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fierce disappointment behind; that is only so much the better; but the hurt
lies in this-that the immortal, the infinite, created in the image of the
everlasting God, is housed with the fading and the corrupting, and clings to
them as its good-clings to them till it is infected and interpenetrated with
their proper diseases, which assume in it a form more terrible in proportion
to the superiority of its kind.
[ 25 ] Holy Scriptures
This story may not be just as the Lord told it, and yet may contain in
its mirror as much of the truth as we are able to receive, and as will
afford us scope for a life's discovery. The modifying influence of the human
channels may be essential to God's revealing mode.
[ 26 ] Command That These Stones Be Made Bread
The Father said, That is a stone. The Son would not say, That is a
loaf. No one creative Fiat shall contradict another. The Father and the Son
are of one mind. The Lord could hunger, could starve, but would not change
into another thing what His Father had made one thing. There was no such
change in the feeding of the multitudes. The fish and the bread were fish
and bread before. . . . There was in these miracles, and I think in all,
only a hastening of appearances: the doing of that in a day, which may
ordinarily take a thousand years, for with God time is not what it is with
us. He makes it... Nor does it render the process one whit more miraculous.
Indeed, the wonder of the growing corn is to me greater than the wonder of
feeding the thousands. It is easier to understand the creative power going
forth at once- immediately-than through the countless, the lovely, the
seemingly forsaken wonders of the cornfield.
[ 27 ] Religious Feeling
In the higher aspect of this first temptation, arising from the fact
that a man cannot feel the things he believes except under certain
conditions of physical well-being dependent upon food, the answer is the
same: A man does not live by his feelings any more than by bread.
[ 28 ] Dryness
And when he can no longer feel the truth, he shall not therefore die.
He lives because God is true; and he is able to know that he lives because
he knows, having once understood the word that God is truth. He believes in
the God of former vision, lives by that word therefore, when all is dark and
there is no vision.
[ 29 ] Presumption
"If ye have faith and doubt not, if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be
thou removed and cast into the sea, it shall be done." Good people . . .
have been tempted to tempt the Lord their God upon the strength of this
saying. . . . Happily for such, the assurance to which they would give the
name of faith generally fails them in time. Faith is that which, knowing the
Lord's will, goes and does it; or, not knowing it, stands and waits... But
to put God to the question in any other way than by saying, "What wilt thou
have me to do?" is an attempt to compel God to declare Himself, or to hasten
His work. . . . The man is therein dissociating himself from God so far
that, instead of acting by the divine will from within, he acts in God's
face, as it were, to see what He will do. Man's first business is, "What
does God want me to do?", not "What will God do if I do so and so?"
[ 30 ] The Knowledge of God
To say Thou art God, without knowing what the Thou means-of what use is
it? God is a name only, except we know God.
[ 31] The Passion
It is with the holiest fear that we should approach the terrible fact
of the sufferings of Our Lord. Let no one think that these were less because
He was more. The more delicate the nature, the more alive to all that is
lovely and true, lawful and right, the more does it feel the antagonism of
pain, the inroad of death upon life; the more dreadful is that breach of the
harmony of things whose sound is torture.
[ 32 ] Eli, Eli
He could not see, could not feel Him near; and yet it is "My God" that
He cries. Thus the Will of Jesus, in the very moment when His faith seems
about to yield is finally triumphant. It has no feeling now to support it,
no beatific vision to absorb it. It stands naked in His soul and tortured,
as He stood naked and scourged before Pilate. Pure and simple and surrounded
by fire, it declares for God.
[ 33 ] The Same
Without this last trial of all, the temptations of our Master had not
been so full as the human cup could hold; there would have been one region
through which we had to pass wherein we might call aloud upon our
Captain-Brother, and there would be no voice or hearing: He had avoided the
fatal spot!
[ 34 ] Vicarious Desolation
This is the Faith of the Son of God. God withdrew, as it were, that the
perfect Will of the Son might arise and go forth to find the Will of the
Father. It is possible that even then He thought of the lost sheep who could
not believe that God was their Father; and for them, too, in all their loss
and blindness and unlove, cried, saying the word they might say, knowing for
them that God means Father and more.
