experience
of the continued coming of the kingdom he then preached:
it is not yet come; it has been all the time, and is
now, drawing slowly nearer.
The sermon on the mount, as it is
commonly called, seems the Lord’s first free
utterance, in the presence of any large assembly, of
the good news of the kingdom. He had been teaching
his disciples and messengers; and had already brought
the glad tidings that his father was their father,
to many besides to Nathanael for one, to
Nicodemus, to the woman of Samaria, to every one he
had cured, every one whose cry for help he had heard:
his epiphany was a gradual thing, beginning, where
it continues, with the individual. It is impossible
even to guess at what number may have heard him on
this occasion: he seems to have gone up the mount
because of the crowd to secure a somewhat
opener position whence he could better speak; and
thither followed him those who desired to be taught
of him, accompanied doubtless by not a few in whom
curiosity was the chief motive. Disciple or gazer,
he addressed the individuality of every one that had
ears to hear. Peter and Andrew, James and John,
are all we know as his recognized disciples, followers,
and companions, at the time; but, while his words
were addressed to such as had come to him desiring
to learn of him, the things he uttered were eternal
truths, life in which was essential for every one
of his father’s children, therefore they were
for all: he who heard to obey, was his disciple.
How different, at the first sound
of it, must the good news have been from the news
anxiously expected by those who waited for the Messiah!
Even the Baptist in prison lay listening after something
of quite another sort. The Lord had to send him
a message, by eye-witnesses of his doings, to remind
him that God’s thoughts are not as our thoughts,
or his ways as our ways that the design
of God is other and better than the expectation of
men. His summary of the gifts he was giving to
men, culminated with the preaching of the good news
to the poor. If John had known these his doings
before, he had not recognized them as belonging to
the Lord’s special mission: the Lord tells
him it is not enough to have accepted him as the Messiah;
he must recognize his doings as the work he had come
into the world to do, and as in their nature so divine
as to be the very business of the Son of God in whom
the Father was well pleased.
Wherein then consisted the goodness
of the news which he opened his mouth to give them?
What was in the news to make the poor glad? Why
was his arrival with such words in his heart and mouth,
the coming of the kingdom?
All good news from heaven, is of truth essential
truth, involving duty, and giving and promising help
to the performance of it. There can be no good
news for us men, except of uplifting love, and no one
can be lifted up who will not rise. If God himself
sought to raise his little ones without their consenting
effort, they would drop from his foiled endeavour.
He will carry us in his arms till we are able to walk;
he will carry us in his arms when we are weary with
walking; he will not carry us if we will not walk.
Very different are the good news Jesus
brings us from certain prevalent representations of
the gospel, founded on the pagan notion that suffering
is an offset for sin, and culminating in the vile assertion
that the suffering of an innocent man, just because
he is innocent, yea perfect, is a satisfaction to
the holy Father for the evil deeds of his children.
As a theory concerning the atonement nothing could
be worse, either intellectually, morally, or spiritually;
announced as the gospel itself, as the good news of
the kingdom of heaven, the idea is monstrous as any
Chinese dragon. Such a so-called gospel is no
gospel, however accepted as God sent by good men of
a certain development. It is evil news, dwarfing,
enslaving, maddening news to the child-heart
of the dreariest damnation. Doubtless some elements
of the gospel are mixed up with it on most occasions
of its announcement; none the more is it the message
received from him. It can be good news only to
such as are prudently willing to be delivered from
a God they fear, but unable to accept the gospel of
a perfect God, in whom to trust perfectly.
The good news of Jesus was just the
news of the thoughts and ways of the Father in the
midst of his family. He told them that the way
men thought for themselves and their children was
not the way God thought for himself and his children;
that the kingdom of heaven was founded, and must at
length show itself founded on very different principles
from those of the kingdoms and families of the world,
meaning by the world that part of the Father’s
family which will not be ordered by him, will not
even try to obey him. The world’s man, its
great, its successful, its honorable man, is he who
may have and do what he pleases, whose strength lies
in money and the praise of men; the greatest in the
kingdom of heaven is the man who is humblest and serves
his fellows the most. Multitudes of men, in no
degree notable as ambitious or proud, hold the ambitious,
the proud man in honour, and, for all deliverance,
hope after some shadow of his prosperity. How
many even of those who look for the world to come,
seek to the powers of this world for deliverance from
its evils, as if God were the God of the world to come
only! The oppressed of the Lord’s time looked
for a Messiah to set their nation free, and make it
rich and strong; the oppressed of our time believe
in money, knowledge, and the will of a people which
needs but power to be in its turn the oppressor.
The first words of the Lord on this occasion were: ’Blessed
are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom
of heaven,’
It is not the proud, it is not the
greedy of distinction, it is not those who gather
and hoard, not those who lay down the law to their
neighbours, not those that condescend, any more than
those that shrug the shoulder and shoot out the lip,
that have any share in the kingdom of the Father.
That kingdom has no relation with or resemblance to
the kingdoms of this world, deals with no one thing
that distinguishes their rulers, except to repudiate
it. The Son of God will favour no smallest ambition,
be it in the heart of him who leans on his bosom.
The kingdom of God, the refuge of the oppressed, the
golden age of the new world, the real Utopia, the
newest yet oldest Atlantis, the home of the children,
will not open its gates to the most miserable who would
rise above his equal in misery, who looks down on
any one more miserable than himself. It is the
home of perfect brotherhood. The poor, the beggars
in spirit, the humble men of heart, the unambitious,
the unselfish; those who never despise men, and never
seek their praises; the lowly, who see nothing to
admire in themselves, therefore cannot seek to be admired
of others; the men who give themselves away these
are the freemen of the kingdom, these are the citizens
of the new Jerusalem. The men who are aware of
their own essential poverty; not the men who are poor
in friends, poor in influence, poor in acquirements,
poor in money, but those who are poor in spirit, who
feel themselves poor creatures; who know nothing
to be pleased with themselves for, and desire nothing
to make them think well of themselves; who know that
they need much to make their life worth living, to
make their existence a good thing, to make them fit
to live; these humble ones are the poor whom the Lord
calls blessed. When a man says, I am low and
worthless, then the gate of the kingdom begins to
open to him, for there enter the true, and this man
has begun to know the truth concerning himself.
Whatever such a man has attained to, he straightway
forgets; it is part of him and behind him; his business
is with what he has not, with the things that lie above
and before him. The man who is proud of anything
he thinks he has reached, has not reached it.
He is but proud of himself, and imagining a cause
for his pride. If he had reached, he would already
have begun to forget. He who delights in contemplating
whereto he has attained, is not merely sliding back;
he is already in the dirt of self-satisfaction.
The gate of the kingdom is closed, and he outside.
The child who, clinging to his Father, dares not think
he has in any sense attained while as yet he is not
as his Father his Father’s heart,
his Father’s heaven is his natural home.
To find himself thinking of himself as above his fellows,
would be to that child a shuddering terror; his universe
would contract around him, his ideal wither on its
throne. The least motion of self-satisfaction,
the first thought of placing himself in the forefront
of estimation, would be to him a flash from the nether
abyss. God is his life and his lord. That
his father should be content with him must be all
his care. Among his relations with his neighbour,
infinitely precious, comparison with his neighbour
has no place. Which is the greater is of no account.
He would not choose to be less than his neighbour;
he would choose his neighbour to be greater than he.
He looks up to every man. Otherwise gifted than
he, his neighbour is more than he. All come from
the one mighty father: shall he judge the live
thoughts of God, which is greater and which is less?
In thus denying, thus turning his back on himself,
he has no thought of saintliness, no thought but of
his father and his brethren. To such a child heaven’s
best secrets are open. He clambers about the throne
of the Father unrebuked; his back is ready for the
smallest heavenly playmate; his arms are an open refuge
for any blackest little lost kid of the Father’s
flock; he will toil with it up the heavenly stair,
up the very steps of the great white throne, to lay
it on the Father’s knees. For the glory
of that Father is not in knowing himself God, but in
giving himself away in creating and redeeming
and glorifying his children.
The man who does not house self, has
room to be his real self God’s eternal
idea of him. He lives eternally; in virtue of
the creative power present in him with momently, unimpeded
creation, he is. How should there be in
him one thought of ruling or commanding or surpassing!
He can imagine no bliss, no good in being greater
than some one else. He is unable to wish himself
other than he is, except more what God made him for,
which is indeed the highest willing of the will of
God. His brother’s wellbeing is essential
to his bliss. The thought of standing higher
in the favour of God than his brother, would make him
miserable. He would lift every brother to the
embrace of the Father. Blessed are the poor in
spirit, for they are of the same spirit as God, and
of nature the kingdom of heaven is theirs.
‘Blessed are the meek, for they
shall inherit the earth,’ expresses the same
principle: the same law holds in the earth as
in the kingdom of heaven. How should it be otherwise?
Has the creator of the ends of the earth ceased to
rule it after his fashion, because his rebellious
children have so long, to their own hurt, vainly endeavoured
to rule it after theirs? The kingdom of heaven
belongs to the poor; the meek shall inherit the earth.
The earth as God sees it, as those to whom the kingdom
of heaven belongs also see it, is good, all good, very
good, fit for the meek to inherit; and one day they
shall inherit it not indeed as men of the
world count inheritance, but as the maker and owner
of the world has from the first counted it. So
different are the two ways of inheriting, that one
of the meek may be heartily enjoying his possession,
while one of the proud is selfishly walling him out
from the spot in it he loves best.
The meek are those that do not assert
themselves, do not defend themselves, never dream
of avenging themselves, or of returning aught but
good for evil. They do not imagine it their business
to take care of themselves. The meek man may
indeed take much thought, but it will not be for himself.
He never builds an exclusive wall, shuts any honest
neighbour out. He will not always serve the wish,
but always the good of his neighbour. His service
must be true service. Self shall be no umpire
in affair of his. Man’s consciousness of
himself is but a shadow: the meek man’s
self always vanishes in the light of a real presence.
His nature lies open to the Father of men, and to
every good impulse is as it were empty. No bristling
importance, no vain attendance of fancied rights and
wrongs, guards his door, or crowds the passages of
his house; they are for the angels to come and go.
Abandoned thus to the truth, as the sparks from the
gleaming river dip into the flowers of Dante’s
unperfected vision, so the many souls of the visible
world, lights from the father of lights, enter his
heart freely; and by them he inherits the earth he
was created to inherit possesses it as his
father made him capable of possessing, and the earth
of being possessed. Because the man is meek,
his eye is single; he sees things as God sees them,
as he would have his child see them: to confront
creation with pure eyes is to possess it.
How little is the man able to make
his own, who would ravish all! The man who, by
the exclusion of others from the space he calls his,
would grasp any portion of the earth as his own, befools
himself in the attempt. The very bread he has
swallowed cannot so in any real sense be his.
There does not exist such a power of possessing as
he would arrogate. There is not such a sense
of having as that of which he has conceived the shadow
in his degenerate and lapsing imagination. The
real owner of his demesne is that pedlar passing his
gate, into a divine soul receiving the sweetnesses
which not all the greed of the so-counted possessor
can keep within his walls: they overflow the cup-lip
of the coping, to give themselves to the footfarer.
The motions aerial, the sounds, the odours of those
imprisoned spaces, are the earnest of a possession
for which is ever growing his power of possessing.
In no wise will such inheritance interfere with the
claim of the man who calls them his. Each possessor
has them his, as much as each in his own way is capable
of possessing them. For possession is determined
by the kind and the scope of the power of possessing;
and the earth has a fourth dimension of which the
mere owner of its soil knows nothing.
The child of the maker is naturally
the inheritor. But if the child try to possess
as a house the thing his father made an organ, will
he succeed in so possessing it? Or if he do nestle
in a corner of its case, will he oust thereby the
Lord of its multiplex harmony, sitting regnant on
the seat of sway, and drawing with ‘volant touch’
from the house of the child the liege homage of its
rendered wealth? To the poverty of such a child
are all those left, who think to have and to hold after
the corrupt fancies of a greedy self.
We cannot see the world as God means
it, save in proportion as our souls are meek.
In meekness only are we its inheritors. Meekness
alone makes the spiritual retina pure to receive God’s
things as they are, mingling with them neither imperfection
nor impurity of its own. A thing so beheld that
it conveys to me the divine thought issuing in its
form, is mine; by nothing but its mediation between
God and my life, can anything be mine. The man
so dull as to insist that a thing is his because he
has bought it and paid for it, had better bethink
himself that not all the combined forces of law, justice,
and goodwill, can keep it his; while even death cannot
take the world from the man who possesses it as alone
the maker of him and it cares that he should possess
it. This man leaves it, but carries it with him;
that man carries with him only its loss. He passes,
unable to close hand or mouth upon any portion of it.
Its ownness to him was but the changes he could
make in it, and the nearness into which he could bring
it to the body he lived in. That body the earth
in its turn possesses now, and it lies very still,
changing nothing, but being changed. Is this
the fine of the great buyer of land, to have his fine
pate full of fine dirt? In the soul of the meek,
the earth remains an endless possession his
because he who made it is his his as nothing
but his maker could ever be the creature’s.
He has the earth by his divine relation to him who
sent it forth from him as a tree sends out its leaves.
To inherit the earth is to grow ever more alive to
the presence, in it and in all its parts, of him who
is the life of men. How far one may advance in
such inheritance while yet in the body, will simply
depend on the meekness he attains while yet in the
body; but it may be, as Frederick Denison Maurice,
the servant of God, thought while yet he was with
us, that the new heavens and the new earth are the
same in which we now live, righteously inhabited by
the meek, with their deeper-opened eyes. What
if the meek of the dead be thus possessing it even
now! But I do not care to speculate. It is
enough that the man who refuses to assert himself,
seeking no recognition by men, leaving the care of
his life to the Father, and occupying himself with
the will of the Father, shall find himself, by and
by, at home in the Father’s house, with all
the Father’s property his.
Which is more the possessor of the
world he who has a thousand houses, or
he who, without one house to call his own, has ten
in which his knock at the door would rouse instant
jubilation? Which is the richer the
man who, his large money spent, would have no refuge;
or he for whose necessity a hundred would sacrifice
comfort? Which of the two possessed the earth king
Agrippa or tent-maker Paul?
Which is the real possessor of a book the
man who has its original and every following edition,
and shows, to many an admiring and envying visitor,
now this, now that, in binding characteristic, with
possessor-pride; yea, from secret shrine is able to
draw forth and display the author’s manuscript,
with the very shapes in which his thoughts came forth
to the light of day, or the man who cherishes
one little, hollow-backed, coverless, untitled, bethumbed
copy, which he takes with him in his solitary walks
and broods over in his silent chamber, always finding
in it some beauty or excellence or aid he had not
found before which is to him in truth as
a live companion?
For what makes the thing a book?
Is it not that it has a soul the mind in
it of him who wrote the book? Therefore only can
the book be possessed, for life alone can be the possession
of life. The dead possess their dead only to
bury them.
Does not he then, who loves and understands
his book, possess it with such possession as is impossible
to the other? Just so may the world itself be
possessed either as a volume unread, or
as the wine of a soul, ’the precious life-blood
of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose
to a life beyond life.’ It may be possessed
as a book filled with words from the mouth of God,
or but as the golden-clasped covers of that book;
as an embodiment or incarnation of God himself; or
but as a house built to sell. The Lord loved the
world and the things of the world, not as the men
of the world love them, but finding his father in
everything that came from his father’s heart.
The same spirit, then, is required
for possessing the kingdom of heaven, and for inheriting
the earth. How should it not be so, when the one
Power is the informing life of both? If we are
the Lord’s, we possess the kingdom of heaven,
and so inherit the earth. How many who call themselves
by his name, would have it otherwise: they would
possess the earth and inherit the kingdom! Such
fill churches and chapels on Sundays: anywhere
suits for the worship of Mammon.
Yet verily, earth as well as heaven
may be largely possessed even now.
Two men are walking abroad together;
to the one, the world yields thought after thought
of delight; he sees heaven and earth embrace one another;
he feels an indescribable presence over and in them;
his joy will afterward, in the solitude of his chamber,
break forth in song; to the other, oppressed
with the thought of his poverty, or ruminating how
to make much into more, the glory of the Lord is but
a warm summer day; it enters in at no window of his
soul; it offers him no gift; for, in the very temple
of God, he looks for no God in it. Nor must there
needs be two men to think and feel thus differently.
In what diverse fashion will any one subject
to ever-changing mood see the same world of the same
glad creator! Alas for men, if it changed as we
change, if it grew meaningless when we grow faithless!
Thought for a morrow that may never come, dread of
the dividing death which works for endless companionship,
anger with one we love, will cloud the radiant morning,
and make the day dark with night. At evening,
having bethought ourselves, and returned to him that
feeds the ravens, and watches the dying sparrow, and
says to his children ‘Love one another,’
the sunset splendour is glad over us, the western
sky is refulgent as the court of the Father when the
glad news is spread abroad that a sinner has repented.
We have mourned in the twilight of our little faith,
but, having sent away our sin, the glory of God’s
heaven over his darkening earth has comforted us.
SORROW THE PLEDGE OF JOY.
’Blessed are they that mourn,
for they shall be comforted.’ Matthew
.
Grief, then, sorrow, pain of heart,
mourning, is no partition-wall between man and God.
So far is it from opposing any obstacle to the passage
of God’s light into man’s soul, that the
Lord congratulates them that mourn. There is
no evil in sorrow. True, it is not an essential
good, a good in itself, like love; but it will mingle
with any good thing, and is even so allied to good
that it will open the door of the heart for any good.
More of sorrowful than of joyful men are always standing
about the everlasting doors that open into the presence
of the Most High. It is true also that joy is
in its nature more divine than sorrow; for, although
man must sorrow, and God share in his sorrow, yet
in himself God is not sorrowful, and the ‘glad
creator’ never made man for sorrow: it
is but a stormy strait through which he must pass to
his ocean of peace. He ‘makes the joy the
last in every song.’ Still, I repeat, a
man in sorrow is in general far nearer God than a man
in joy. Gladness may make a man forget his thanksgiving;
misery drives him to his prayers. For we are
not yet, we are only becoming. The endless
day will at length dawn whose every throbbing moment
will heave our hearts Godward; we shall scarce need
to lift them up: now, there are two door-keepers
to the house of prayer, and Sorrow is more on the alert
to open than her grandson Joy.
The gladsome child runs farther afield;
the wounded child turns to go home. The weeper
sits down close to the gate; the lord of life draws
nigh to him from within. God loves not sorrow,
yet rejoices to see a man sorrowful, for in his sorrow
man leaves his heavenward door on the latch, and God
can enter to help him. He loves, I say, to see
him sorrowful, for then he can come near to part him
from that which makes his sorrow a welcome sight.
When Ephraim bemoans himself, he is a pleasant child.