[ 35 ] Creeping Christians
We are and remain such creeping Christians, because we look at
ourselves and not at Christ; because we gaze at the marks of our own soiled
feet, and the trail of our own defiled garments. . . . Each, putting his
foot in the footprint of the Master, and so defacing it, turns to examine
how far his neighbor's footprint corresponds with that which he still calk
the Master's, although it is but his own. Or, having committed a petty
fault, I mean a fault such as only a petty creature could commit, we mourn
over the defilement to ourselves, and the shame of it before our friends,
children, or servants, instead of hastening to make the due confession and
amends to our fellow, and then, forgetting our own paltry self with its
well-earned disgrace, lift up our eyes to the glory which alone will quicken
the true man in us, and kill the peddling creature we so wrongly call our
self.
[ 36 ] Dryness
So long as we have nothing to say to God, nothing to do with Him, save
in the sunshine of the mind when we feel Him near us, we are poor creatures,
willed upon, not willing. . . . And how in such a condition do we generally
act? Do we sit mourning over the loss of feeling? Or worse, make frantic
efforts to rouse them?
[ 37 ] The Use of Dryness
God does not, by the instant gift of His Spirit, make us always feel
right, desire good, love purity, aspire after Him and His Will. Therefore
either He will not, or He cannot. If He will not, it must be because it
would not be well to do so. If He cannot, then He would not if He could;
else a better condition than God's is conceivable to the mind of God. . . .
The truth is this: He wants to make us in His own image, choosing the good,
refusing the evil. How should He effect this if He were always moving us
from within, as He does at divine intervals, toward the beauty of holiness?
. . . For God made our individuality as well as, and a greater marvel than,
our dependence; made our apartness from Himself, that freedom should bind us
divinely dearer to Himself, with a new and inscrutable marvel of love; for
the Godhead is still at the root, is the making root of our individuality,
and the freer the man, the stronger the bond that binds him to Him who made
his freedom.
[ 38 ] The Highest Condition of the Human Will
The highest condition of the human will is in sight.... I say not the
highest condition of the Human Being; that surely lies in the Beatific
Vision, in the sight of God. But the highest condition of the Human Will, as
distinct, not as separated from God, is when, not seeing God, not seeming to
itself to grasp Him at all, it yet holds Him fast.
[ 39 ] Troubled Soul
Troubled soul, thou are not bound to feel but thou art bound to arise.
God loves thee whether thou feelest or not. Thou canst not love when thou
wilt, but thou art bound to fight the hatred in thee to the last. Try not to
feel good when thou art not good, but cry to Him who is good. He changes not
because thou changest. Nay, He has an especial tenderness of love toward
thee for that thou art in the dark and hast no light, and His heart is glad
when thou doest arise and say, "I will go to my Father." . . . Fold the arms
of thy faith, and wait in the quietness until light goes up in thy darkness.
For the arms of thy Faith I say, but not of thy Action: bethink thee of
something that thou oughtest to do, and, go to do it, if it be but the
sweeping of a room, or the preparing of a meal, or a visit to a friend. Heed
not thy feeling: Do thy work.
[ 40 ] Dangerous Moment
Am I going to do a good deed? Then, of all times- Father into thy
hands: lest the enemy should have me now.
[ 41 ] It Is Finished
... when the agony of death was over, when the storm of the world died
away behind His retiring spirit, and He entered the regions where there is
only life, and therefore all that is not music is silence...
[ 42 ] Members of One Another
We shall never be able, I say, to rest in the bosom of the Father, till
the fatherhood is fully revealed to us in the love of the brothers. For He
cannot be our Father, save as He is their Father; and if we do not see Him
and feel Him as their Father, we cannot know Him as ours.
[ 43 ] Originality
Our Lord never thought of being original.
[ 44 ] The Moral Law
Of what use then is the Law? To lead us to Christ, the Truth-to waken
in our minds a sense of what our deepest nature, the presence, namely, of
God in us, requires of us-to let us know, in part by failure, that the
purest efforts of will of which we are capable cannot lift us up even to the
abstaining from wrong to our neighbor.
[ 45 ] The Same
In order to fulfill the commonest law ... we must rise into a loftier
region altogether, a region that is above law, because it is spirit and life
and makes the law.