So good a medicine is sorrow, so powerful to slay the
moths that infest and devour the human heart, that
the Lord is glad to see a man weep. He congratulates
him on his sadness. Grief is an ill-favoured
thing, but she is Love’s own child, and her mother
loves her.
The promise to them that mourn, is
not the kingdom of heaven, but that their mourning
shall be ended, that they shall be comforted.
To mourn is not to fight with evil; it is only to
miss that which is good. It is not an essential
heavenly condition, like poorness of spirit or meekness.
No man will carry his mourning with him into heaven or,
if he does, it will speedily be turned either into
joy, or into what will result in joy, namely, redemptive
action.
Mourning is a canker-bitten blossom
on the rose-tree of love. Is there any mourning
worthy the name that has not love for its root?
Men mourn because they love. Love is the life
out of which are fashioned all the natural feelings,
every emotion of man. Love modelled by faith,
is hope; love shaped by wrong, is anger verily
anger, though pure of sin; love invaded by loss, is
grief.
The garment of mourning is oftenest
a winding-sheet; the loss of the loved by death is
the main cause of the mourning of the world. The
Greek word here used to describe the blessed of the
Lord, generally means those that mourn for the
dead. It is not in the New Testament employed
exclusively in this sense, neither do I imagine it
stands here for such only: there are griefs than
death sorer far, and harder far to comfort harder
even for God himself, with whom all things are possible;
but it may give pleasure to know that the promise of
comfort to those that mourn, may specially apply to
those that mourn because their loved have gone out
of their sight, and beyond the reach of their cry.
Their sorrow, indeed, to the love divine, involves
no difficulty; it is a small matter, easily met.
The father, whose elder son is ever with him, but
whose younger is in a far country, wasting his substance
with riotous living, is unspeakably more to be pitied,
and is harder to help, than that father both of whose
sons lie in the sleep of death.
Much of what goes by the name of comfort,
is merely worthless; and such as could be comforted
by it, I should not care to comfort. Let time
do what it may to bring the ease of oblivion; let
change of scene do what in it lies to lead thought
away from the vanished; let new loves bury grief in
the grave of the old love: consolation of such
sort could never have crossed the mind of Jesus.
Would The Truth call a man blessed because his pain
would sooner or later depart, leaving him at best no
better than before, and certainly poorer not
only the beloved gone, but the sorrow for him too,
and with the sorrow the love that had caused the sorrow?
Blessed of God because restored to an absence of sorrow?
Such a God were fitly adored only where not one heart
worshipped in spirit and in truth.
‘The Lord means of course,’
some one may say, ’that the comfort of the mourners
will be the restoration of that which they have lost.
He means, “Blessed are ye although ye mourn,
for your sorrow will be turned into joy."’
Happy are they whom nothing less than
such restoration will comfort! But would such
restoration be comfort enough for the heart of Jesus
to give? Was ever love so deep, so pure, so perfect,
as to be good enough for him? And suppose the
love between the parted two had been such, would the
mere restoration in the future of that which once he
had, be ground enough for so emphatically proclaiming
the man blessed now, blessed while yet in the midnight
of his loss, and knowing nothing of the hour of his
deliverance? To call a man blessed in his
sorrow because of something to be given him, surely
implies a something better than what he had before!
True, the joy that is past may have been so great that
the man might well feel blessed in the merest hope
of its restoration; but would that be meaning enough
for the word in the mouth of the Lord? That the
interruption of his blessedness was but temporary,
would hardly be fit ground for calling the man blessed
in that interruption. Blessed is a strong word,
and in the mouth of Jesus means all it can mean.
Can his saying here mean less than ’Blessed
are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted with
a bliss well worth all the pain of the medicinal sorrow’?
Besides, the benediction surely means that the man
is blessed because of his condition of mourning,
not in spite of it. His mourning is surely a
part at least of the Lord’s ground for congratulating
him: is it not the present operative means whereby
the consolation is growing possible? In a word,
I do not think the Lord would be content to call a
man blessed on the mere ground of his going to be
restored to a former bliss by no means perfect; I think
he congratulated the mourners upon the grief they
were enduring, because he saw the excellent glory
of the comfort that was drawing nigh; because he knew
the immeasurably greater joy to which the sorrow was
at once clearing the way and conducting the mourner.
When I say greater, God forbid I should mean
other! I mean the same bliss, divinely enlarged
and divinely purified passed again through
the hands of the creative Perfection. The Lord
knew all the history of love and loss; beheld throughout
the universe the winged Love discrowning the skeleton
Fear. God’s comfort must ever be larger
than man’s grief, else were there gaps in his
Godhood. Mere restoration would leave a hiatus,
barren and growthless, in the development of his children.
But, alas, what a pinched hope, what
miserable expectations, most who call themselves the
Lord’s disciples derive from their notions of
his teaching! Well may they think of death as
the one thing to be right zealously avoided, and for
ever lamented! Who would forsake even the window-less
hut of his sorrow for the poor mean place they imagine
the Father’s house! Why, many of them do
not even expect to know their friends there! do not
expect to distinguish one from another of all the
holy assembly! They will look in many faces, but
never to recognize old friends and lovers! A
fine saviour of men is their Jesus! Glorious
lights they shine in the world of our sorrow, holding
forth a word of darkness, of dismallest death!
Is the Lord such as they believe him? ‘Good-bye,
then, good Master!’ cries the human heart.
’I thought thou couldst save me, but, alas,
thou canst not. If thou savest the part of our
being which can sin, thou lettest the part that can
love sink into hopeless perdition: thou art not
he that should come; I look for another! Thou
wouldst destroy and not save me! Thy father is
not my father; thy God is not my God! Ah, to
whom shall we go? He has not the words of eternal
life, this Jesus, and the universe is dark as chaos!
O father, this thy son is good, but we need a greater
son than he. Never will thy children love thee
under the shadow of this new law, that they are not
to love one another as thou lovest them!’ How
does that man love God of what kind is
the love he bears him who is unable to believe
that God loves every throb of every human heart toward
another? Did not the Lord die that we should
love one another, and be one with him and the Father,
and is not the knowledge of difference essential to
the deepest love? Can there be oneness without
difference? harmony without distinction? Are
all to have the same face? then why faces at all?
If the plains of heaven are to be crowded with the
same one face over and over for ever, but one moment
will pass ere by monotony bliss shall have grown ghastly.
Why not perfect spheres of featureless ivory rather
than those multitudinous heads with one face!
Or are we to start afresh with countenances all new,
each beautiful, each lovable, each a revelation of
the infinite father, each distinct from every other,
and therefore all blending toward a full revealing but
never more the dear old precious faces, with its whole
story in each, which seem, at the very thought of
them, to draw our hearts out of our bosoms? Were
they created only to become dear, and be destroyed?
Is it in wine only that the old is better? Would
such a new heaven be a thing to thank God for?
Would this be a prospect on which the Son of Man would
congratulate the mourner, or at which the mourner
for the dead would count himself blessed? It is
a shame that such a preposterous, monstrous unbelief
should call for argument.
A heaven without human love it were
inhuman, and yet more undivine to desire; it ought
not to be desired by any being made in the image of
God. The lord of life died that his father’s
children might grow perfect in love might
love their brothers and sisters as he loved them:
is it to this end that they must cease to know one
another? To annihilate the past of our earthly
embodiment, would be to crush under the heel of an
iron fate the very idea of tenderness, human or divine.
We shall all doubtless be changed,
but in what direction? to something less,
or to something greater? to something that
is less we, which means degradation? to something
that is not we, which means annihilation? or to something
that is more we, which means a farther development
of the original idea of us, the divine germ of us,
holding in it all we ever were, all we ever can and
must become? What is it constitutes this or that
man? Is it what he himself thinks he is?
Assuredly not. Is it what his friends at any given
moment think him? Far from it. In which
of his changing moods is he more himself? Loves
any lover so little as to desire no change
in the person loved no something different
to bring him or her closer to the indwelling ideal?
In the loveliest is there not something not like her something
less lovely than she some little thing
in which a change would make her, not less, but more
herself? Is it not of the very essence of the
Christian hope, that we shall be changed from much
bad to all good? If a wife so love that she would
keep every opposition, every inconsistency in her
husband’s as yet but partially harmonious character,
she does not love well enough for the kingdom of heaven.
If its imperfections be essential to the individuality
she loves, and to the repossession of her joy in it,
she may be sure that, if he were restored to her as
she would have him, she would soon come to love him
less perhaps to love him not at all; for
no one who does not love perfection, will ever keep
constant in loving. Fault is not lovable; it
is only the good in which the alien fault dwells that
causes it to seem capable of being loved. Neither
is it any man’s peculiarities that make him
beloved; it is the essential humanity underlying those
peculiarities. They may make him interesting,
and, where not offensive, they may come to be loved
for the sake of the man; but in themselves they are
of smallest account.
We must not however confound peculiarity
with diversity. Diversity is in and from God;
peculiarity in and from man. The real man is the
divine idea of him; the man God had in view when he
began to send him forth out of thought into thinking;
the man he is now working to perfect by casting out
what is not he, and developing what is he. But
in God’s real men, that is, his ideal men, the
diversity is infinite; he does not repeat his creations;
every one of his children differs from every other,
and in every one the diversity is lovable. God
gives in his children an analysis of himself, an analysis
that will never be exhausted. It is the original
God-idea of the individual man that will at length
be given, without spot or blemish, into the arms of
love.
Such, surely, is the heart of the
comfort the Lord will give those whose love is now
making them mourn; and their present blessedness must
be the expectation of the time when the true lover
shall find the restored the same as the lost with
precious differences: the things that were not
like the true self, gone or going; the things that
were loveliest, lovelier still; the restored not merely
more than the lost, but more the person lost than
he or she that was lost. For the things which
made him or her what he or she was, the things that
rendered lovable, the things essential to the person,
will be more present, because more developed.
Whether or not the Lord was here thinking
specially of the mourners for the dead, as I think
he was, he surely does not limit the word of comfort
to them, or wish us to believe less than that his father
has perfect comfort for every human grief. Out
upon such miserable theologians as, instead of receiving
them into the good soil of a generous heart, to bring
forth truth an hundred fold, so cut and pare the words
of the Lord as to take the very life from them, quenching
all their glory and colour in their own inability
to believe, and still would have the dead letter of
them accepted as the comfort of a creator to the sore
hearts he made in his own image! Here, ’as
if they were God’s spies,’ some such would
tell us that the Lord proclaims the blessedness of
those that mourn for their sins, and of them only.
What mere honest man would make a promise which was
all a reservation, except in one unmentioned point!
Assuredly they who mourn for their sins will be gloriously
comforted, but certainly such also as are bowed down
with any grief. The Lord would have us know that
sorrow is not a part of life; that it is but a wind
blowing throughout it, to winnow and cleanse.
Where shall the woman go whose child is at the point
of death, or whom the husband of her youth has forsaken,
but to her Father in heaven? Must she keep away
until she knows herself sorry for her sins? How
should that woman care to be delivered from her sins,
how could she accept any comfort, who believed the
child of her bosom lost to her for ever? Would
the Lord have such a one be of good cheer, of merry
heart, because her sins were forgiven her? Would
such a mother be a woman of whom the saviour of men
might have been born? If a woman forget the child
she has borne and nourished, how shall she remember
the father from whom she has herself come? The
Lord came to heal the broken-hearted; therefore he
said, ‘Blessed are the mourners.’
Hope in God, mother, for the deadest of thy children,
even for him who died in his sins. Thou mayest
have long to wait for him but he will be
found. It may be, thou thyself wilt one day be
sent to seek him and find him. Rest thy hope
on no excuse thy love would make for him, neither upon
any quibble theological or sacerdotal; hope on in
him who created him, and who loves him more than thou.
God will excuse him better than thou, and his uncovenanted
mercy is larger than that of his ministers. Shall
not the Father do his best to find his
prodigal? the good shepherd to find his lost sheep?
The angels in his presence know the Father, and watch
for the prodigal. Thou shalt be comforted.
There is one phase of our mourning
for the dead which I must not leave unconsidered,
seeing it is the pain within pain of all our mourning the
sorrow, namely, with its keen recurrent pangs because
of things we have said or done, or omitted to say
or do, while we companied with the departed.
The very life that would give itself to the other,
aches with the sense of having, this time and that,
not given what it might. We cast ourselves at
their feet, crying, Forgive me, my heart’s own!
but they are pale with distance, and do not seem to
hear. It may be that they are longing in like
agony of love after us, but know better, or perhaps
only are more assured than we, that we shall be comforted
together by and by.
Bethink thee, brother, sister, I say;
bethink thee of the splendour of God, and answer Would
he be perfect if in his restitution of all things
there were no opportunity for declaring our bitter
grief and shame for the past? no moment in which to
sob Sister, brother, I am thy slave? no
room for making amends? At the same time, when
the desired moment comes, one look in the eyes may
be enough, and we shall know one another even as God
knows us. Like the purposed words of the prodigal
in the parable, it may be that the words of our confession
will hardly find place. Heart may so speak to
heart as to forget there were such things. Mourner,
hope in God, and comfort where thou canst, and the
lord of mourners will be able to comfort thee the
sooner. It may be thy very severity with thyself,
has already moved the Lord to take thy part.
Such as mourn the loss of love, such
from whom the friend, the brother, the lover, has
turned away what shall I cry to them? You
too shall be comforted only hearken:
Whatever selfishness clouds the love that mourns the
loss of love, that selfishness must be taken out of
it burned out of it even by pain extreme,
if such be needful. By cause of that in thy love
which was not love, it may be thy loss has come; anyhow,
because of thy love’s defect, thou must suffer
that it may be supplied. God will not, like the
unjust judge, avenge thee to escape the cry that troubles
him. No crying will make him comfort thy selfishness.
He will not render thee incapable of loving truly.
He despises neither thy love though mingled with selfishness,
nor thy suffering that springs from both; he will
disentangle thy selfishness from thy love, and cast
it into the fire. His cure for thy selfishness
at once and thy suffering, is to make thee love more and
more truly; not with the love of love, but with the
love of the person whose lost love thou bemoanest.
For the love of love is the love of thyself. Begin
to love as God loves, and thy grief will assuage;
but for comfort wait his time. What he will do
for thee, he only knows. It may be thou wilt never
know what he will do, but only what he has done:
it was too good for thee to know save by receiving
it. The moment thou art capable of it, thine it
will be.
One thing is clear in regard to every
trouble that the natural way with it is
straight to the Father’s knee. The Father
is father for his children, else why did he
make himself their father? Wouldst thou not,
mourner, be comforted rather after the one eternal
fashion the child by the father than
in such poor temporary way as would but leave thee
the more exposed to thy worst enemy, thine own unreclaimed
self? an enemy who has but this one good
thing in him that he will always bring thee
to sorrow!
The Lord has come to wipe away our
tears. He is doing it; he will have it done as
soon as he can; and until he can, he would have them
flow without bitterness; to which end he tells us
it is a blessed thing to mourn, because of the comfort
on its way. Accept his comfort now, and so prepare
for the comfort at hand. He is getting you ready
for it, but you must be a fellow worker with him,
or he will never have done. He must have
you pure in heart, eager after righteousness, a very
child of his father in heaven.
GOD’S FAMILY.
‘Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they shall see God.’ ’Blessed
are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness,
for they shall be filled.’ ’Blessed
are the peace-makers, for they shall be called the
children of God.’ Matthew , 6, 9.
The cry of the deepest in man has
always been, to see God. It was the cry of Moses
and the cry of Job, the cry of psalmist and of prophet;
and to the cry, there has ever been faintly heard
a far approach of coming answer. In the fullness
of time the Son appears with the proclamation that
a certain class of men shall behold the Father:
’Blessed are the pure in heart,’ he cries,
‘for they shall see God.’ He who saw
God, who sees him now, who always did and always will
see him, says, ’Be pure, and you also shall
see him.’ To see God was the Lord’s
own, eternal, one happiness; therefore he knew that
the essential bliss of the creature is to behold the
face of the creator. In that face lies the mystery
of a man’s own nature, the history of a man’s
own being. He who can read no line of it, can
know neither himself nor his fellow; he only who knows
God a little, can at all understand man. The blessed
in Dante’s Paradise ever and always read each
other’s thoughts in God. Looking to him,
they find their neighbour. All that the creature
needs to see or know, all that the creature can see
or know, is the face of him from whom he came.
Not seeing and knowing it, he will never be at rest;
seeing and knowing it, his existence will yet indeed
be a mystery to him and an awe, but no more a dismay.
To know that it is, and that it has power neither to
continue nor to cease, must to any soul alive enough
to appreciate the fact, be merest terror, save also
it knows one with it the Power by which it exists.
From the man who comes to know and feel that Power
in him and one with him, loneliness, anxiety, and
fear vanish; he is no more an orphan without a home,
a little one astray on the cold waste of a helpless
consciousness. ‘Father,’ he cries,
’hold me fast to thy creating will, that I may
know myself one with it, know myself its outcome,
its willed embodiment, and rejoice without trembling.
Be this the delight of my being, that thou hast willed,
hast loved me forth; let me know that I am thy child,
born to obey thee. Dost thou not justify thy
deed to thyself by thy tenderness toward me? dost thou
not justify it to thy child by revealing to him his
claim on thee because of thy disparture of him from
thyself, because of his utter dependence on thee?
Father, thou art in me, else I could not be in thee,
could have no house for my soul to dwell in, or any
world in which to walk abroad,’
These truths are, I believe, the very
necessities of fact, but a man does not therefore,
at a given moment, necessarily know them. It is
absolutely necessary, none the less, to his real being,
that he should know these spiritual relations in which
he stands to his Origin; yea, that they should be
always present and potent with him, and become the
heart and sphere and all-pervading substance of his
consciousness, of which they are the ground and foundation.
Once to have seen them, is not always to see them.
There are times, and those times many, when the cares
of this world with no right to any part
in our thought, seeing either they are unreasonable
or God imperfect so blind the eyes of the
soul to the radiance of the eternally true, that they
see it only as if it ought to be true, not as if it
must be true; as if it might be true in the region
of thought, but could not be true in the region of
fact. Our very senses, filled with the things
of our passing sojourn, combine to cast discredit
upon the existence of any world for the sake of which
we are furnished with an inner eye, an eternal ear.
But had we once seen God face to face, should we not
be always and for ever sure of him? we have had but
glimpses of the Father. Yet, if we had seen God
face to face, but had again become impure of heart if
such a fearful thought be a possible idea we
should then no more believe that we had ever beheld
him. A sin-beclouded soul could never recall the
vision whose essential verity was its only possible
proof. None but the pure in heart see God; only
the growing-pure hope to see him. Even those who
saw the Lord, the express image of his person, did
not see God. They only saw Jesus and
then but the outside Jesus, or a little more.
They were not pure in heart; they saw him and did
not see him. They saw him with their eyes, but
not with those eyes which alone can see God. Those
were not born in them yet. Neither the eyes of
the resurrection-body, nor the eyes of unembodied
spirits can see God; only the eyes of that eternal
something that is of the very essence of God, the
thought-eyes, the truth-eyes, the love-eyes, can see
him. It is not because we are created and he
uncreated, it is not because of any difference involved
in that difference of all differences, that we cannot
see him. If he pleased to take a shape, and that
shape were presented to us, and we saw that shape,
we should not therefore be seeing God. Even if
we knew it was a shape of God call it even
God himself our eyes rested upon; if we had been told
the fact and believed the report; yet, if we did not
see the Godness, were not capable of recognizing
him, so as without the report to know the vision him,
we should not be seeing God, we should only be seeing
the tabernacle in which for the moment he dwelt.
In other words, not seeing what in the form made it
a form fit for him to take, we should not be seeing
a presence which could only be God.
To see God is to stand on the highest
point of created being. Not until we see God no
partial and passing embodiment of him, but the abiding
presence do we stand upon our own mountain-top,
the height of the existence God has given us, and
up to which he is leading us. That there we should
stand, is the end of our creation. This truth
is at the heart of everything, means all kinds of
completions, may be uttered in many ways; but language
will never compass it, for form will never contain
it. Nor shall we ever see, that is know God perfectly.
We shall indeed never absolutely know man or woman
or child; but we may know God as we never can know
human being as we never can know ourselves.
We not only may, but we must so know him, and it can
never be until we are pure in heart. Then shall
we know him with the infinitude of an ever-growing
knowledge.
‘What is it, then, to be pure in heart?’
I answer, It is not necessary to define
this purity, or to have in the mind any clear form
of it. For even to know perfectly, were that
possible, what purity of heart is, would not be to
be pure in heart.
‘How then am I to try after
it? can I do so without knowing what it is?’
Though you do not know any definition
of purity, you know enough to begin to be pure.
You do not know what a man is, but you know how to
make his acquaintance perhaps even how to
gain his friendship. Your brain does not know
what purity is; your heart has some acquaintance with
purity itself. Your brain in seeking to know what
it is, may even obstruct your heart in bettering its
friendship with it. To know what purity is, a
man must already be pure; but he who can put the question,
already knows enough of purity, I repeat, to begin
to become pure. If this moment you determine
to start for purity, your conscience will at once
tell you where to begin. If you reply, ’My
conscience says nothing definite’; I answer,
’You are but playing with your conscience.
Determine, and it will speak.’
If you care to see God, be pure.
If you will not be pure, you will grow more and more
impure; and instead of seeing God, will at length find
yourself face to face with a vast inane a
vast inane, yet filled full of one inhabitant, that
devouring monster, your own false self. If for
this neither do you care, I tell you there is a Power
that will not have it so; a Love that will make you
care by the consequences of not caring.
You who seek purity, and would have
your fellow-men also seek it, spend not your labour
on the stony ground of their intellect, endeavouring
to explain what purity is; give their imagination
the one pure man; call up their conscience to witness
against their own deeds; urge upon them the grand
resolve to be pure. With the first endeavour of
a soul toward her, Purity will begin to draw nigh,
calling for admittance; and never will a man have
to pause in the divine toil, asking what next is required
of him; the demands of the indwelling Purity will
ever be in front of his slow-labouring obedience.
If one should say, ’Alas, I
am shut out from this blessing! I am not pure
in heart: never shall I see God!’ here is
another word from the same eternal heart to comfort
him, making his grief its own consolation. For
this man also there is blessing with the messenger
of the Father. Unhappy men were we, if God were
the God of the perfected only, and not of the growing,
the becoming! ‘Blessed are they,’
says the Lord, concerning the not yet pure, ’which
do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they
shall be filled.’ Filled with righteousness,
they are pure; pure, they shall see God.
Long ere the Lord appeared, ever since
man was on the earth, nay, surely, from the very beginning,
was his spirit at work in it for righteousness; in
the fullness of time he came in his own human person,
to fulfil all righteousness. He came to his own
of the same mind with himself, who hungered and thirsted
after righteousness. They should be fulfilled
of righteousness!
To hunger and thirst after anything,
implies a sore personal need, a strong desire, a passion
for that thing. Those that hunger and thirst
after righteousness, seek with their whole nature the
design of that nature. Nothing less will give
them satisfaction; that alone will set them at ease.
They long to be delivered from their sins, to send
them away, to be clean and blessed by their absence in
a word to become men, God’s men; for, sin gone,
all the rest is good. It was not in such hearts,
it was not in any heart that the revolting legal fiction
of imputed righteousness arose. Righteousness
itself, God’s righteousness, rightness in their
own being, in heart and brain and hands, is what they
desire. Of such men was Nathanael, in whom was
no guile; such, perhaps, was Nicodemus too, although
he did come to Jesus by night; such was Zacchaeus.
The temple could do nothing to deliver them; but, by
their very futility, its observances had done their
work, developing the desires they could not meet,
making the men hunger and thirst the more after genuine
righteousness: the Lord must bring them this bread
from heaven. With him, the live, original rightness,
in their hearts, they must speedily become righteous.
With that Love their friend, who is at once both the
root and the flower of things, they would strive vigorously
as well as hunger eagerly after righteousness.
Love is the father of righteousness. It could
not be, and could not be hungered after, but for love.
The lord of righteousness himself could not live without
Love, without the Father in him. Every heart was
created for, and can live no otherwise than in and
upon love eternal, perfect, pure, unchanging; and
love necessitates righteousness. In how many souls
has not the very thought of a real God waked a longing
to be different, to be pure, to be right! The
fact that this feeling is possible, that a soul can
become dissatisfied with itself, and desire a change
in itself, reveals God as an essential part of its
being; for in itself the soul is aware that it cannot
be what it would, what it ought that it
cannot set itself right: a need has been generated
in the soul for which the soul can generate no supply;
a presence higher than itself must have caused that
need; a power greater than itself must supply it, for
the soul knows its very need, its very lack, is of
something greater than itself.
But the primal need of the human soul
is yet greater than this; the longing after righteousness
is only one of the manifestations of it; the need
itself is that of existence not self-existent
for the consciousness of the presence of the causing
Self-existent. It is the man’s need of
God. A moral, that is, a human, a spiritual being,
must either be God, or one with God. This truth
begins to reveal itself when the man begins to feel
that he cannot cast out the thing he hates, cannot
be the thing he loves. That he hates thus, that
he loves thus, is because God is in him, but he finds
he has not enough of God. His awaking strength
manifests itself in his sense of weakness, for only
strength can know itself weak. The negative cannot
know itself at all. Weakness cannot know itself
weak. It is a little strength that longs for
more; it is infant righteousness that hungers after
righteousness.
To every soul dissatisfied with itself,
comes this word, at once rousing and consoling, from
the Power that lives and makes him live that
in his hungering and thirsting he is blessed, for
he shall be filled. His hungering and thirsting
is the divine pledge of the divine meal. The
more he hungers and thirsts the more blessed is he;
the more room is there in him to receive that which
God is yet more eager to give than he to have.
It is the miserable emptiness that makes a man hunger
and thirst; and, as the body, so the soul hungers
after what belongs to its nature. A man hungers
and thirsts after righteousness because his nature
needs it needs it because it was made for
it; his soul desires its own. His nature is good,
and desires more good. Therefore, that he is empty
of good, needs discourage no one; for what is emptiness
but room to be filled? Emptiness is need of good;
the emptiness that desires good, is itself good.
Even if the hunger after righteousness should in part
spring from a desire after self-respect, it is not
therefore all false. A man could not even
be ashamed of himself, without some ’feeling
sense’ of the beauty of rightness. By divine
degrees the man will at length grow sick of himself,
and desire righteousness with a pure hunger just
as a man longs to eat that which is good, nor thinks
of the strength it will restore.
To be filled with righteousness, will
be to forget even righteousness itself in the bliss
of being righteous, that is, a child of God. The
thought of righteousness will vanish in the fact of
righteousness. When a creature is just what he
is meant to be, what only he is fit to be; when, therefore,
he is truly himself, he never thinks what he is.
He is that thing; why think about it?
It is no longer outside of him that he should contemplate
or desire it.
God made man, and woke in him the
hunger for righteousness; the Lord came to enlarge
and rouse this hunger. The first and lasting effect
of his words must be to make the hungering and thirsting
long yet more. If their passion grow to a despairing
sense of the unattainable, a hopelessness of ever
gaining that without which life were worthless, let
them remember that the Lord congratulates the hungry
and thirsty, so sure does he know them of being one
day satisfied. Their hunger is a precious thing
to have, none the less that it were a bad thing to
retain unappeased. It springs from the lack but
also from the love of good, and its presence makes
it possible to supply the lack. Happy, then, ye
pining souls! The food you would have, is the
one thing the Lord would have you have, the very thing
he came to bring you! Fear not, ye hungering
and thirsting; you shall have righteousness enough,
though none to spare none to spare, yet
enough to overflow upon every man. See how the
Lord goes on filling his disciples, John and Peter
and James and Paul, with righteousness from within!
What honest soul, interpreting the servant by the
master, and unbiassed by the tradition of them that
would shut the kingdom of heaven against men, can
doubt what Paul means by ‘the righteousness
which is of God by faith’? He was taught
of Jesus Christ through the words he had spoken; and
the man who does not understand Jesus Christ, will
never understand his apostles. What righteousness
could St Paul have meant but the same the Lord would
have men hunger and thirst after the very
righteousness wherewith God is righteous! They
that hunger and thirst after such only righteousness,
shall become pure in heart, and shall see God.
If your hunger seems long in being
filled, it is well it should seem long. But what
if your righteousness tarry, because your hunger after
it is not eager? There are who sit long at the
table because their desire is slow; they eat as who
should say, We need no food. In things spiritual,
increasing desire is the sign that satisfaction is
drawing nearer. But it were better to hunger
after righteousness for ever than to dull the sense
of lack with the husks of the Christian scribes and
lawyers: he who trusts in the atonement instead
of in the father of Jesus Christ, fills his fancy
with the chimeras of a vulgar legalism, not his heart
with the righteousness of God.
Hear another like word of the Lord.
He assures us that the Father hears the cries of his
elect of those whom he seeks to worship
him because they worship in spirit and in truth.
’Shall not God avenge his own elect,’
he says, ‘which cry day and night unto him?’
Now what can God’s elect have to keep on crying
for, night and day, but righteousness? He allows
that God seems to put off answering them, but assures
us he will answer them speedily. Even now he
must be busy answering their prayers; increasing hunger
is the best possible indication that he is doing so.
For some divine reason it is well they should not yet
know in themselves that he is answering their prayers;
but the day must come when we shall be righteous even
as he is righteous; when no word of his will miss
being understood because of our lack of righteousness;
when no unrighteousness shall hide from our eyes the
face of the Father.
These two promises, of seeing God,
and being filled with righteousness, have place between
the individual man and his father in heaven directly;
the promise I now come to, has place between a man
and his God as the God of other men also, as the father
of the whole family in heaven and earth: ’Blessed
are the peace-makers, for they shall be called the
children of God.’
Those that are on their way to see
God, those who are growing pure in heart through hunger
and thirst after righteousness, are indeed the children
of God; but specially the Lord calls those his children
who, on their way home, are peace-makers in the travelling
company; for, surely, those in any family are specially
the children, who make peace with and among the rest.
The true idea of the universe is the whole family in
heaven and earth. All the children in this part
of it, the earth, at least, are not good children;
but however far, therefore, the earth is from being
a true portion of a real family, the life-germ at the
root of the world, that by and for which it exists,
is its relation to God the father of men. For
the development of this germ in the consciousness of
the children, the church whose idea is the
purer family within the more mixed, ever growing as
leaven within the meal by absorption, but which itself
is, alas! not easily distinguishable from the world
it would change is one of the passing means.
For the same purpose, the whole divine family is made
up of numberless human families, that in these, men
may learn and begin to love one another. God,
then, would make of the world a true, divine family.
Now the primary necessity to the very existence of
a family is peace. Many a human family is no family,
and the world is no family yet, for the lack of peace.
Wherever peace is growing, there of course is the
live peace, counteracting disruption and disintegration,
and helping the development of the true essential
family. The one question, therefore, as to any
family is, whether peace or strife be on the increase
in it; for peace alone makes it possible for the binding
grass-roots of life love, namely, and justice to
spread throughout what were else but a wind-blown heap
of still drifting sand. The peace-makers quiet
the winds of the world ever ready to be up and blowing;
they tend and cherish the interlacing roots of the
ministering grass; they spin and twist many uniting
cords, and they weave many supporting bands; they
are the servants, for the truth’s sake, of the
individual, of the family, of the world, of the great
universal family of heaven and earth. They are
the true children of that family, the allies and ministers
of every clasping and consolidating force in it; fellow-workers
they are with God in the creation of the family; they
help him to get it to his mind, to perfect his father-idea.
Ever radiating peace, they welcome love, but do not
seek it; they provoke no jealousy. They are the
children of God, for like him they would be one with
his creatures. His eldest son, his very likeness,
was the first of the family-peace-makers. Preaching
peace to them that were afar off and them that were
nigh, he stood undefended in the turbulent crowd of
his fellows, and it was only over his dead body that
his brothers began to come together in the peace that
will not be broken. He rose again from the dead;
his peace-making brothers, like himself, are dying
unto sin; and not yet have the evil children made their
father hate, or their elder brother flinch.
On the other hand, those whose influence
is to divide and separate, causing the hearts of men
to lean away from each other, make themselves the
children of the evil one: born of God and not
of the devil, they turn from God, and adopt the devil
their father. They set their God-born life against
God, against the whole creative, redemptive purpose
of his unifying will, ever obstructing the one prayer
of the first-born that the children may
be one with him in the Father. Against the heart-end
of creation, against that for which the Son yielded
himself utterly, the sowers of strife, the fomenters
of discord, contend ceaseless. They do their
part with all the other powers of evil to make the
world which the love of God holds together a
world at least, though not yet a family one
heaving mass of dissolution. But they labour in
vain. Through the mass and through it, that it
may cohere, this way and that, guided in dance inexplicable
of prophetic harmony, move the children of God, the
lights of the world, the lovers of men, the fellow-workers
with God, the peace-makers ever weaving,
after a pattern devised by, and known only to him
who orders their ways, the web of the world’s
history. But for them the world would have no
history; it would vanish, a cloud of windborne dust.
As in his labour, so shall these share in the joy of
God, in the divine fruition of victorious endeavour.
Blessed are the peace-makers, for they shall be called
the children of God the children
because they set the Father on the throne of the Family.
The main practical difficulty, with
some at least of the peace-makers, is, how to carry
themselves toward the undoers of peace, the disuniters
of souls. Perhaps the most potent of these are
not those powers of the church visible who care for
canon and dogma more than for truth, and for the church
more than for Christ; who take uniformity for unity;
who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, nor knowing
what spirit they are of; such men, I say, are perhaps
neither the most active nor the most potent force
working for the disintegration of the body of Christ.
I imagine also that neither are the party-liars of
politics the worst foes to divine unity, ungenerous,
and often knowingly false as they are to their opponents,
to whom they seem to have no desire to be honest and
fair. I think, rather, they must be the babbling
liars of the social circle, and the faithless brothers
and unloving sisters of disunited human families.
But why inquire? Every self-assertion, every form
of self-seeking however small or poor, world-noble
or grotesque, is a separating and scattering force.
And these forces are multitudinous, these points of
radial repulsion are innumerable, because of the prevailing
passion of mean souls to seem great, and feel important.
If such cannot hope to attract the attention of the
great-little world, if they cannot even become ‘the
cynosure of neighbouring eyes,’ they will, in
what sphere they may call their own, however small
it be, try to make a party for themselves; each, revolving
on his or her own axis, will attempt to self-centre
a private whirlpool of human monads. To draw such
a surrounding, the partisan of self will sometimes
gnaw asunder the most precious of bonds, poison whole
broods of infant loves. Such real schismatics
go about, where not inventing evil, yet rejoicing in
iniquity; mishearing; misrepresenting; paralyzing affection;
separating hearts. Their chosen calling is that
of the strife-maker, the child of the dividing devil.
They belong to the class of the perfidious,
whom Dante places in the lowest infernal gulf as their
proper home. Many a woman who now imagines herself
standing well in morals and religion, will find herself
at last just such a child of the devil; and her misery
will be the hope of her redemption.
But it is not for her sake that I
write these things: would such a woman recognize
her own likeness, were I to set it down as close as
words could draw it? I am rather as one groping
after some light on the true behaviour toward her
kind. Are we to treat persons known for liars
and strife-makers as the children of the devil or
not? Are we to turn away from them, and refuse
to acknowledge them, rousing an ignorant strife of
tongues concerning our conduct? Are we guilty
of connivance, when silent as to the ambush whence
we know the wicked arrow privily shot? Are we
to call the traitor to account? or are we to give
warning of any sort? I have no answer. Each
must carry the question that perplexes to the Light
of the World. To what purpose is the spirit of
God promised to them that ask it, if not to help them
order their way aright?
One thing is plain that
we must love the strife-maker; another is nearly as
plain that, if we do not love him, we must
leave him alone; for without love there can be no
peace-making, and words will but occasion more strife.
To be kind neither hurts nor compromises. Kindness
has many phases, and the fitting form of it may avoid
offence, and must avoid untruth.
We must not fear what man can do to
us, but commit our way to the Father of the Family.
We must be nowise anxious to defend ourselves; and
if not ourselves because God is our defence, then
why our friends? is he not their defence as much as
ours? Commit thy friend’s cause also to
him who judgeth righteously. Be ready to bear
testimony for thy friend, as thou wouldst to receive
the blow struck at him; but do not plunge into a nest
of scorpions to rescue his handkerchief. Be true
to him thyself, nor spare to show thou lovest and
honourest him; but defence may dishonour: men
may say, What! is thy friend’s esteem then so
small? He is unwise who drags a rich veil from
a cactus-bush.
Whatever our relation, then, with
any peace-breaker, our mercy must ever be within call;
and it may help us against an indignation too strong
to be pure, to remember that when any man is reviled
for righteousness-sake, then is he blessed.
THE REWARD OF OBEDIENCE.
‘Blessed are the merciful, for
they shall obtain mercy.’ ’Blessed
are they which are persecuted for righteousness’
sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed
are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you,
and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely,
for my sake. Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for
great is your reward in heaven; for so persecuted
they the prophets which were before you.’ Matthew,
, 10 11, 12.
Mercy cannot get in where mercy goes
not out. The outgoing makes way for the incoming.
God takes the part of humanity against the man.
The man must treat men as he would have God treat
him. ’If ye forgive men their trespasses,’
the Lord says, ’your heavenly father will also
forgive you; but if ye forgive not men their trespasses,
neither will your father forgive your trespasses.