[ 46 ] Upward toward the Center
"But how," says a man, who is willing to recognize the universal
neighborhood, but finds himself unable to fulfill the bare law toward the
woman even whom he loves best-"How am I then to rise into that higher
region, that empyrean of love?" And, beginning straightaway to try to love
his neighbor, he finds that the empyrean of which he spoke is no more to be
reached in itself than the law was to be reached in itself. As he cannot
keep the law without first rising into the love of his neighbor, so he
cannot love his neighbor without first rising higher still. The whole system
of the universe works upon this law-the driving of things upward toward the
center. The man who will love his neighbor can do so by no immediately
operative exercise of the will. It is the man fulfilled of God from whom he
came and by whom he is, who alone can as himself love his neighbor who came
from God too and is by God too. The mystery of individuality and consequent
relation is deep as the beginnings of humanity, and the questions thence
arising can be solved only by him who has, practically at least, solved the
holy necessities resulting from his origin. In God alone can man meet man.
In Him alone the converging lines of existence touch and cross not. When the
mind of Christ, the life of the Head, courses through that atom which the
man is of the slowly revivifying body, when he is alive too, then the love
of the brothers is there as conscious life. ... It is possible to love our
neighbor as ourselves. Our Lord never spoke hyperbolically.
[ 47 ] No One Loves Because He Sees Why
Where a man does not love, the not-loving must seem rational. For no
one loves because he sees why, but because he loves. No human reason can be
given for the highest necessity of divinely created existence. For reasons
are always from above downward.
[ 48 ] My Neighbor
A man must not choose his neighbor: he must take the neighbor that God
sends him. . . . The neighbor is just the man who is next to you at the
moment, the man with whom any business has brought you into contact.
[ 49 ] The Same
The love of our neighbor is the only door out of the dungeon of self,
where we mope and mow, striking sparks, and rubbing phosphorescences out of
the walls, and blowing our own breath in our own nostrils, instead of
issuing to the fair sunlight of God, the sweet winds of the universe.
[ 50 ] What Cannot Be Loved
But how can we love a man or a woman who ... is mean, unlovely,
carping, uncertain, self-righteous, self-seeking, and self-admiring?-who can
even sneer, the most inhuman of human faults, far worse in its essence than
mere murder? These things cannot be loved. The best man hates them most; the
worst man cannot love them. But are these the man? . . . Lies there not
within the man and the woman a divine element of brotherhood, of sisterhood,
a something lovely and lovable- slowly fading, it may be-dying away under
the fierce heat of vile passions, or the yet more fearful cold of sepulchral
selfishness, but there? ... It is the very presence of this fading humanity
that makes it possible for us to hate. If it were an animal only, and not a
man or a woman, that did us hurt, we should not hate: we should only kill.
[ 51 ] Love and Justice
Man is not made for justice from his fellow, but for love, which is
greater than justice, and by including supersedes justice. Mere justice is
an impossibility, a fiction of analysis.... Justice to be justice must be
much more than justice. Love is the law of our condition, without which we
can no more render justice than a man can keep a straight line, walking in
the dark.
[ 52 ] The Body
It is by the body that we come into contact with Nature, with our
fellowmen, with all their revelations to us. It is through the body that we
receive all the lessons of passion, of suffering, of love, of beauty, of
science. It is through the body that we are both trained outward from
ourselves, and driven inward into our deepest selves to find God. There is
glory and might in this vital evanescence, this slow glacierlike flow of
clothing and revealing matter, this ever uptossed rainbow of tangible
humanity. It is no less of God's making than the spirit that is clothed
therein.
[ 53 ] Goodness
The Father was all in all to the Son, and the Son no more thought of
His own goodness than an honest man thinks of his honesty. When the good man
sees goodness, he thinks of his own evil: Jesus had no evil to think of, but
neither does He think of His goodness: He delights in His Father's. "Why
callest thou Me good?"
[ 54 ] Christ's Disregards
The Lord cared neither for isolated truth nor for orphaned deed. It was
truth in the inward parts, it was the good heart, the mother of good deeds,
He cherished. ... It was good men He cared about, not notions of good
things, or even good actions, save as the outcome of life, save as the
bodies in which the primary live actions of love and will in the soul took
shape and came forth.