And in the prophecy of the judgment of the Son of
man, he represents himself as saying, ’Inasmuch
as ye have done it unto one of the least of these
my brethren, ye have done it unto me.’
But the demand for mercy is far from
being for the sake only of the man who needs his neighbour’s
mercy; it is greatly more for the sake of the man
who must show the mercy. It is a small thing to
a man whether or not his neighbour be merciful to
him; it is life or death to him whether or not he
be merciful to his neighbour. The greatest mercy
that can be shown to man, is to make him merciful;
therefore, if he will not be merciful, the mercy of
God must compel him thereto. In the parable of
the king taking account of his servants, he delivers
the unmerciful debtor to the tormentors, ’till
he should pay all that was due unto him.’
The king had forgiven his debtor, but as the debtor
refuses to pass on the forgiveness to his neighbour the
only way to make a return in kind the king
withdraws his forgiveness. If we forgive not men
their trespasses, our trespasses remain. For
how can God in any sense forgive, remit, or send away
the sin which a man insists on retaining? Unmerciful,
we must be given up to the tormentors until we learn
to be merciful. God is merciful: we must
be merciful. There is no blessedness except in
being such as God; it would be altogether unmerciful
to leave us unmerciful. The reward of the merciful
is, that by their mercy they are rendered capable
of receiving the mercy of God yea, God himself,
who is Mercy.
That men may be drawn to taste and
see and understand, the Lord associates reward with
righteousness. The Lord would have men love righteousness,
but how are they to love it without being acquainted
with it? How are they to go on loving it without
a growing knowledge of it? To draw them toward
it that they may begin to know it, and to encourage
them when assailed by the disappointments that accompany
endeavour, he tells them simply a truth concerning
it that in the doing of it, there is great
reward. Let no one start with dismay at the idea
of a reward of righteousness, saying virtue is its
own reward. Is not virtue then a reward?
Is any other imaginable reward worth mentioning beside
it? True, the man may, after this mode or that,
mistake the reward promised; not the less must he
have it, or perish. Who will count himself deceived
by overfulfilment? Would a parent be deceiving
his child in saying, ’My boy, you will have
a great reward if you learn Greek,’ foreseeing
his son’s delight in Homer and Plato now
but a valueless waste in his eyes? When his reward
comes, will the youth feel aggrieved that it is Greek,
and not bank-notes?
The nature indeed of the Lord’s
promised rewards is hardly to be mistaken; yet the
foolish remarks one sometimes hears, make me wish to
point out that neither is the Lord proclaiming an ethical
system, nor does he make the blunder of representing
as righteousness the doing of a good thing because
of some advantage to be thereby gained. When he
promises, he only states some fact that will encourage
his disciples that is, all who learn of
him to meet the difficulties in the way
of doing right and so learning righteousness, his object
being to make men righteous, not to teach them philosophy.
I doubt if those who would, on the ground of mentioned
reward, set aside the teaching of the Lord, are as
anxious to be righteous as they are to prove him unrighteous.
If they were, they would, I think, take more care to
represent him truly; they would make farther search
into the thing, nor be willing that he whom the world
confesses its best man, and whom they themselves,
perhaps, confess their superior in conduct, should
be found less pure in theory than they. Must
the Lord hide from his friends that they will have
cause to rejoice that they have been obedient?
Must he give them no help to counterbalance the load
with which they start on their race? Is he to
tell them the horrors of the persécutions that
await them, and not the sweet sympathies that will
help them through? Was it wrong to assure them
that where he was going they should go also?
The Lord could not demand of them more righteousness
than he does: ’Be ye therefore perfect
as your father in heaven is perfect;’ but not
to help them by word of love, deed of power, and promise
of good, would have shown him far less of a brother
and a saviour. It is the part of the enemy of
righteousness to increase the difficulties in the way
of becoming righteous, and to diminish those in the
way of seeming righteous. Jesus desires no righteousness
for the pride of being righteous, any more than for
advantage to be gained by it; therefore, while requiring
such purity as the man, beforehand, is unable to imagine,
he gives him all the encouragement he can. He
will not enhance his victory by difficulties of
them there are enough but by completeness.
He will not demand the loftiest motives in the yet
far from loftiest soul: to those the soul must
grow. He will hearten the child with promises,
and fulfil them to the contentment of the man.
Men cannot be righteous without love;
to love a righteous man is the best, the only way
to learn righteousness: the Lord gives us himself
to love, and promises his closest friendship to them
that overcome.
God’s rewards are always in
kind. ’I am your father; be my children,
and I will be your father.’ Every obedience
is the opening of another door into the boundless
universe of life. So long as the constitution
of that universe remains, so long as the world continues
to be made by God, righteousness can never fail of
perfect reward. Before it could be otherwise,
the government must have passed into other hands.
The idea of merit is nowise essential
to that of reward. Jesus tells us that the lord
who finds his servant faithful, will make him sit down
to meat, and come forth and serve him; he says likewise,
’When ye have done all, say we are unprofitable
servants; we have done only that which it was our
duty to do.’ Reward is the rebound of Virtue’s
well-served ball from the hand of Love; a sense of
merit is the most sneaking shape that self-satisfaction
can assume. God’s reward lies closed in
all well-doing: the doer of right grows better
and humbler, and comes nearer to God’s heart
as nearer to his likeness; grows more capable of God’s
own blessedness, and of inheriting the kingdoms of
heaven and earth. To be made greater than one’s
fellows is the offered reward of hell, and involves
no greatness; to be made greater than one’s self,
is the divine reward, and involves a real greatness.
A man might be set above all his fellows, to be but
so much less than he was before; a man cannot be raised
a hair’s-breadth above himself, without rising
nearer to God. The reward itself, then, is righteousness;
and the man who was righteous for the sake of such
reward, knowing what it was, would be righteous for
the sake of righteousness, which yet, however,
would not be perfection. But I must distinguish
and divide no farther now.
The reward of mercy is not often of
this world; the merciful do not often receive mercy
in return from their fellows; perhaps they do not
often receive much gratitude. None the less, being
the children of their father in heaven, will they
go on to show mercy, even to their enemies. They
must give like God, and like God be blessed in giving.
There is a mercy that lies in the
endeavour to share with others the best things God
has given: they who do so will be persecuted,
and reviled, and slandered, as well as thanked and
loved and befriended. The Lord not only promises
the greatest possible reward; he tells his disciples
the worst they have to expect. He not only shows
them the fair countries to which they are bound; he
tells them the truth of the rough weather and the
hardships of the way. He will not have them choose
in ignorance. At the same time he strengthens
them to meet coming difficulty, by instructing them
in its real nature. All this is part of his preparation
of them for his work, for taking his yoke upon them,
and becoming fellow-labourers with him in his father’s
vineyard. They must not imagine, because they
are the servants of his father, that therefore they
shall find their work easy; they shall only find the
reward great. Neither will he have them fancy,
when evil comes upon them, that something unforeseen,
unprovided for, has befallen them. It is just
then, on the contrary, that their reward comes nigh:
when men revile them and persecute them, then they
may know that they are blessed. Their suffering
is ground for rejoicing, for exceeding gladness.
The ignominy cast upon them leaves the name of the
Lord’s Father written upon their foreheads,
the mark of the true among the false, of the children
among the slaves. With all who suffer for the
world, persecution is the seal of their patent, a
sign that they were sent: they fill up that which
is behind of the afflictions of Christ for his body’s
sake.
Let us look at the similar words the
Lord spoke in a later address to his disciples, in
the presence of thousands, on the plain, supplemented
with lamentation over such as have what they desire:
St Luke v 26.
’Blessed be ye poor, for
yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that
hunger now, for ye shall be filled. Blessed are
ye that weep now, for ye shall laugh. Blessed
are ye when men shall hate you, and when they shall
separate you from their company, and shall reproach
you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of
Man’s sake. Rejoice ye in that day, and
leap for joy, for behold your reward is great in heaven;
for in the like manner did their fathers unto the prophets.
’But woe unto you that are
rich! for ye have received your consolation.
Woe unto you that are full, for ye shall hunger.
Woe unto you that laugh now, for ye shall mourn and
weep. Woe unto you when all men shall speak well
of you; for so did their fathers to the false prophets.’
On this occasion he uses the word
hunger without limitation. Every true
want, every genuine need, every God-created hunger,
is a thing provided for in the idea of the universe;
but no attempt to fill a void otherwise than the Heart
of the Universe intended and intends, is or can be
anything but a woe. God forgets none of his children the
naughty ones any more than the good. Love and
reward is for the good: love and correction for
the bad. The bad ones will trouble the good, but
shall do them no hurt. The evil a man does to
his neighbour, shall do his neighbour no harm, shall
work indeed for his good; but he himself will have
to mourn for his doing. A sore injury to himself,
it is to his neighbour a cause of jubilation not
for the evil the man does to himself over
that there is sorrow in heaven but for the
good it occasions his neighbour. The poor, the
hungry, the weeping, the hated, may lament their lot
as if God had forgotten them; but God is all the time
caring for them. Blessed in his sight now, they
shall soon know themselves blessed. ’Blessed
are ye that weep now, for ye shall laugh.’ Welcome
words from the glad heart of the Saviour! Do they
not make our hearts burn within us? They
shall be comforted even to laughter! The poor,
the hungry, the weeping, the hated, the persecuted,
are the powerful, the opulent, the merry, the loved,
the victorious of God’s kingdom, to
be filled with good things, to laugh for very delight,
to be honoured and sought and cherished!
But such as have their poor consolation
in this life alas for them! for
those who have yet to learn what hunger is! for those
whose laughter is as the crackling of thorns! for
those who have loved and gathered the praises of men!
for the rich, the jocund, the full-fed! Silent-footed
evil is on its way to seize them. Dives must go
without; Lazarus must have. God’s education
makes use of terrible extremes. There are last
that shall be first, and first that shall be last.
The Lord knew what trials, what tortures
even awaited his disciples after his death; he knew
they would need every encouragement he could give
them to keep their hearts strong, lest in some moment
of dismay they should deny him. If they had denied
him, where would our gospel be? If there are
none able and ready to be crucified for him now, alas
for the age to come! What a poor travesty of
the good news of God will arrive at their doors!
Those whom our Lord felicitates are
all the children of one family; and everything that
can be called blessed or blessing comes of the same
righteousness. If a disciple be blessed because
of any one thing, every other blessing is either his,
or on the way to become his; for he is on the way
to receive the very righteousness of God. Each
good thing opens the door to the one next it, so to
all the rest. But as if these his assurances
and promises and comfortings were not large enough;
as if the mention of any condition whatever might
discourage some humble man of heart with a sense of
unfitness, with the fear, perhaps conviction that
the promise was not for him; as if some one might say,
’Alas, I am proud, and neither poor in spirit
nor meek; I am at times not at all hungry after righteousness;
I am not half merciful, and am very ready to feel
hurt and indignant: I am shut out from every blessing!’
the Lord, knowing the multitudes that can urge nothing
in their own favour, and sorely feel they are not
blessed, looks abroad over the wide world of his brothers
and sisters, and calls aloud, including in the boundless
invitation every living soul with but the one qualification
of unrest or discomfort, ’Come unto me all ye
that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you
rest.’
THE YOKE OF JESUS.
At that time Jesus answered and said, according
to Luke, In that hour Jesus rejoiced in spirit, and
said, ’I thank thee, O Father, Lord
of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things
from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them
unto babes. Even so, Father, for so it seemed
good in thy sight.
’All things are delivered unto
me of my father; and no man knoweth the son,’ according
to Luke, ’who the son is,’ ’but
the father; neither knoweth any man the father,’ according
to Luke, ’who the father is,’ ’save
the son, and he to whomsoever the son will reveal
him.’ Matthew x 27;
Luke , 22.
’Come unto me, all ye that labour,
and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me, for I am meek
and lowly in heart; and ye shall find rest unto your
souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is
light.’ Matthew x 30.
The words of the Lord in the former
two of these paragraphs, are represented, both by
Matthew and by Luke, as spoken after the denunciation
of the cities of Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum;
only in Luke’s narrative, the return of the
seventy is mentioned between; and there the rejoicing
of the Lord over the Father’s revelation of himself
to babes, appears to have reference to the seventy.
The fact that the return of the seventy is not mentioned
elsewhere, leaves us free to suppose that the words
were indeed spoken on that occasion. The circumstances,
however, as circumstances, are to us of little importance,
not being necessary to the understanding of the words.
The Lord makes no complaint against
the wise and prudent; he but recognizes that they
are not those to whom his father reveals his best
things; for which fact and the reasons of it, he thanks,
or praises his father. ’I bless thy will:
I see that thou art right: I am of one mind with
thee:’ something of each of these phases
of meaning seems to belong to the Greek word.
’But why not reveal true things
first to the wise? Are they not the fittest to
receive them?’ Yes, if these things and their
wisdom lie in the same region not otherwise.
No amount of knowledge or skill in physical science,
will make a man the fitter to argue a metaphysical
question; and the wisdom of this world, meaning by
the term, the philosophy of prudence, self-protection,
precaution, specially unfits a man for receiving what
the Father has to reveal: in proportion to our
care about our own well being, is our incapability
of understanding and welcoming the care of the Father.
The wise and the prudent, with all their energy of
thought, could never see the things of the Father
sufficiently to recognize them as true. Their
sagacity labours in earthly things, and so fills their
minds with their own questions and conclusions, that
they cannot see the eternal foundations God has laid
in man, or the consequent necessities of their own
nature. They are proud of finding out things,
but the things they find out are all less than themselves.
Because, however, they have discovered them, they
imagine such things the goal of the human intellect.
If they grant there may be things beyond those, they
either count them beyond their reach, or declare themselves
uninterested in them: for the wise and prudent,
they do not exist. They work only to gather by
the senses, and deduce from what they have so gathered,
the prudential, the probable, the expedient, the protective.
They never think of the essential, of what in itself
must be. They are cautious, wary, discreet, judicious,
circumspect, provident, temporizing. They have
no enthusiasm, and are shy of all forms of it a
clever, hard, thin people, who take things
for the universe, and love of facts for love of truth.
They know nothing deeper in man than mere surface
mental facts and their relations. They do not
perceive, or they turn away from any truth which the
intellect cannot formulate. Zeal for God will
never eat them up: why should it? he is not interesting
to them: theology may be; to such men religion
means theology. How should the treasure of the
Father be open to such? In their hands his rubies
would draw in their fire, and cease to glow.
The roses of paradise in their gardens would blow withered.
They never go beyond the porch of the temple; they
are not sure whether there be any adytum, and
they do not care to go in and see: why indeed
should they? it would but be to turn and come out again.
Even when they know their duty, they must take it
to pieces, and consider the grounds of its claim before
they will render it obedience. All those evil
doctrines about God that work misery and madness, have
their origin in the brains of the wise and prudent,
not in the hearts of the children. These wise
and prudent, careful to make the words of his messengers
rime with their conclusions, interpret the great heart
of God, not by their own hearts, but by their miserable
intellects; and, postponing the obedience which alone
can give power to the understanding, press upon men’s
minds their wretched interpretations of the will of
the Father, instead of the doing of that will upon
their hearts. They call their philosophy the
truth of God, and say men must hold it, or stand outside.
They are the slaves of the letter in all its weakness
and imperfection, and will be until the
spirit of the Word, the spirit of obedience shall
set them free.
The babes must beware lest the wise
and prudent come between them and the Father.
They must yield no claim to authority over their belief,
made by man or community, by church any more than by
synagogue. That alone is for them to believe
which the Lord reveals to their souls as true; that
alone is it possible for them to believe with what
he counts belief. The divine object for which
teacher or church exists, is the persuasion of the
individual heart to come to Jesus, the spirit, to be
taught what he alone can teach.
Terribly has his gospel suffered in
the mouths of the wise and prudent: how would
it be faring now, had its first messages been committed
to persons of repute, instead of those simple fishermen?
It would be nowhere, or, if anywhere, unrecognizable.
From the first we should have had a system founded
on a human interpretation of the divine gospel, instead
of the gospel itself, which would have disappeared.
As it is, we have had one dull miserable human system
after another usurping its place; but, thank God,
the gospel remains! The little child, heedless
of his trailing cloud of glory, and looking about him
aghast in an unknown world, may yet see and run to
the arms open to the children. How often has
not some symbol employed in the New Testament been
forced into the service of argument for one or another
contemptible scheme of redemption, which were no redemption;
while the truth for the sake of which the symbol was
used, the thing meant to be conveyed by it, has lain
unregarded beside the heap of rubbish! Had the
wise and prudent been the confidants of God, I repeat,
the letter would at once have usurped the place of
the spirit; the ministering slave would have been
set over the household; a system of religion, with
its rickety, malodorous plan of salvation, would not
only have at once been put in the place of a living
Christ, but would yet have held that place. The
great brother, the human God, the eternal Son, the
living one, would have been as utterly hidden from
the tearful eyes and aching hearts of the weary and
heavy-laden, as if he had never come from the deeps
of love to call the children home out of the shadows
of a self-haunted universe. But the Father revealed
the Father’s things to his babes; the babes
loved, and began to do them, therewith began to understand
them, and went on growing in the knowledge of them
and in the power of communicating them; while to the
wise and prudent, the deepest words of the most babe-like
of them all, John Boanerges, even now appear but a
finger-worn rosary of platitudes. The babe understands
the wise and prudent, but is understood only by the
babe.
The Father, then, revealed his things
to babes, because the babes were his own little ones,
uncorrupted by the wisdom or the care of this world,
and therefore able to receive them. The others,
though his children, had not begun to be like him,
therefore could not receive them. The Father’s
things could not have got anyhow into their minds
without leaving all their value, all their spirit,
outside the unchildlike place. The babes are
near enough whence they come, to understand a little
how things go in the presence of their father in heaven,
and thereby to interpret the words of the Son.
The child who has not yet ‘walked above a mile
or two from’ his ‘first love,’ is
not out of touch with the mind of his Father.
Quickly will he seal the old bond when the Son himself,
the first of the babes, the one perfect babe of God,
comes to lead the children out of the lovely ‘shadows
of eternity’ into the land of the ‘white
celestial thought.’ As God is the one only
real father, so is it only to God that any one can
be a perfect child. In his garden only can childhood
blossom.
The leader of the great array of little
ones, himself, in virtue of his firstborn childhood,
the first recipient of the revelations of his father,
having thus given thanks, and said why he gave thanks,
breaks out afresh, renewing expression of delight
that God had willed it thus: ‘Even so,
father, for so it seemed good in thy sight!’
I venture to translate, ’Yea, O Father, for
thus came forth satisfaction before thee!’ and
think he meant, ’Yea, Father, for thereat were
all thy angels filled with satisfaction,’ The
babes were the prophets in heaven, and the angels
were glad to find it was to be so upon the earth also;
they rejoiced to see that what was bound in heaven,
was bound on earth; that the same principle held in
each. Compare Matt, xvii and 14; also Luke
x. ’See that ye despise not one of
these little ones; for I say unto you that their angels
in heaven do always behold the face of my father which
is in heaven.... Thus it is not the will before
your father which is in heaven,’ among
the angels who stand before him, I think he means, ’that
one of these little ones should perish.’
’Even so, I say unto you, there is joy in the
presence of the angels of God over one sinner that
repenteth.’
Having thus thanked his father that
he has done after his own ’good and acceptable
and perfect will’, he turns to his disciples,
and tells them that he knows the Father, being his
Son, and that he only can reveal the Father to the
rest of his children: ’All things are delivered
unto me of my father; and no one knoweth the son but
the father; neither knoweth any one the father save
the son, and he to whomsoever the son willeth to reveal
him.’ It is almost as if his mention of
the babes brought his thoughts back to himself and
his father, between whom lay the secret of all life
and all sending yea, all loving. The
relation of the Father and the Son contains the idea
of the universe. Jesus tells his disciples that
his father had no secrets from him; that he knew the
Father as the Father knew him. The Son must know
the Father; he only could know him and
knowing, he could reveal him; the Son could make the
other, the imperfect children, know the Father, and
so become such as he. All things were given unto
him by the Father, because he was the Son of the Father:
for the same reason he could reveal the things of the
Father to the child of the Father. The child-relation
is the one eternal, ever enduring, never changing
relation.
Note that, while the Lord here represents
the knowledge his father and he have each of the other
as limited to themselves, the statement is one of
fact only, not of design or intention: his presence
in the world is for the removal of that limitation.
The Father knows the Son and sends him to us that
we may know him; the Son knows the Father, and dies
to reveal him. The glory of God’s mysteries
is that they are for his children to look
into.
When the Lord took the little child
in the presence of his disciples, and declared him
his representative, he made him the representative
of his father also; but the eternal child alone can
reveal him. To reveal is immeasurably more than
to represent; it is to present to the eyes that know
the true when they see it. Jesus represented God;
the spirit of Jesus reveals God. The represented
God a man may refuse; many refused the Lord; the revealed
God no one can refuse; to see God and to love him
are one. He can be revealed only to the child;
perfectly, to the pure child only. All the discipline
of the world is to make men children, that God may
be revealed to them.
No man, when first he comes to himself,
can have any true knowledge of God; he can only have
a desire after such knowledge. But while he does
not know him at all, he cannot become in his heart
God’s child; so the Father must draw nearer
to him. He sends therefore his first born, who
does know him, is exactly like him, and can represent
him perfectly. Drawn to him, the children receive
him, and then he is able to reveal the Father to them.
No wisdom of the wise can find out God; no words of
the God-loving can reveal him. The simplicity
of the whole natural relation is too deep for the
philosopher. The Son alone can reveal God; the
child alone understand him. The elder brother
companies with the younger, and makes him yet more
a child like himself. He interpenetrates his
willing companion with his obedient glory. He
lets him see how he delights in his father, and lets
him know that God is his father too. He rouses
in his little brother the sense of their father’s
will; and the younger, as he hears and obeys, begins
to see that his elder brother must be the very image
of their father. He becomes more and more of a
child, and more and more the Son reveals to him the
Father. For he knows that to know the Father
is the one thing needful to every child of the Father,
the one thing to fill the divine gulf of his necessity.
To see the Father is the cry of every child-heart
in the universe of the Father is the need,
where not the cry, of every living soul. Comfort
yourselves then, brothers and sisters; he to whom the
Son will reveal him shall know the Father; and the
Son came to us that he might reveal him. ‘Eternal
Brother,’ we cry, ’show us the Father.
Be thyself to us, that in thee we may know him.
We too are his children: let the other children
share with thee in the things of the Father.’
Having spoken to his father first,
and now to his disciples, the Lord turns to the whole
world, and lets his heart overflow: St Matthew
alone has saved for us the eternal cry: ’Come
unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and
I will give you rest.’ ’I know
the Father; come then to me, all ye that labour and
are heavy laden.’ He does not here call
those who want to know the Father; his cry goes far
beyond them; it reaches to the ends of the earth.
He calls those who are weary; those who do not know
that ignorance of the Father is the cause of all their
labour and the heaviness of their burden. ‘Come
unto me,’ he says, ’and I will give you
rest.’
This is the Lord’s own form
of his gospel, more intensely personal and direct,
at the same time of yet wider inclusion, than that
which, at Nazareth, he appropriated from Isaiah; differing
from it also in this, that it is interfused with strongest
persuasion to the troubled to enter into and share
his own eternal rest. I will turn his argument
a little. ’I have rest because I know the
Father. Be meek and lowly of heart toward him
as I am; let him lay his yoke upon you as he lays it
on me. I do his will, not my own. Take on
you the yoke that I wear; be his child like me; become
a babe to whom he can reveal his wonders. Then
shall you too find rest to your souls; you shall have
the same peace I have; you will be weary and heavy
laden no more. I find my yoke easy, my burden
light.’
We must not imagine that, when the
Lord says, ‘Take my yoke upon you,’ he
means a yoke which he lays on those that come to him;
‘my yoke’ is the yoke he wears himself,
the yoke his father lays upon him, the yoke out of
which, that same moment, he speaks, bearing it with
glad patience. ’You must take on you the
yoke I have taken: the Father lays it upon us.’
The best of the good wine remains;
I have kept it to the last. A friend pointed
out to me that the Master does not mean we must take
on us a yoke like his; we must take on us the very
yoke he is carrying.
Dante, describing how, on the first
terrace of Purgatory, he walked stooping, to be on
a level with Oderisi, who went bowed to the ground
by the ponderous burden of the pride he had cherished
on earth, says ’I went walking with
this heavy-laden soul, just as oxen walk in the yoke’:
this picture almost always comes to me with the words
of the Lord, ’Take my yoke upon you, and learn
of me.’ Their intent is, ’Take the
other end of my yoke, doing as I do, being as I am.’
Think of it a moment: to walk in the same
yoke with the Son of Man, doing the same labour with
him, and having the same feeling common to him and
us! This, and nothing else, is offered the man
who would have rest to his soul; is required of the
man who would know the Father; is by the Lord pressed
upon him to whom he would give the same peace which
pervades and sustains his own eternal heart.
But a yoke is for drawing withal:
what load is it the Lord is drawing? Wherewith
is the cart laden which he would have us help him draw?
With what but the will of the eternal, the perfect
Father? How should the Father honour the Son,
but by giving him his will to embody in deed, by making
him hand to his father’s heart! and
hardest of all, in bringing home his children!
Specially in drawing this load must his yoke-fellow
share. How to draw it, he must learn of him who
draws by his side.
Whoever, in the commonest duties that
fall to him, does as the Father would have him do,
bears His yoke along with Jesus; and the Father takes
his help for the redemption of the world for
the deliverance of men from the slavery of their own
rubbish-laden waggons, into the liberty of God’s
husbandmen. Bearing the same yoke with Jesus,
the man learns to walk step for step with him, drawing,
drawing the cart laden with the will of the father
of both, and rejoicing with the joy of Jesus.
The glory of existence is to take up its burden, and
exist for Existence eternal and supreme for
the Father who does his divine and perfect best to
impart his glad life to us, making us sharers of that
nature which is bliss, and that labour which is peace.
He lives for us; we must live for him. The little
ones must take their full share in the great Father’s
work: his work is the business of the family.
Starts thy soul, trembles thy brain
at the thought of such a burden as the will of the
eternally creating, eternally saving God? ’How
shall mortal man walk in such a yoke,’ sayest
thou, ’even with the Son of God bearing it also?’
Why, brother, sister, it is the only
burden bearable the only burden that can
be borne of mortal! Under any other, the lightest,
he must at last sink outworn, his very soul gray with
sickness!
He on whom lay the other half of the
burden of God, the weight of his creation to redeem,
says, ’The yoke I bear is easy; the burden I
draw is light’; and this he said, knowing the
death he was to die. The yoke did not gall his
neck, the burden did not overstrain his sinews, neither
did the goal on Calvary fright him from the straight
way thither. He had the will of the Father to
work out, and that will was his strength as well as
his joy. He had the same will as his father.
To him the one thing worth living for, was the share
the love of his father gave him in his work.
He loved his father even to the death of the cross,
and eternally beyond it.
When we give ourselves up to the Father
as the Son gave himself, we shall not only find our
yoke easy and our burden light, but that they communicate
ease and lightness; not only will they not make us
weary, but they will give us rest from all other weariness.
Let us not waste a moment in asking how this can be;
the only way to know that, is to take the yoke on
us. That rest is a secret for every heart to know,
for never a tongue to tell. Only by having it
can we know it. If it seem impossible to take
the yoke on us, let us attempt the impossible; let
us lay hold of the yoke, and bow our heads, and try
to get our necks under it. Giving our Father
the opportunity, he will help and not fail us.
He is helping us every moment, when least we think
we need his help; when most we think we do, then may
we most boldly, as most earnestly we must, cry for
it. What or how much his creatures can do or bear,
God only understands; but when most it seems impossible
to do or bear, we must be most confident that he will
neither demand too much, nor fail with the vital creator-help.
That help will be there when wanted that
is, the moment it can be help. To be able beforehand
to imagine ourselves doing or bearing, we have neither
claim nor need.
It is vain to think that any weariness,
however caused, any burden, however slight, may be
got rid of otherwise than by bowing the neck to the
yoke of the Father’s will. There can be
no other rest for heart and soul that he has created.
From every burden, from every anxiety, from all dread
of shame or loss, even loss of love itself, that yoke
will set us free.
These words of the Lord so
many as are reported in common by St Matthew and St
Luke, namely his thanksgiving, and his statement concerning
the mutual knowledge of his father and himself, meet
me like a well known face unexpectedly encountered:
they come to me like a piece of heavenly bread cut
from the gospel of St John. The words are not
in that gospel, and in St Matthew’s and St Luke’s
there is nothing more of the kind in St
Mark’s nothing like them. The passage seems
to me just one solitary flower testifying to the presence
in the gospels of Matthew and Luke of the same root
of thought and feeling which everywhere blossoms in
that of John. It looks as if it had crept out
of the fourth gospel into the first and third, and
seems a true sign, though no proof, that, however
much the fourth be unlike the other gospels, they have
all the same origin. Some disciple was able to
remember one such word of which the promised comforter
brought many to the remembrance of John. I do
not see how the more phenomenal gospels are ever to
be understood, save through a right perception of
the relation in which the Lord stands to his father,
which relation is the main subject of the gospel according
to St John.
As to the loving cry of the great
brother to the whole weary world which Matthew alone
has set down, I seem aware of a certain indescribable
individuality in its tone, distinguishing it from all
his other sayings on record.
Those who come at the call of the
Lord, and take the rest he offers them, learning of
him, and bearing the yoke of the Father, are the salt
of the earth, the light of the world.
THE SALT AND THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD.
’Ye are the salt of the earth;
but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall
it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing,
but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of
men. Ye are the light of the world. A city
that is set on an hill, cannot be hid. Neither
do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel,
but on a candlestick, and it giveth light unto all
that are in the house. Let your light so shine
before men, that they may see your good works, and
glorify your father which is in heaven.’ Matthew
16.
The Lord knew these men, and had their
hearts in his hand; else would he have told them they
were the salt of the earth and the light of the world?
They were in danger, it is true, of pluming themselves
on what he had said of them, of taking their importance
to their own credit, and seeing themselves other than
God saw them. Yet the Lord does not hesitate
to call his few humble disciples the salt of the earth;
and every century since has borne witness that such
indeed they were that he spoke of them
but the simple fact. Where would the world be
now but for their salt and their light! The world
that knows neither their salt nor their light may
imagine itself now at least greatly retarded by the
long-drawn survival of their influences; but such as
have chosen aspiration and not ambition, will cry,
But for those men, whither should we at this moment
be bound! Their Master set them to be salt against
corruption, and light against darkness; and our souls
answer and say, Lord, they have been the salt, they
have been the light of the world!
No sooner has he used the symbol of
the salt, than the Lord proceeds to supplement its
incompleteness. They were salt which must remember
that it is salt; which must live salt, and choose
salt, and be salt. For the whole worth of salt
lies in its being salt; and all the saltness of the
moral salt lies in the will to be salt. To lose
its saltness, then, is to cease to exist, save as
a vile thing whose very being is unjustifiable.
What is to be done with saltless salt! with
such as would teach religion, and know not God!
Having thus carried the figure as
far as it will serve him, the Master changes it for
another, which he can carry farther. For salt
only preserves from growing bad; it does not cause
anything to grow better. His disciples are the
salt of the world, but they are more. Therefore,
having warned the human salt to look to itself that
it be indeed salt, he proceeds: ‘Ye are
the light of the world, a city, a candle,’ and
so resumes his former path of persuasion and enforcement:
’It is so, therefore make it so.’ ’Ye
are the salt of the earth; therefore be salt.’ ’Ye
are the light of the world; therefore shine.’ ’Ye
are a city; be seen upon your hill.’ ’Ye
are the Lord’s candles; let no bushels cover
you. Let your light shine.’ Every disciple
of the Lord must be a preacher of righteousness.
Cities are the best lighted portions
of the world; and perhaps the Lord meant, ‘You
are a live city, therefore light up your city.’
Some connection of the city with light seems probably
in his thought, seeing the allusion to the city on
the hill comes in the midst of what he says about
light in relation to his disciples as the light of
the world. Anyhow the city is the best circle
in which, and the best centre from which to diffuse
moral light. A man brooding in the desert may
find the very light of light, but he must go to the
city to let it shine.
From the general idea of light, however,
associated with the city as visible to all the country
around, the Lord turns at once, in this probably fragmentary
representation of his words, to the homelier, the
more individual and personally applicable figure of
the lamp: ’Neither do men light a lamp,
and put it under a bushel, but on a lampstand, and
it giveth light to all that are in the house,’
Here let us meditate a moment.
For what is a lamp or a man lighted? For them
that need light, therefore for all. A candle is
not lighted for itself; neither is a man. The
light that serves self only, is no true light; its
one virtue is that it will soon go out. The bushel
needs to be lighted, but not by being put over the
lamp. The man’s own soul needs to be lighted,
but light for itself only, light covered by the bushel,
is darkness whether to soul or bushel. Light unshared
is darkness. To be light indeed, it must shine
out. It is of the very essence of light, that
it is for others. The thing is true of the spiritual
as of the physical light of the truth as
of its type.
The lights of the world are live lights.
The lamp that the Lord kindles is a lamp that can
will to shine, a soul that must shine. Its true
relation to the spirits around it to God
and its fellows, is its light. Then only does
it fully shine, when its love, which is its light,
shows it to all the souls within its scope, and all
those souls to each other, and so does its part to
bring all together toward one. In the darkness
each soul is alone; in the light the souls are a family.
Men do not light a lamp to kill it with a bushel,
but to set it on a stand, that it may give light to
all that are in the house. The Lord seems to say,
’So have I lighted you, not that you may shine
for yourselves, but that you may give light unto all.
I have set you like a city on a hill, that the whole
earth may see and share in your light. Shine therefore;
so shine before men, that they may see your good things
and glorify your father for the light with which he
has lighted you. Take heed to your light that
it be such, that it so shine, that in you men may see
the Father may see your works so good,
so plainly his, that they recognize his presence in
you, and thank him for you.’ There was the
danger always of the shadow of the self-bushel clouding
the lamp the Father had lighted; and the moment they
ceased to show the Father, the light that was in them
was darkness. God alone is the light, and our
light is the shining of his will in our lives.
If our light shine at all, it must be, it can be only
in showing the Father; nothing is light that does not
bear him witness. The man that sees the glory
of God, would turn sick at the thought of glorifying
his own self, whose one only possible glory is to
shine with the glory of God. When a man tries
to shine from the self that is not one with God and
filled with his light, he is but making ready for
his own gathering contempt. The man who, like
his Lord, seeks not his own, but the will of him who
sent him, he alone shines. He who would shine
in the praises of men, will, sooner or later, find
himself but a Gideon’s-pitcher left broken on
the field.
Let us bestir ourselves then to keep
this word of the Lord; and to this end inquire how
we are to let our light shine.
To the man who does not try to order
his thoughts and feelings and judgments after the
will of the Father, I have nothing to say; he can
have no light to let shine. For to let our light
shine is to see that in every, even the smallest thing,
our lives and actions correspond to what we know of
God; that, as the true children of our father in heaven,
we do everything as he would have us do it. Need
I say that to let our light shine is to be just, honourable,
true, courteous, more careful over the claim of our
neighbour than our own, as knowing ourselves in danger
of overlooking it, and not bound to insist on every
claim of our own! The man who takes no count
of what is fair, friendly, pure, unselfish, lovely,
gracious, where is his claim to call Jesus
his master? where his claim to Christianity?
What saves his claim from being merest mockery?
The outshining of any human light
must be obedience to truth recognized as such; our
first show of light as the Lord’s disciples must
be in doing the things he tells us. Naturally
thus we declare him our master, the ruler of our conduct,
the enlightener of our souls; and while in the doing
of his will a man is learning the loveliness of righteousness,
he can hardly fail to let some light shine across the
dust of his failures, the exhalations from his faults.
Thus will his disciples shine as lights in the world,
holding forth the Word of life.
To shine, we must keep in his light,
sunning our souls in it by thinking of what he said
and did, and would have us think and do. So shall
we drink the light like some diamonds, keep it, and
shine in the dark. Doing his will, men will see
in us that we count the world his, hold that his will
and not ours must be done in it. Our very faces
will then shine with the hope of seeing him, and being
taken home where he is. Only let us remember
that trying to look what we ought to be, is the beginning
of hypocrisy.
If we do indeed expect better things
to come, we must let our hope appear. A Christian
who looks gloomy at the mention of death, still more,
one who talks of his friends as if he had lost them,
turns the bushel of his little-faith over the lamp
of the Lord’s light. Death is but our visible
horizon, and our look ought always to be focussed beyond
it. We should never talk as if death were the
end of anything.
To let our light shine, we must take
care that we have no respect for riches: if we
have none, there is no fear of our showing any.
To treat the poor man with less attention or cordiality
than the rich, is to show ourselves the servants of
Mammon. In like manner we must lay no value on
the praise of men, or in any way seek it. We must
honour no man because of intellect, fame, or success.
We must not shrink, in fear of the judgment of men,
from doing openly what we hold right; or at all acknowledge
as a law-giver what calls itself Society, or harbour
the least anxiety for its approval.
In business, the custom of the trade
must be understood by both contracting parties, else
it can have no place, either as law or excuse, with
the disciple of Jesus. The man to whom business
is one thing and religion another, is not a disciple.