[ 55 ] Easy to Please and Hard to Satisfy
That no keeping but a perfect one will satisfy God, I hold with all my
heart and strength; but that there is none else He cares for, is one of the
lies of the enemy. What father is not pleased with the first tottering
attempt of his little one to walk? What father would be satisfied with
anything but the manly step of the full-grown son!
[ 56 ] The Moral Law
The immediate end of the commandments never was that men should succeed
in obeying them, but that, finding they could not do that which yet must be
done, finding the more they tried the more was required of them, they should
be driven to the source of life and law-of their life and His law-to seek
from Him such reinforcement of life as should make the fulfillment of the
law as possible, yea, as natural, as necessary.
[ 57 ] Bondage
A man is in bondage to whatever he cannot part with that is less than
himself.
[ 58 ] The Rich Young Man (Matthew 19: 16-22)
It was time . . . that he should refuse, that he should know what
manner of spirit he was of, and meet the confusions of soul, the sad
searchings of heart that must follow. A time comes to every man when he must
obey, or make such refusal-and know it. . . . The time will come, God only
knows its hour, when he will see the nature of his deed, with the knowledge
that he was dimly seeing it so even when he did it: the alternative had been
put before him.
[ 59 ] Law and Spirit
The commandments can never be kept while there is a strife to keep
them: the man is overwhelmed in the weight of their broken pieces. It needs
a clean heart to have pure hands, all the power of a live soul to keep the
law-a power of life, not of struggle; the strength of love, not the effort
of duty.
[ 60 ] Our Nonage
The number of fools not yet acknowledging the first condition of
manhood nowise alters the fact that he who has begun to recognize duty and
acknowledge the facts of his being, is but a tottering child on the path of
life. He is on the path: he is as wise as at the time he can be; the
Father's arms are stretched out to receive him; but he is not therefore a
wonderful being; not therefore a model of wisdom; not at all the admirable
creature his largely remaining folly would, in his worst moments (that is,
when he feels best) persuade him to think himself; he is just one of God's
poor creatures.
[ 61 ] Knowledge
Had he done as the Master told him, he would soon have come to
understand. Obedience is the opener of eyes.
[ 62 ] Living Forever
The poor idea of living forever, all that commonplace minds grasp at
for eternal life-(is) its mere concomitant shadow, in itself not worth
thinking about. When a man is ... one with God, what should he do but live
forever?
[ 63 ] Be Ye Perfect
"I cannot be perfect; it is hopeless; and He does not expect it." -It
would be more honest if he said, "I do not want to be perfect: I am content
to be saved." Such as he do not care for being perfect as their Father in
heaven is perfect, but for being what they called saved.
[ 64 ] Carrion Comfort
Or are you so well satisfied with what you are, that you have never
sought eternal life, never hungered and thirsted after the righteousness of
God, the perfection of your being? If this latter be your condition, then be
comforted; the Master does not require of you to sell what you have and give
to the poor. You follow Him! You go with Him to preach good tidings!-you who
care not for righteousness! You are not one whose company is desirable to
the Master. Be comforted, I say: He does not want you; He will not ask you
to open your purse for Him; you may give or withhold: it is nothing to Him.
... Go and keep the commandments. It is not come to your money yet. The
commandments are enough for you. You are not yet a child in the kingdom. You
do not care for the arms of your Father; you value only the shelter of His
roof. As to your money, let the commandments direct you how to use it. It is
in you but pitiable presumption to wonder whether it is required of you to
sell all that you have ... for the Young Man to have sold all and followed
Him would have been to accept God's patent of peerage: to you it is not
offered.
[ 65 ] The Same
Does this comfort you? Then alas for you! . . . Your relief is to know
that the Lord has no need of you- does not require you to part with your
money, does not offer you Himself instead. You do not indeed sell Him for
thirty pieces of silver, but you are glad not to buy Him with all that you
have.
[ 66 ] How Hard?
This life, this Kingdom of God, this simplicity of absolute existence,
is hard to enter. How hard? As hard as the Master of salvation could find
words to express the hardness.