If he refuses to harmonize them by making his business
religion, he has already chosen Mammon; if he thinks
not to settle the question, it is settled. The
most futile of all human endeavours is, to serve God
and Mammon. The man who makes the endeavour,
betrays his Master in the temple and kisses him in
the garden; takes advantage of him in the shop, and
offers him ‘divine service!’ on Sunday.
His very church-going is but a further service of Mammon!
But let us waste no strength in despising such men;
let us rather turn the light upon ourselves:
are we not in some way denying him? Is our light
bearing witness? Is it shining before men so that
they glorify God for it? If it does not shine,
it is darkness. In the darkness which a man takes
for light, he will thrust at the heart of the Lord
himself.
He who goes about his everyday duty
as the work the Father has given him to do, is he
who lets his light shine. But such a man will
not be content with this: he must yet let his
light shine. Whatever makes his heart glad, he
will have his neighbour share. The body is a lantern;
it must not be a dark lantern; the glowing heart must
show in the shining face. His glad thought may
not be one to impart to his neighbour, but he must
not quench the vibration of its gladness ere it reach
him. What shall we say of him who comes from
his closet, his mountain-top, with such a veil over
his face as masks his very humanity? Is it with
the Father that man has had communion, whose every
movement is self-hampered, and in whose eyes dwell
no smiles for the people of his house? The man
who receives the quiet attentions, the divine ministrations,
of wife or son or daughter, without token of pleasure,
without sign of gratitude, can hardly have been with
Jesus. Or can he have been with him, and have
left him behind in his closet? If his faith in
God take from a man his cheerfulness, how shall the
face of a man ever shine? And why are they always
glad before the face of the Father in heaven?
It is true that pain or inward grief may blameless
banish all smiling, but even heaviness of heart has
no right so to tumble the bushel over the lamp that
no ray can get out to tell that love is yet burning
within. The man must at least let his dear ones
know that something else than displeasure with them
is the cause of his clouded countenance.
What a sweet colour the divine light
takes to itself in courtesy, whose perfection is the
recognition of every man as a temple of the living
God. Sorely ruined, sadly defiled the temple may
be, but if God had left it, it would be a heap and
not a house.
Next to love, specially will the light
shine out in fairness. What light can he have
in him who is always on his own side, and will never
descry reason or right on that of his adversary?
And certainly, if he that showeth mercy, as well he
that showeth justice, ought to do it with cheerfulness.
But if all our light shine out, and
none of our darkness, shall we not be in utmost danger
of hypocrisy? Yes, if we but hide our darkness,
and do not strive to slay it with our light:
what way have we to show it, while struggling to destroy
it? Only when we cherish evil, is there hypocrisy
in hiding it. A man who is honestly fighting it
and showing it no quarter, is already conqueror in
Christ, or will soon be and more than innocent.
But our good feelings, those that make for righteousness
and unity, we ought to let shine; they claim to commune
with the light in others. Many parents hold words
unsaid which would lift hundred-weights from the hearts
of their children, yea, make them leap for joy.
A stern father and a silent mother make mournful, or,
which is far worse, hard children. Need I add
that, if any one, hearing the injunction to let his
light shine, makes himself shine instead, it is because
the light is not in him!
But what shall I say of such as, in
the name of religion, let only their darkness out the
darkness of worshipped opinion, the darkness of lip-honour
and disobedience! Such are those who tear asunder
the body of Christ with the explosives of dispute,
on the plea of such a unity as alone they can understand,
namely a paltry uniformity. What have not the
‘good church-man’ and the ‘strong
dissenter’ to answer for, who, hiding what true
light they have, if indeed they have any, each under
the bushel of his party-spirit, radiate only repulsion!
There is no schism, none whatever, in using diverse
forms of thought or worship: true honesty is
never schismatic. The real schismatic is the man
who turns away love and justice from the neighbour
who holds theories in religious philosophy, or as
to church-constitution, different from his own; who
denies or avoids his brother because he follows not
with him; who calls him a schismatic because he prefers
this or that mode of public worship not his.
The other may be schismatic; he himself certainly
is. He walks in the darkness of opinion,
not in the light of life, not in the faith which worketh
by love. Worst of all is division in the name
of Christ who came to make one. Neither Paul
nor Apollos nor Cephas would least
of all will Christ be the leader of any party save
that of his own elect, the party of love of
love which suffereth long and is kind; which envieth
not, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly,
seeketh not its own, is not easily provoked, thinketh
no evil, rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth
in the truth, beareth all things, believeth all things,
hopeth all things, endureth all things.
‘Let your light shine,’
says the Lord: if I have none, the call
cannot apply to me; but I must bethink me, lest, in
the night I am cherishing about me, the Lord come
upon me like a thief. There may be those, however,
and I think they are numerous, who, having some, or
imagining they have much light, yet have not enough
to know the duty of letting it shine on their neighbours.
The Lord would have his men so alive with his light,
that it should for ever go flashing from each to all,
and all, with eternal response, keep glorifying the
Father. Dost thou look for a good time coming,
friend, when thou shalt know as thou art known?
Let the joy of thy hope stream forth upon thy neighbours.
Fold them round in that which maketh thyself glad.
Let thy nature grow more expansive and communicative.
Look like the man thou art a man who knows
something very good. Thou believest thyself on
the way to the heart of things: walk so, shine
so, that all that see thee shall want to go with thee.
What light issues from such as make
their faces long at the very name of death, and look
and speak as if it were the end of all things and the
worst of evils? Jesus told his men not to fear
death; told them his friends should go to be with
him; told them they should live in the house of his
father and their father; and since then he has risen
himself from the tomb, and gone to prepare a place
for them: who, what are these miserable refusers
of comfort? Not Christians, surely! Oh,
yes, they are Christians! ‘They are gone,’
they say, ’to be for ever with the Lord;’
and then they weep and lament, and seem more afraid
of starting to join them than of aught else under
the sun! To the last attainable moment they cling
to what they call life. They are children were
there ever any other such children? who
hang crying to the skirts of their mother, and will
not be lifted to her bosom. They are not of Paul’s
mind: to be with Him is not better! They
worship their physician; and their prayer to the God
of their life is to spare them from more life.
What sort of Christians are they? Where shines
their light? Alas for thee, poor world, hadst
thou no better lights than these!
You who have light, show yourselves
the sons and daughters of Light, of God, of Hope the
heirs of a great completeness. Freely let your
light shine.
Only take heed that ye do not your
righteousness before men, to be seen of them.
THE RIGHT HAND AND THE LEFT.
Take heed that ye do not your righteousness
before men to be seen of them; otherwise ye have no
reward of your father which is in heaven....
But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know
what thy right hand doeth; that thine alms may be
in secret; and thy father which seeth in secret, himself
shall reward thee. Matthew vi.
I,3.
Let your light out freely, that men
may see it, but not that men may see you. If
I do anything, not because it has to be done, not because
God would have it so, not that I may do right, not
because it is honest, not that I love the thing, not
that I may be true to my Lord, not that the truth
may be recognized as truth and as his, but that I may
be seen as the doer, that I may be praised of men,
that I may gain repute or fame; be the thing itself
ever so good, I may look to men for my reward, for
there is none for me with the Father. If, that
light being my pleasure, I do it that the light may
shine, and that men may know the Light, the
father of lights, I do well; but if I do it that I
may be seen shining, that the light may be noted as
emanating from me and not from another, then am I
of those that seek glory of men, and worship Satan;
the light that through me may possibly illuminate others,
will, in me and for me, be darkness.
But when thou doest alms, let not
thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.
How, then, am I to let my light shine,
if I take pains to hide what I do?
The injunction is not to hide what
you do from others, but to hide it from yourself.
The Master would have you not plume yourself upon it,
not cherish the thought that you have done it, or
confer with yourself in satisfaction over it.
You must not count it to your praise. A man must
not desire to be satisfied with himself. His right
hand must not seek the praise of his left hand.
His doing must not invite his after-thinking.
The right hand must let the thing done go, as a thing
done-with. We must meditate nothing either as
a fine thing for us to do, or a fine thing for us
to have done. We must not imagine any merit in
us: it would be to love a lie, for we can have
none; there is no such thing possible. Is there
anything to be proud of in refusing to worship the
devil? Is it a grand thing, is it a meritorious
thing, not to be vile? When we have done all,
we are unprofitable servants. Our very best is
but decent. What more could it be? Why then
think of it as anything more? What things could
we or any one do, worthy of being brooded over as
possessions. Good to do, they were; bad to pride
ourselves upon, they are. Why should a man meditate
with satisfaction on having denied himself some selfish
indulgence, any more than on having washed his hands?
May we roll the rejection of a villainy as a sweet
morsel under our tongues? They were the worst
villains of all who could be proud of not having committed
a villainy; and their pride would but render them
the more capable of the villainy, when next the temptation
to it came. Even if our supposed merit were of
the positive order, and we did every duty perfectly,
the moment we began to pride ourselves upon the fact,
we should drop into a hell of worthlessness.
What are we for but to do our duty? We must do
it, and think nothing of ourselves for that, neither
care what men think of us for anything. With the
praise or blame of men we have nought to do.
Their blame may be a good thing, their praise cannot
be. But the worst sort of the praise of men is
the praise we give ourselves. We must do nothing
to be seen of ourselves. We must seek no approbation
even, but that of God, else we shut the door of the
kingdom from the outside. His approbation will
but quicken our sense of unworthiness. What!
seek the praise of men for being fair to our own brothers
and sisters? What! seek the praise of God for
laying our hearts at the feet of him to whom we utterly
belong? There is no pride so mean and
all pride is absolutely, essentially mean as
the pride of being holier than our fellow, except
the pride of being holy. Such imagined holiness
is foulness. Religion itself in the hearts of
the unreal, is a dead thing; what seems life in it,
is the vermiculate life of a corpse.
There is one word in the context,
as we have it in the authorized version, that used
to trouble me, seeming to make its publicity a portion
of the reward for doing certain right things in secret:
I mean the word openly, at the ends of the
fourth, the sixth, and the eighteenth verses, making
the Lord seem to say, ’Avoid the praise of men,
and thou shalt at length have the praise of men.’ ’Thy
father, which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly.’
Thy reward shall be seen of men! and thou seen
as the receiver of the reward! In what other way
could the word, then or now, be fairly understood?
It must be the interpolation of some Jew scribe, who,
even after learning a little of the Christ, continued
unable to conceive as reward anything that did not
draw part at least of its sweetness from the gazing
eyes of the multitude. Glad was I to find that
the word is not in the best manuscripts; and God be
thanked that it is left out in the revised version.
What shall we think of the daring that could interpolate
it! But of like sort is the daring of much exposition
of the Master’s words. What men have not
faith enough to receive, they will still dilute to
the standard of their own faculty of reception.
If any one say, ’Why did the Lord let the word
remain there so long, if he never said it?’ I
answer: Perhaps that the minds of his disciples
might be troubled at its presence, arise against it,
and do him right by casting it out and so
Wisdom be justified of her children.
But there are some who, if the notion
of reward is not naturally a trouble to them, yet
have come to feel it such, because of the words of
certain objectors who think to take a higher stand
than the Christian, saying the idea of reward for
doing right is a low, an unworthy idea. Now,
verily, it would be a low thing for any child to do
his father’s will in the hope that his father
would reward him for it; but it is quite another thing
for a father whose child endeavours to please him,
to let him know that he recognizes his childness toward
him, and will be fatherly good to him. What kind
of a father were the man who, because there could
be no merit or desert in doing well, would not give
his child a smile or a pleased word when he saw him
trying his best? Would not such acknowledgment
from the father be the natural correlate of the child’s
behaviour? and what would the father’s smile
be but the perfect reward of the child? Suppose
the father to love the child so that he wants to give
him everything, but dares not until his character is
developed: must he not be glad, and show his gladness,
at every shade of a progress that will at length set
him free to throne his son over all that he has?
‘I am an unprofitable servant,’ says the
man who has done his duty; but his lord, coming unexpectedly,
and finding him at his post, girds himself, and makes
him sit down to meat, and comes forth and serves him.
How could the divine order of things, founded for growth
and gradual betterment, hold and proceed without the
notion of return for a thing done? Must there
be only current and no tide? How can we be workers
with God at his work, and he never say ‘Thank
you, my child’? Will he take joy in his
success and give none? Is he the husbandman to
take all the profit, and muzzle the mouth of his ox?
When a man does work for another, he has his wages
for it, and society exists by the dependence of man
upon man through work and wages. The devil is
not the inventor of this society; he has invented
the notion of a certain degradation in work, a still
greater in wages; and following this up, has constituted
a Society after his own likeness, which despises work,
leaves it undone, and so can claim its wages without
disgrace.
If you say, ‘No one ought to
do right for the sake of reward,’ I go farther
and say, ’No man can do right for the
sake of reward. A man may do a thing indifferent,
he may do a thing wrong, for the sake of reward; but
a thing in itself right, done for reward, would, in
the very doing, cease to be right.’ At
the same time, if a man does right, he cannot escape
being rewarded for it; and to refuse the reward, would
be to refuse life, and foil the creative love.
The whole question is of the kind of reward expected.
What first reward for doing well, may I look for?
To grow purer in heart, and stronger in the hope of
at length seeing God. If a man be not after this
fashion rewarded, he must perish. As to happiness
or any lower rewards that naturally follow the first is
God to destroy the law of his universe, the divine
sequence of cause and effect in order to say:
’You must do well, but you shall gain no good
by it; you must lead a dull joyless existence to all
eternity, that lack of delight may show you pure’?
Could Love create with such end in view? Righteousness
does not demand creation; it is Love, not Righteousness,
that cannot live alone. The creature must already
be, ere Righteousness can put in a claim. But,
hearts and souls there, Love itself, which created
for love and joy, presses the demand of Righteousness
first.
A righteousness that created misery
in order to up-hold itself, would be a righteousness
that was unrighteous. God will die for righteousness,
but never create for a joyless righteousness.
To call into being the necessarily and hopelessly
incomplete, would be to wrong creation in its very
essence. To create for the knowledge of himself,
and then not give himself, would be injustice even
to cruelty; and if God give himself, what other reward there
can be no further is not included,
seeing he is Life and all her children the
All in all? It will take the utmost joy God can
give, to let men know him; and what man, knowing him,
would mind losing every other joy? Only what
other joy could keep from entering, where the God
of joy already dwelt? The law of the universe
holds, and will hold, the name of the Father be praised: ’Whatsoever
a man soweth, that shall he also reap.’
’They have sown the wind, and they shall reap
the whirlwind.’ ’He that soweth to
his flesh, shall of the flesh reap corruption; but
he that soweth to the spirit, shall of the spirit
reap life everlasting.’ ’Whosoever
hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more
abundance; but whosoever hath not, from him shall
be taken away even that he hath.’
To object to Christianity as selfish,
is utter foolishness; Christianity alone gives any
hope of deliverance from selfishness. Is it selfish
to desire to love? Is it selfish to hope for
purity and the sight of God? What better can
we do for our neighbour than to become altogether
righteous toward him? Will he not be the nearer
sharing in the exceeding great reward of a return
to the divine idea?
Where is the evil toward God, where
the wrong to my neighbour, if I think sometimes of
the joys to follow in the train of perfect loving?
Is not the atmosphere of God, love itself, the very
breath of the Father, wherein can float no thinnest
pollution of selfishness, the only material wherewithal
to build the airy castles of heaven? ‘Creator,’
the childlike heart might cry, ’give me all
the wages, all the reward thy perfect father-heart
can give thy unmeriting child. My fit wages may
be pain, sorrow, humiliation of soul: I stretch
out my hands to receive them. Thy reward will
be to lift me out of the mire of self-love, and bring
me nearer to thyself and thy children: welcome,
divinest of good things! Thy highest reward is
thy purest gift; thou didst make me for it from the
first; thou, the eternal life, hast been labouring
still to fit me for receiving it the vision,
the knowledge, the possession of thyself. I can
seek but what thou waitest and watchest to give:
I would be such into whom thy love can flow.’
It seems to me that the only merit
that could live before God, is the merit of Jesus who
of himself, at once, untaught, unimplored, laid himself
aside, and turned to the Father, refusing his life
save in the Father. Like God, of himself he chose
righteousness, and so merited to sit on the throne
of God. In the same spirit he gave himself afterward
to his father’s children, and merited the power
to transfuse the life-redeeming energy of his spirit
into theirs: made perfect, he became the author
of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him.
But it is a word of little daring, that Jesus had
no thought of merit in what he did that
he saw only what he had to be, what he must do. I
speak after the poor fashion of a man lost in what
is too great for him, yet is his very life. Where
can be a man’s merit in refusing to go down to
an abyss of loss loss of the right to be,
loss of his father, loss of himself? Would Satan,
with all the instincts and impulses of his origin
in him, have merited eternal life by refusing
to be a devil? Not the less would he have had
eternal life; not the less would he have been wrapt
in the love and confidence of the Father. He would
have had his reward. I cannot imagine thing created
meriting aught save by divine courtesy.
I suspect the notion of merit belongs
to a low development, and the higher a man rises,
the less will he find it worth a thought. Perhaps
we shall come to see that it owes what being it has,
to man, that it is a thing thinkable only by man.
I suspect it is not a thought of the eternal mind,
and has in itself no existence, being to God merely
a thing thought by man.
For
merit lives from man to man,
And not from man, O Lord,
to thee.
The man, then, who does right, and
seeks no praise from men, while he merits nothing,
shall be rewarded by his Father, and his reward will
be right precious to him.
We must let our light shine, make
our faith, our hope, our love, manifest that
men may praise, not us for shining, but the Father
for creating the light. No man with faith, hope,
love, alive in his soul, could make the divine possessions
a show to gain for himself the admiration of men:
not the less must they appear in our words, in our
looks, in our carriage above all, in honourable,
unselfish, hospitable, helpful deeds. Our light
must shine in cheerfulness, in joy, yea, where a man
has the gift, in merriment; in freedom from care save
for one another, in interest in the things of others,
in fearlessness and tenderness, in courtesy and graciousness.
In our anger and indignation, specially, must our
light shine. But we must give no quarter to the
most shadowy thought of how this or that will look.
From the faintest thought of the praise of men, we
must turn away. No man can be the disciple of
Christ and desire fame. To desire fame is ignoble;
it is a beggarly greed. In the noble mind, it
is the more of an infirmity. There is no aspiration
in it nothing but ambition. It is simply
selfishness that would be proud if it could.
Fame is the applause of the many, and the judgment
of the many is foolish; therefore the greater the fame,
the more is the foolishness that swells it, and the
worse is the foolishness that longs after it.
Aspiration is the sole escape from ambition. He
who aspires that is, does his endeavour
to rise above himself neither lusts to
be higher than his neighbour, nor seeks to mount in
his opinion. What light there is in him shines
the more that he does nothing to be seen of men.
He stands in the mist between the gulf and the glory,
and looks upward. He loves not his own soul, but
longs to be clean.
Out of the gulf into the glory,
Father, my soul
cries out to be lifted.
Dark is the woof of my dismal
story,
Thorough thy sun-warp
stormily drifted!
Out of the gulf into the glory,
Lift me, and save my story.
I have done many things merely
shameful;
I am a man ashamed,
my father!
My life is ashamed and broken
and blameful
The broken and
blameful, oh, cleanse and gather!
Heartily shame me, Lord, of
the shameful!
To my judge I flee with my
blameful.
Saviour, at peace in thy perfect
purity,
Think what it
is, not to be pure!
Strong in thy love’s
essential security,
Think upon those
who are never secure.
Full fill my soul with the
light of thy purity;
Fold me in love’s security.
O Father, O Brother, my heart
is sore aching
Help it to ache
as much as is needful;
Is it you cleansing me, mending,
remaking,
Dear potter-hands,
so tender and heedful?
Sick of my past, of my own
self aching
Hurt on, dear hands, with
your making.
Proud of the form thou hadst
given thy vessel,
Proud of myself,
I forgot my donor;
Down in the dust I began to
nestle,
Poured thee no
wine, and drank deep of dishonour!
Lord, thou hast broken, thou
mendest thy vessel!
In the dust of thy glory I
nestle.
O Lord, the earnest expectation of
thy creature waiteth for the manifestation of the
sons of God.
THE HOPE OF THE UNIVERSE.
For the earnest expectation of the
creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons
of God. Romans vii.
Let us try, through these words, to
get at the idea in St Paul’s mind for which
they stand, and have so long stood. It can be
no worthless idea they represent no mere
platitude, which a man, failing to understand it at
once, may without loss leave behind him. The words
mean something which Paul believes vitally associated
with the life and death of his Master. He had
seen Jesus with his bodily eyes, I think, but he had
not seen him with those alone; he had seen and saw
him with the real eyes, the eyes that do not see except
they understand; and the sight of him had uplifted
his whole nature first his pure will for
righteousness, and then his hoping imagination; and
out of these, in the knowledge of Jesus, he spoke.
The letters he has left behind him,
written in the power of this uplifting, have waked
but poor ideas in poor minds; for words, if they seem
to mean anything, must always seem to mean something
within the scope of the mind hearing them. Words
cannot convey the thought of a thinker to a no-thinker;
of a largely aspiring and self-discontented soul,
to a creature satisfied with his poverty, and counting
his meagre faculty the human standard. Neither
will they readily reveal the mind of one old in thought,
to one who has but lately begun to think. The
higher the reader’s notion of what St Paul intends the
higher the idea, that is, which his words wake in
him, the more likely is it to be the same which moved
the man who had seen Jesus, and was his own no more.
If a man err in his interpretation, it will hardly
be by attributing to his words an intent too high.
First then, what does Paul, the slave
of Christ, intend by ’the creature’ or
‘the creation’? If he means the visible
world, he did not surely, and without saying so,
mean to exclude the noblest part of it the
sentient! If he did, it is doubly strange that
he should immediately attribute not merely sense,
but conscious sense, to that part, the insentient,
namely, which remained. If you say he does so
but by a figure of speech, I answer that a figure
that meant less than it said and how much
less would not this? would be one altogether
unworthy of the Lord’s messenger.
First, I repeat, to exclude the sentient
from the term common to both in the word creation
or creature and then to attribute
the capabilities of the sentient to the insentient,
as a mere figure to express the hopes of men with
regard to the perfecting of the insentient for the
comfort of men, were a violence as unfit in rhetoric
as in its own nature. Take another part of the
same utterance: ’For we know that the whole
creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until
now:’ is it not manifest that to interpret
such words as referring to the mere imperfections
of the insensate material world, would be to make of
the phrase a worthless hyperbole? I am inclined
to believe the apostle regarded the whole visible
creation as, in far differing degrees of consciousness,
a live outcome from the heart of the living one, who
is all and in all: such view, at the same time,
I do not care to insist upon; I only care to argue
that the word creature or creation must
include everything in creation that has sentient life.
That I should in the class include a greater number
of phenomena than a reader may be prepared to admit,
will nowise affect the force of what I have to say,
seeing my point is simply this: that in the term
creation, Paul comprises all creatures capable
of suffering; the condition of which sentient, therefore
superior portion, gives him occasion to speak of the
whole creation as suffering in the process of its divine
evolution or development, groaning and travailing
as in the pangs of giving birth to a better self,
a nobler world. It is not necessary to the idea
that the creation should know what it is groaning
after, or wherein the higher condition constituting
its deliverance must consist. The human race
groans for deliverance: how much does the race
know that its redemption lies in becoming one with
the Father, and partaking of his glory? Here
and there one of the race knows it which
is indeed a pledge for the race but the
race cannot be said to know its own lack, or to have
even a far-off notion of what alone can stay its groaning.
In like manner the whole creation is groaning after
an unforeseen yet essential birth groans
with the necessity of being freed from a state that
is but a transitional and not a true one, from a condition
that nowise answers to the intent in which existence
began. In both the lower creation and the higher,
this same groaning of the fettered idea after a freer
life, seems the first enforced decree of a holy fate,
and itself the first movement of the hampered thing
toward the liberty of another birth.
To believe that God made many of the
lower creatures merely for prey, or to be the slaves
of a slave, and writhe under the tyrannies of
a cruel master who will not serve his own master;
that he created and is creating an endless succession
of them to reap little or no good of life but its
cessation a doctrine held by some, and practically
accepted by multitudes is to believe in
a God who, so far as one portion at least of his creation
is concerned, is a demon. But a creative demon
is an absurdity; and were such a creator possible,
he would not be God, but must one day be found and
destroyed by the real God. Not the less the fact
remains, that miserable suffering abounds among them,
and that, even supposing God did not foresee how creation
would turn out for them, the thing lies at his door.
He has besides made them so far dumb that they cannot
move the hearts of the oppressors into whose hands
he has given them, telling how hard they find the world,
how sore their life in it. The apostle takes
up their case, and gives us material for an answer
to such as blame God for their sad condition.
There are many, I suspect, who from
the eighth chapter of St Paul’s epistle to the
Romans, gather this much and no more: that
the lower animals alive at the coming of the Lord,
whensoever that may be, will thenceforward, with such
as thereafter may come into existence, lead a happy
life for the time allotted them! Strong champions
of God, these profound believers! What lovers
of life, what disciples of St Paul, nay, what disciples
of Jesus, to whom such a gloss is consolation for the
moans of a universe! Truly, the furnace of affliction
they would extinguish thus, casts out the more an
evil odour! For all the creatures who through
ages of misery have groaned and travailed and died,
to these mild Christians it is enough that they are
dead, therefore, as they would argue, out of it now!
‘It is well with them,’ I seem to hear
such say; ’they are mercifully dealt with; their
sufferings are over; they had not to live on for ever
in oppression. The God of their life has taken
from them their past, and troubles them with no future!’
It is true this were no small consolation concerning
such as are gone away! Surely rest is better
than ceaseless toil and pain! But what shall we
say of such a heedless God as those Christians are
content to worship! Is he a merciful God?
Is he a loving God? How shall he die to escape
the remorse of the authorship of so much misery?
Our pity turns from the dead creature to the live
creator who could live and know himself the maker
of so many extinguished hearts, whose friend was not
he, but Death. Blessed be the name of the Father
of Jesus, there is no such creator!
Be we have not to do with the dead
only; there are those which live and suffer:
is there no comfort concerning them, but that they
too shall at length die and leave their misery?
And what shall we say of those coming, and yet to
come and pass evermore issuing from the
fountain of life, daily born into evil things?
Will the consolation that they will soon die, suffice
for the heart of the child who laments over his dead
bird or rabbit, and would fain love that father in
heaven who keeps on making the creatures? Alas,
they are crowding in; they cannot help themselves;
their misery is awaiting them! Would those Christians
have me believe in a God who differentiates creatures
from himself, only that they may be the prey of other
creatures, or spend a few hours or years, helpless
and lonely, speechless and without appeal, in merciless
hands, then pass away into nothingness? I will
not; in the name of Jesus, I will not. Had he
not known something better, would he have said what
he did about the father of men and the sparrows?
What many men call their beliefs,
are but the prejudices they happen to have picked
up: why should such believers waste a thought
as to how their paltry fellow-inhabitants of the planet
fare? Many indeed have all their lives been too
busy making their human fellows groan and sweat for
their own fancied well-being, to spare a thought for
the fate of the yet more helpless. But there
are not a few, who would be indignant at having their
belief in God questioned, who yet seem greatly to fear
imagining him better than he is: whether is it
he or themselves they dread injuring by expecting
too much of him? ’You see the plain facts
of the case!’ they say. ’There is
no questioning them! What can be done for the
poor things except indeed you take the absurd
notion into your head, that they too have a life beyond
the grave?’
Why should such a notion seem to you
absurd? I answer. The teachers of the nation
have unwittingly, it seems to me through unbelief,
wronged the animals deeply by their silence anent
the thoughtless popular presumption that they have
no hereafter; thus leaving them deprived of a great
advantage to their position among men. But I suppose
they too have taken it for granted that the Preserver
of man and beast never had a thought of keeping one
beast alive beyond a certain time; in which case heartless
men might well argue he did not care how they wronged
them, for he meant them no redress. Their immortality
is no new faith with me, but as old as my childhood.
Do you believe in immortality for
yourself? I would ask any reader who is not in
sympathy with my hope for the animals. If not,
I have no argument with you. But if you do, why
not believe in it for them? Verily, were immortality
no greater a thing for the animals than it seems for
men to some who yet profess to expect it, I should
scarce care to insist upon their share in it.
But if the thought be anywise precious to you, is
it essential to your enjoyment in it, that nothing
less than yourself should share its realization?
Are you the lowest kind of creature that could
be permitted to live? Had God been of like heart
with you, would he have given life and immortality
to creatures so much less than himself as we?
Are these not worth making immortal? How, then,
were they worth calling out of the depth of no-being?
It is a greater deed, to make be that which was not,
than to seal it with an infinite immortality:
did God do that which was not worth doing? What
he thought worth making, you think not worth continuing
made! You would have him go on for ever creating
new things with one hand, and annihilating those he
had made with the other for I presume you
would not prefer the earth to be without animals!
If it were harder for God to make the former go on
living, than to send forth new, then his creatures
were no better than the toys which a child makes,
and destroys as he makes them. For what good,
for what divine purpose is the maker of the sparrow
present at its death, if he does not care what becomes
of it? What is he there for, I repeat, if he
have no care that it go well with his bird in its dying,
that it be neither comfortless nor lost in the abyss?
If his presence be no good to the sparrow, are you
very sure what good it will be to you when your hour
comes? Believe it is not by a little only that
the heart of the universe is tenderer, more loving,
more just and fair, than yours or mine.
If you did not believe you were yourself
to out-live death, I could not blame you for thinking
all was over with the sparrow; but to believe in immortality
for yourself, and not care to believe in it for the
sparrow, would be simply hard-hearted and selfish.
If it would make you happy to think there was life
beyond death for the sparrow as well as for yourself,
I would gladly help you at least to hope that there
may be.
I know of no reason why I should not
look for the animals to rise again, in the same sense
in which I hope myself to rise again which
is, to reappear, clothed with another and better form
of life than before. If the Father will raise
his children, why should he not also raise those whom
he has taught his little ones to love? Love is
the one bond of the universe, the heart of God, the
life of his children: if animals can be loved,
they are loveable; if they can love, they are yet more
plainly loveable: love is eternal; how then should
its object perish? Must the very immortality
of love divide the bond of love? Must the love
live on for ever without its object? or worse still,
must the love die with its object, and be eternal
no more than it? What a mis-invented correlation
in which the one side was eternal, the other, where
not yet annihilated, constantly perishing! Is
not our love to the animals a precious variety of
love? And if God gave the creatures to us, that
a new phase of love might be born in us toward another
kind of life from the same fountain, why should the
new life be more perishing than the new love?
Can you imagine that, if, here-after, one of God’s
little ones were to ask him to give again one of the
earth’s old loves kitten, or pony,
or squirrel, or dog, which he had taken from him,
the Father would say no? If the thing was so
good that God made it for and gave it to the child
at first who never asked for it, why should he not
give it again to the child who prays for it because
the Father had made him love it? What a child
may ask for, the Father will keep ready.
That there are difficulties in the
way of believing thus, I grant; that there are impossibilities,
I deny. Perhaps the first difficulty that occurs
is, the many forms of life which we cannot desire again
to see. But while we would gladly keep the perfected
forms of the higher animals, we may hope that those
of many other kinds are as transitory as their bodies,
belonging but to a stage of development. All animal
forms tend to higher: why should not the individual,
as well as the race, pass through stages of ascent.
If I have myself gone through each of the typical
forms of lower life on my way to the human a
supposition by antenatal history rendered probable and
therefore may have passed through any number of individual
forms of life, I do not see why each of the lower
animals should not as well pass upward through a succession
of bettering embodiments. I grant that the theory
requires another to complement it; namely, that those
men and women, who do not even approximately fulfil
the conditions of their elevated rank, who will not
endeavour after the great human-divine idea, striving
to ascend, are sent away back down to that stage of
development, say of fish or insect or reptile, beyond
which their moral nature has refused to advance.
Who has not seen or known men who appeared
not to have passed, or indeed in some things to have
approached the development of the more human of the
lower animals! Let those take care who look contemptuously
upon the animals, lest, in misusing one of them, they
misuse some ancestor of their own, sent back, as the
one mercy for him, to reassume far past forms and
conditions far past in physical, that is,
but not in moral development and so have
another opportunity of passing the self-constituted
barrier. The suggestion may appear very ridiculous,
and no doubt lends itself to humorous comment; but
what if it should be true! what if the amused reader
should himself be getting ready to follow the remanded
ancestor! Upon it, however, I do not care to spend
thought or time, least of all argument; what I care
to press is the question If we believe
in the progress of creation as hitherto manifested,
also in the marvellous changes of form that take place
in every individual of certain classes, why should
there be any difficulty in hoping that old lives may
reappear in new forms? The typical soul reappears
in higher formal type; why may not also the individual
soul reappear in higher form?
Multitudes evidently count it safest
to hold by a dull scheme of things: can it be
because, like David in Browning’s poem Saul,
they dread lest they should worst the Giver by inventing
better gifts than his? That we do not know, is
the best reason for hoping to the full extent God has
made possible to us. If then we go wrong, it will
be in the direction of the right, and with such aberration
as will be easier to correct than what must come of
refusing to imagine, and leaving the dullest traditional
prepossessions to rule our hearts and minds, with no
claim but the poverty of their expectation from the
paternal riches. Those that hope little cannot
grow much. To them the very glory of God must
be a small thing, for their hope of it is so small
as not to be worth rejoicing in. That he is a
faithful creator means nothing to them for far the
larger portion of the creatures he has made! Truly
their notion of faithfulness is poor enough; how then
can their faith be strong! In the very nature
of divine things, the common-place must be false.
The stupid, self-satisfied soul, which cannot know
its own stupidity, and will not trouble itself either
to understand or to imagine, is the farthest behind
of all the backward children in God’s nursery.
As I say, then, I know no cause of
reasonable difficulty in regard to the continued existence
of the lower animals, except the present nature of
some of them. But what Christian will dare to
say that God does not care about them? and
he knows them as we cannot know them. Great or
small, they are his. Great are all his results;
small are all his beginnings. That we have to
send many of his creatures out of this phase of their
life because of their hurtfulness in this phase of
ours, is to me no stumbling-block. The very fact
that this has always had to be done, the long protracted
combat of the race with such, and the constantly repeated
though not invariable victory of the man, has had an
essential and incalculable share in the development
of humanity, which is the rendering of man capable
of knowing God; and when their part to that end is
no longer necessary, changed conditions may speedily
so operate that the wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
and the leopard lie down with the kid. The difficulty
may go for nothing in view of the forces of that future
with which this loving speculation concerns itself.
I would now lead my companion a little
closer to what the apostle says in the nineteenth
verse; to come closer, if we may, to the idea that
burned in his heart when he wrote what we call the
eighth chapter of his epistle to the Romans.
Oh, how far ahead he seems, in his hope for the creation,
of the footsore and halting brigade of Christians at
present crossing the world! He knew Christ, and
could therefore look into the will of the Father.
For the earnest expectation of
the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the
sons of God!
At the head of one of his poems, Henry
Vaughan has this Latin translation of the verse:
I do not know whether he found or made it, but it
is closer to its sense than ours:
’Etenim res creatae
exerto capite observantes expectant revelationem
filiorum Dei.’ ’For the
things created, watching with head thrust out, await
the revelation of the sons of God.’
Why?
Because God has subjected the creation
to vanity, in the hope that the creation itself shall
be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the
glorious liberty of the children of God. For this
double deliverance from corruption and
the consequent subjection to vanity, the creation
is eagerly watching.
The bondage of corruption God encounters
and counteracts by subjection to vanity. Corruption
is the breaking up of the essential idea; the falling
away from the original indwelling and life-causing
thought. It is met by the suffering which itself
causes. That suffering is for redemption, for
deliverance. It is the life in the corrupting
thing that makes the suffering possible; it is the
live part, not the corrupted part that suffers; it
is the redeemable, not the doomed thing, that is subjected
to vanity. The race in which evil that
is, corruption, is at work, needs, as the one means
for its rescue, subjection to vanity; it is the one
hope against the supremacy of corruption; and the whole
encircling, harboring, and helping creation must, for
the sake of man, its head, and for its own further
sake too, share in this subjection to vanity with
its hope of deliverance.
Corruption brings in vanity, causes
empty aching gaps in vitality. This aching is
what most people regard as evil: it is the unpleasant
cure of evil. It takes all shapes of suffering of
the body, of the mind, of the heart, of the spirit.
It is altogether beneficent: without this ever
invading vanity, what hope would there be for the rich
and powerful, accustomed to, and set upon their own
way? what hope for the self-indulgent, the conceited,
the greedy, the miserly? The more things men
seek, the more varied the things they imagine they
need, the more are they subject to vanity all
the forms of which may be summed in the word disappointment.
He who would not house with disappointment, must seek
the incorruptible, the true. He must break the
bondage of havings and shows; of rumours, and praises,
and pretences, and selfish pleasures. He must
come out of the false into the real; out of the darkness
into the light; out of the bondage of corruption into
the glorious liberty of the children of God.
To bring men to break with corruption, the gulf of
the inane yawns before them. Aghast in soul,
they cry, ‘Vanity of vanities! all is vanity!’
and beyond the abyss begin to espy the eternal world
of truth.
Note now ‘the hope that the
creation itself also,’ as something besides
and other than God’s men and women, ’shall
be delivered from the bondage of corruption, into
the liberty of the glory of the children of God.’