[ 67 ] Things
The man who for consciousness of well-being depends upon anything but
life, the life essential, is a slave; he hangs on what is less than
himself.... Things are given us-this body, first of things-that through them
we may be trained both to independence and true possession of them. We must
possess them; they must not possess us. Their use is to mediate-as shapes
and manifestations in lower kind of the things that are unseen, that is, in
themselves unseeable, the things that belong, not to the world of speech but
the world of silence, not to the world of showing, but the world of being,
the world that cannot be shaken, and must remain. These things unseen take
the form in the things of time and space- not that they may exist, for they
exist in and from eternal Godhead, but that their being may be known to
those in training for the eternal; these things unseen the sons and
daughters of God must possess. But instead of reaching out after them, they
grasp at their forms, regard the things seen as the things to be possessed,
fall in love with the bodies instead of the souls of them.
[ 68 ] Possession
He who has God, has all things, after the fashion in which He who made
them has them.
[ 69 ] The Torment of Death
It is imperative on us to get rid of the tyranny of things. See how
imperative: let the young man cling with every fiber to his wealth, what God
can do He will do; His child shall not be left in the Hell of possession.
Comes the angel of death-and where are the things that haunted the poor soul
with such manifold hindrance and obstruction? ... Is the man so freed from
the dominion of things? Does Death so serve him-so ransom him? . . . Not so;
for then first, I presume, does the man of things become aware of their
tyranny. When a man begins to abstain, then first he recognizes the strength
of his passion: it may be, when a man has not a thing left, he will begin to
know what a necessity he had made of things.
[ 70 ] The Utility of Death
Wherein then lies the service of Death? ... In this: it is not the
fetters that gall, but the fetters that soothe, which eat into the soul. In
this way is the loss of things ... a motioning, hardly toward, yet in favor
of, deliverance. It may seem to a man the first of his slavery when it is in
truth the beginning of his freedom. Never soul was set free without being
made to feel its slavery.
[ 71 ] Not the Rich Only
But it is not the rich man only who is under the dominion of things;
they too are slaves who, having no money, are unhappy from the lack of it.
[ 72 ] Fearful Thinking
Because we easily imagine ourselves in want, we imagine God ready to
forsake us.
[ 73 ] Miracles
The miracles of Jesus were the ordinary works of His Father, wrought
small and swift that we might take them in.
[ 74 ] The Sacred Present
The next hour, the next moment, is as much beyond our grasp and as much
in God's care, as that a hundred years away. Care for the next minute is
just as foolish as care for the morrow, or for a day in the next thousand
years-in neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything. Those
claims only of the morrow which have to be prepared today are of the duty of
today: the moment which coincides with work to be done, is the moment to be
minded; the next is nowhere till God has made it.
[ 75 ] Forethought
If a man forget a thing, God will see to that: man is not Lord of his
memory or his intellect. But man is lord of his will, his action; and is
then verily to blame when, remembering a duty, he does not do it, but puts
it off, and Jo forgets it. If a man lay himself out to do the immediate duty
of the moment, wonderfully little forethought, I suspect, will be found
needful. That forethought only is right which has to determine duty, and
pass into action. To the foundation of yesterday's work well done, the work
of the morrow will be sure to fit. Work done is of more consequence for the
future than the foresight of an archangel.
[ 76 ] Not the Rich Only
If it be things that slay you, what matter whether things you have, or
things you have not?
[ 77 ] Care
Tomorrow makes today's whole head sick, its whole heart faint. When we
should be still, sleeping or dreaming, we are fretting about an hour that
lies a half sun's journey away! Not so doest thou, Lord; thou doest the work
of thy Father!
[ 78 ] The Sacred Present
The care that is filling your mind at this moment, or but waiting till
you lay the book aside to leap upon you -that need which is no need, is a
demon sucking at the spring of your life. "No; mine is a reasonable care- an
unavoidable care, indeed." Is it something you have to do this very moment?
"No." Then you are allowing it to usurp the place of something that is
required of you this moment. "There is nothing required of me at this
moment." Nay but there is-the greatest thing that can be required of man.
"Pray, what is it?" Trust in the living God.... "I do trust Him in spiritual
matters." Everything is an affair of the spirit.