The creation then is to share in the deliverance and
liberty and glory of the children of God. Deliverance
from corruption, liberty from bondage, must include
escape from the very home and goal of corruption,
namely death, and that in all its kinds
and degrees. When you say then that for the children
of God there is no more death, remember that the deliverance
of the creature is from the bondage of corruption into
the glorious liberty of the children of God.
Dead, in bondage to corruption, how can they share
in the liberty of the children of Life? Where
is their deliverance?
If such then be the words of the apostle,
does he, or does he not, I ask, hold the idea of the
immortality of the animals? If you say all he
means is, that the creatures alive at the coming of
the Lord will be set free from the tyranny of corrupt
man, I refer you to what I have already said of the
poverty of such an interpretation, accepting the failure
of justice and love toward those that have passed
away, are passing, and must yet, ere that coming,
be born to pass away for ever. For the man whose
heart aches to adore a faithful creator, what comfort
lies in such good news! He must perish for lack
of a true God! Oh lame conclusion to the grand
prophecy! Is God a mocker, who will not be mocked?
Is there a past to God with which he has done?
Is Time too much for him? Is he God enough to
care for those that happen to live at one present time,
but not God enough to care for those that happened
to live at another present time? Or did he care
for them, but could not help them? Shall we not
rather believe that the vessels of less honour, the
misused, the maltreated, shall be filled full with
creative wine at last? Shall not the children
have little dogs under the Father’s table, to
which to let fall plenty of crumbs? If there
was such provision for the sparrows of our Lord’s
time of sojourn, and he will bring yet better with
him when he comes again, how should the dead sparrows
and their sorrows be passed over of him with whom
is no variableness, neither shadow of turning?
Or would the deliverance of the creatures into the
groaned-for liberty have been much worth mentioning,
if within a few years their share in the glory of
the sons of God was to die away in death? But
the gifts of God are without repentance.
How St Paul longs for and loves liberty!
Only true lover of liberty is he, who will die to
give it to his neighbour! St Paul loved liberty
more than his own liberty. But then see how different
his notion of the liberty on its way to the children
of God, from the dull modern fancies of heaven still
set forth in the popular hymn-books! The new heaven
and the new earth will at least be a heaven and an
earth! What would the newest earth be to the
old children without its animals? Barer than the
heavens emptied of the constellations that are called
by their names. Then, if the earth must have
its animals, why not the old ones, already dear?
The sons of God are not a new race of sons of God,
but the old race glorified: why a new race
of animals, and not the old ones glorified?
The apostle says they are to share
in the liberty of the sons of God: will it not
then be a liberty like ours, a liberty always ready
to be offered on the altar of love? What sweet
service will not that of the animals be, thus offered!
How sweet also to minister to them in their turns
of need! For to us doubtless will they then flee
for help in any difficulty, as now they flee from
us in dread of our tyranny. What lovelier feature
in the newness of the new earth, than the old animals
glorified with us, in their home with us our
common home, the house of our father each
kind an unfailing pleasure to the other! Ah, what
horses! Ah, what dogs! Ah, what wild beasts,
and what birds in the air! The whole redeemed
creation goes to make up St Paul’s heaven.
He had learned of him who would leave no one out;
who made the excuse for his murderers that they did
not know what they were doing.
Is not the prophecy on the groaning
creation to have its fulfilment in the new heavens
and the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness?
Does not this involve its existence beyond what we
call this world? Why should it not then involve
immortality? Would it not be more like the king
eternal, immortal, invisible, to know no life but the
immortal? to create nothing that could die; to slay
nothing but evil? ’For he is not a God
of the dead, but of the living; for all live unto him.’
But what is this liberty of the children
of God, for which the whole creation is waiting?
The children themselves are waiting for it: when
they have it, then will their house and retinue, the
creation, whose fate hangs on that of the children,
share it with them: what is this liberty?
All liberty must of course consist
in the realization of the ideal harmony between the
creative will and the created life; in the correspondence
of the creature’s active being to the creator’s
idea, which is his substantial soul. In other
words the creature’s liberty is what his obedience
to the law of his existence, the will of his maker,
effects for him. The instant a soul moves counter
to the will of its prime cause, the universe is its
prison; it dashes against the walls of it, and the
sweetest of its uplifting and sustaining forces at
once become its manacles and fetters. But St
Paul is not at the moment thinking either of the metaphysical
notion of liberty, or of its religious realization;
he has in his thought the birth of the soul’s
consciousness of freedom.
’And not only so’ that
the creation groaneth and travaileth ’but
ourselves also, which have the first fruits of the
spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves,
waiting for.... the redemption of our body.’ We
are not free, he implies, until our body is redeemed;
then all the creation will be free with us. He
regards the creation as part of our embodiment.
The whole creation is waiting for the manifestation
of the sons of God that is, the redemption
of their body, the idea of which extends to their
whole material envelopment, with all the life that
belongs to it. For this as for them, the bonds
of corruption must fall away; it must enter into the
same liberty with them, and be that for which it was
created a vital temple, perfected by the
unbroken indwelling of its divinity.
The liberty here intended, it may
be unnecessary to say, is not that essential liberty freedom
from sin, but the completing of the redemption of
the spirit by the redemption of the body, the perfecting
of the greater by its necessary complement of the less.
Evil has been constantly at work, turning our house
of the body into a prison; rendering it more opaque
and heavy and insensible; casting about it bands and
cerements, and filling it with aches and pains.
The freest soul, the purest of lovers, the man most
incapable of anything mean, would not, for all his
mighty liberty, yet feel absolutely at large while
chained to a dying body nor the less hampered,
but the more, that that dying body was his own.
The redemption of the body, therefore, the making
of it for the man a genuine, perfected, responsive
house-alive, is essential to the apostle’s notion
of a man’s deliverance. The new man must
have a new body with a new heaven and earth. St
Paul never thinks of himself as released from body;
he desires a perfect one, and of a nobler sort; he
would inhabit a heaven-made house, and give up the
earth-made one, suitable only to this lower stage of
life, infected and unsafe from the first, and now
much dilapidated in the service of the Master who
could so easily give him a better. He wants a
spiritual body a body that will not thwart
but second the needs and aspirations of the spirit.
He had in his mind, I presume, such a body as the Lord
died with, changed by the interpenetrating of the creative
indwelling will, to a heavenly body, the body with
which he rose. A body like the Lord’s is,
I imagine, necessary to bring us into true and perfect
contact with the creation, of which there must be multitudinous
phases whereof we cannot now be even aware.
The way in which both good and indifferent
people alike lay the blame on their bodies, and look
to death rather than God-aided struggle to set them
at liberty, appears to me low and cowardly: it
is the master fleeing from the slave, despising at
once and fearing him. We must hold the supremacy
over our bodies, but we must not despise body; it is
a divine thing. Body and soul are in the image
of God; and the lord of life was last seen in the
glorified body of his death. I believe that he
still wears that body. But we shall do better
without these bodies that suffer and grow old which
may indeed, as some think, be but the outer cases,
the husks of our real bodies. Endlessly helpful
as they have been to us, and that, in a measure incalculable,
through their very subjection to vanity, we are yet
surely not in altogether and only helpful company,
so long as the houses wherein we live have so many
spots and stains in them which friendly death, it may
be, can alone wash out so many weather-eaten
and self-engendered sores which the builder’s
hand, pulling down and rebuilding of fresh and nobler
material, alone can banish.
When the sons, then, are free, when
their bodies are redeemed, they will lift up with
them the lower creation into their liberty. St
Paul seems to believe that perfection in their kind
awaits also the humbler inhabitants of our world,
its advent to follow immediately on the manifestation
of the sons of God: for our sakes and their own
they have been made subject to vanity; for our sakes
and their own they shall be restored and glorified,
that is, raised higher with us.
Has the question no interest for you?
It would have much, had you now what you must one
day have a heart big enough to love any
life God has thought fit to create. Had the Lord
cared no more for what of his father’s was lower
than himself, than you do for what of your father’s
is lower than you, you would not now be looking for
any sort of redemption.
I have omitted in my quotations the
word adoption used in both English versions:
it is no translation of the Greek word for which it
stands. It is used by St Paul as meaning the
same thing with the phrase, ’the redemption
of the body’ a fact to bring the interpretation
given it at once into question. Falser translation,
if we look at the importance of the thing signified,
and its utter loss in the word used to represent it,
not to mention the substitution for that of the apostle,
of an idea not only untrue but actively mischievous,
was never made. The thing St Paul means in the
word he uses, has simply nothing to do with adoption nothing
whatever. In the beginning of the fourth chapter
of his epistle to the Galatians, he makes perfectly
clear what he intends by it. His unusual word
means the father’s recognition, when he comes
of age, of the child’s relation to him, by giving
him his fitting place of dignity in the house; and
here the deliverance of the body is the act of this
recognition by the great Father, completing and crowning
and declaring the freedom of the man, the perfecting
of the last lingering remnant of his deliverance.
St Paul’s word, I repeat, has nothing to do
with adoption; it means the manifestation of
the grown-up sons of God; the showing of those as
sons, who have always been his children; the bringing
of them out before the universe in such suitable attire
and with such fit attendance, that to look at them
is to see what they are, the sons of the house such
to whom their elder brother applied the words:
‘I said ye are Gods.’
If then the sons groan within themselves,
looking to be lifted up, and the other inhabitants
of the same world groan with them and cry, shall they
not also be lifted up? Have they not also a faithful
creator? He must be a selfish man indeed who
does not desire that it should be so.
It appears then, that, in the expectation
of the apostle, the new heavens and the new earth
in which dwell the sons of God, are to be inhabited
by blessed animals also inferior, but risen and
I think, yet to rise in continuous development.
Here let me revert a moment, and say
a little more clearly and strongly a thing I have
already said:
When the apostle speaks of the whole
creation, is it possible he should have dismissed
the animals from his thoughts, to regard the trees
and flowers bearing their part in the groaning and
travailing of the sore burdened world? Or could
he, animals and trees and flowers forgotten, have
intended by the creation that groaned and travailed,
only the bulk of the earth, its mountains and valleys,
plains and seas and rivers, its agglomeration of hard
and soft, of hot and cold, of moist and dry? If
he could, then the portion that least can be supposed
to feel or know, is regarded by the apostle of love
as immeasurably more important than the portion that
loves and moans and cries. Nor is this all; for
thereupon he attributes the suffering-faculty of the
excluded, far more sentient portion at least, to the
altogether inferior and less sentient, and upon the
ground of that faculty builds the vision of its redemption!
If it could be so, then how should the seeming apostle’s
affected rhapsody of hope be to us other than a mere
puff-ball of falsest rhetoric, a special-pleading
for nothing, as degrading to art as objectless in
nature?
Much would I like to know clearly
what animals the apostle saw on his travels, or around
his home when he had one their conditions,
and their relations to their superiors. Anyhow
they were often suffering creatures; and Paul was
a man growing hourly in likeness to his maker and
theirs, therefore overflowing with sympathy. Perhaps
as he wrote, there passed through his mind a throb
of pity for the beasts he had to kill at Ephesus.
If the Lord said very little about
animals, could he have done more for them than tell
men that his father cared for them? He has thereby
wakened and is wakening in the hearts of men a seed
his father planted. It grows but slowly, yet
has already borne a little precious fruit. His
loving friend St Francis has helped him, and many others
have tried, and are now trying to help him: whoever
sows the seed of that seed the Father planted is helping
the Son. Our behaviour to the animals, our words
concerning them, are seed, either good or bad, in the
hearts of our children. No one can tell to what
the animals might not grow, even here on the old earth
under the old heaven, if they were but dealt with
according to their true position in regard to us.
They are, in sense very real and divine, our kindred.
If I call them our poor relations, it is to suggest
that poor relations are often ill used. Relatives,
poor or rich, may be such ill behaved, self-assertive,
disagreeable persons, that we cannot treat them as
we gladly would; but our endeavour should be to develop
every true relation. He who is prejudiced against
a relative because he is poor, is himself an ill-bred
relative, and to be ill-bred is an excluding fault
with the court of the high countries. There,
poverty is welcome, vulgarity inadmissible.
Those who love certain animals selfishly,
pampering them, as so many mothers do their children
with worse results, that they may be loved of them
in return, betray them to their enemies. They
are not lovers of animals, but only of favourites,
and do their part to make the rest of the world dislike
animals. Theirs are the dogs that inhospitably
growl and bark and snap, moving the indifferent to
dislike, and confirming the unfriendly in their antagonism.
Any dog-parliament, met in the interests of their
kind, would condemn such dogs to be discreetly bitten,
and their mistresses to be avoided. And certainly,
if animals are intended to live and grow, she is the
enemy of any individual animal, who stunts his moral
and intellectual development by unwise indulgence.
Of whatever nature be the heaven of the animals, that
animal is not in the fair way to enter it. The
education of the lower lies at the door of the higher,
and in true education is truest kindness.
But what shall I say of such as for
any kind of end subject animals to torture? I
dare hardly trust myself to the expression of my judgment
of their conduct in this regard.
’We are investigators; we are
not doing it for our own sakes, but for the sake of
others, our fellow-men.’
The higher your motive for it, the
greater is the blame of your unrighteousness.
Must we congratulate you on such a love for your fellows
as inspires you to wrong the weaker than they, those
that are without helper against you? Shall we
count the man worthy who, for the sake of his friend,
robbed another man too feeble to protect himself,
and too poor to punish his assailant? For the
sake of your children, would you waylay a beggar?
No real good can grow in the soil of injustice.
I cannot help suspecting, however,
that the desire to know has a greater share in the
enormity than the desire to help. Alas for the
science that will sacrifice the law of righteousness
but to behold a law of sequence! The tree of
knowledge will never prove to man the tree of life.
There is no law says, Thou shalt know; a thousand
laws cry out, Thou shalt do right. These men
are a law unto themselves and what a law!
It is the old story: the greed of knowing casts
out righteousness, and mercy, and faith. Whatever
believed a benefit may or may not thus be wrought for
higher creatures, the injustice to the lower is nowise
affected. Justice has no respect of persons,
but they are surely the weaker that stand more in
need of justice!
Labour is a law of the universe, and
is not an evil. Death is a law of this world
at least, and is not an evil. Torture is the law
of no world but the hell of human invention.
Labour and death are for the best good of those that
labour and die; they are laws of life. Torture
is doubtless over-ruled for the good of the tortured,
but it will one day burn a very hell in the hearts
of the torturers.
Torture can be inflicted only by the
superior. The divine idea of a superior, is one
who requires duty, and protects, helps, delivers:
our relation to the animals is that of their superiors
in the family, who require labour, it may be, but
are just, helpful, protective. Can they know
anything of the Father who neither love nor rule their
inferiors, but use them as a child his insensate toys,
pulling them to pieces to know what is inside them?
Such men, so-called of science let them
have the dignity to the fullness of its worth lust
to know as if a man’s life lay in knowing, as
if it were a vile thing to be ignorant so
vile that, for the sake of his secret hoard of facts,
they do right in breaking with torture into the house
of the innocent! Surely they shall not thus find
the way of understanding! Surely there is a maniac
thirst for knowledge, as a maniac thirst for wine
or for blood! He who loves knowledge the most
genuinely, will with the most patience wait for it
until it can be had righteously.
Need I argue the injustice? Can
a sentient creature come forth without rights, without
claim to well-being, or to consideration from the other
creatures whom they find, equally without action of
their own, present in space? If one answer, ’For
aught I know, it may be so,’ Where
then are thy own rights? I ask. If another
have none, thine must lie in thy superior power; and
will there not one day come a stronger than thou?
Mayst thou not one day be in Naboth’s place,
with an Ahab getting up to go into thy vineyard to
possess it? The rich man may come prowling after
thy little ewe lamb, and what wilt thou have to say?
He may be the stronger, and thou the weaker!
That the rights of the animals are so much less than
ours, does not surely argue them the less rights!
They have little, and we have much; ought they therefore
to have less and we more? Must we not rather
be the more honourably anxious that they have their
little to the full. Every gain of injustice is
a loss to the world; for life consists neither in
length of days nor in ease of body. Greed of
life and wrong done to secure it, will never work anything
but direst loss. As to knowledge, let justice
guide thy search and thou wilt know the sooner.
Do the will of God, and thou shalt know God, and he
will open thine eyes to look into the very heart of
knowledge. Force thy violent way, and gain knowledge,
to miss truth. Thou mayest wound the heart of
God, but thou canst not rend it asunder to find the
Truth that sits there enthroned.
What man would he be who accepted
the offer to be healed and kept alive by means which
necessitated the torture of certain animals? Would
he feel himself a gentleman walking the
earth with the sense that his life and conscious well-being
were informed and upheld by the agonies of other lives?
‘I hope, sir, your health is better than it
has been?’
’Thank you, I am wonderfully
restored have entered in truth upon a fresh
lease of life. My organism has been nourished
with the agonies of several dogs, and the pangs of
a multitude of rabbits and guinea-pigs, and I am aware
of a marvellous change for the better. They gave
me their lives, and I gave them in return worse pains
than mine. The bargain has proved a quite satisfactory
one! True, their lives were theirs, not mine;
but then their sufferings were theirs, not mine!
They could not defend themselves; they had not a word
to say, so reasonable was the exchange. Poor
fools! they were neither so wise, nor so strong, nor
such lovers of comfort as I! If they could not
take care of themselves, that was their look-out,
not mine! Every animal for himself!’
There was a certain patriotic priest
who thought it better to put a just man to death than
that a whole nation should perish. Precious salvation
that might be wrought by injustice! But then the
just man taught that the rich man and the beggar must
one day change places.
‘To set the life of a dog against
the life of a human being!’
No, but the torture of a dog against
the prolonged life of a being capable of torturing
him. Priceless gain, the lengthening of such a
life, to the man and his friends and his country!
That the animals do not suffer so
much as we should under like inflictions, I hope true,
and think true. But is toothache nothing, because
there are yet worse pains for head and face?
Not a few who now regard themselves
as benefactors of mankind, will one day be looked
upon with a disapprobation which no argument will now
convince them they deserve. But yet another day
is coming, when they will themselves right sorrowfully
pour out disapprobation upon their own deeds; for
they are not stones but men, and must repent.
Let them, in the interests of humanity, give their
own entrails to the knife, their own silver cord to
be laid bare, their own golden bowl to be watched
throbbing, and I will worship at their feet. But
shall I admire their discoveries at the expense of
the stranger nay, no stranger the
poor brother within their gates?
Your conscience does not trouble you?
Take heed that the light that is in you be not darkness.
Whatever judgment mean, will it suffice you in that
hour to say, ’My burning desire to know how life
wrought in him, drove me through the gates and bars
of his living house’? I doubt if you will
add, in your heart any more than with your tongue,
’and I did well.’
To those who expect a world to come,
I say then, Let us take heed how we carry ourselves
to the creation which is to occupy with us the world
to come.
To those whose hearts are sore for
that creation, I say, The Lord is mindful of his own,
and will save both man and beast.