[ 79 ] Heaven
For the only air of the soul, in which it can breathe and live, is the
present God and the spirits of the just: that is our heaven, our home, our
all-right place.... We shall be God's children on the little hills and in
the fields of that heaven, not one desiring to be before another any more
than to cast that other out; for ambition and hatred will then be seen to be
one and the same spirit.
[ 80 ] Shaky Foundations
The things readiest to be done, those which lie, not at the door but on
the very table, of a man's mind, are not merely in general the most
neglected, but even by the thoughtful man, the oftenest let alone, the
oftenest postponed. . . . Truth is one, and he who does the truth in the
small thing is of the truth; he who will do it only in a great thing, who
postpones the small thing near him to the great farther from him, is not of
the truth.
[ 81 ] Fussing
We, too, dull our understandings with trifles, fill the heavenly spaces
with phantoms, waste the heavenly time with hurry. When I trouble myself
over a trifle, even a trifle confessed-the loss of some little article, say-
spurring my memory, and hunting the house, not from immediate need, but from
dislike of loss; when a book has been borrowed of me and not returned, and I
have forgotten the borrower, and fret over the missing volume ... is it not
time I lost a few things when I care for them so unreasonably? This losing
of things is of the mercy of God: it comes to teach us to let them go. Or
have I forgotten a thought that came to me, which seemed of the truth? ... I
keep trying and trying to call it back, feeling a poor man till that thought
be recovered- to be far more lost, perhaps, in a notebook, into which I
shall never look again to find it! I forgot that it is live things God cares
about.
[ 82 ] Housekeeping
I appeal especially to all who keep house concerning the size of
troubles that suffices to hide word and face of God.
[ 83 ] Cares
With every haunting trouble then, great or small, the loss of thousands
or the lack of a shilling, go to God.... If your trouble is such that you
cannot appeal to Him, the more need you should appeal to him!
[ 84 ] God at the Door
Nor will God force any door to enter in. He may send a tempest about
the house; the wind of His admonishment may burst doors and windows, yea,
shake the house to its foundations; but not then, not so, will He enter. The
door must be opened by the willing hand, ere the foot of Love will cross the
threshold. He watches to see the door move from within. Every tempest is but
an assault in the siege of Love. The terror of God is but the other side of
His love; it is love outside, that would be inside-love that knows the house
is no house, only a place, until it enter.
[ 85 ] Difficulties
Everything difficult indicates something more than our theory of life
yet embraces, checks some tendency to abandon the straight path, leaving
open only the way ahead. But there is a reality of being in which all things
are easy and plain-oneness, that is, with the Lord of Life; to pray for this
is the first thing; and to the point of this prayer every difficulty hedges
and directs us.
[ 86 ] Vain Vigilance
Do those who say, "Lo here or lo there are the signs of His coming,"
think to be too keen for Him, and spy His approach? When he tells them to
watch lest He find them neglecting their work, they stare this way and that,
and watch lest He should succeed in coming like a thief! ... Obedience is
the one key of life.
[ 87 ] Incompleteness
He that is made in the image of God must know Him or be desolate. . . .
Witness the dissatisfaction, yea, desolation of my soul-wretched, alone,
unfinished, without Him. It cannot act from itself, save in God; acting from
what seems itself without God, is no action at all, it is a mere yielding to
impulse. All within is disorder and spasm. There is a cry behind me, and a
voice before; instincts of betterment tell me I must rise above my present
self-perhaps even above all my possible self: I see not how to obey, how to
carry them out! I am shut up in a world of consciousness, an unknown I in an
unknown world: surely this world of my unwilled, un-chosen, compelled
existence, cannot be shut out from Him, cannot be unknown to Him, cannot be
impenetrable, impermeable, unpresent to Him from whom I am?
[ 88 ] Prayer
Shall I not tell Him my troubles-how He, even He, has troubled me by
making me?-how unfit I am to be that which I am?-that my being is not to me
a good thing yet?-that I need a law that shall account to me for it in
righteousness-reveal to me how I am to make it a good-how I am to be* a.
good and not an evil?
[ 89 ] Knowledge That Would Be Useless
Why should the question admit of doubt? We know that the wind blows;
why should we not know that God answers prayer? I reply, What if God does
not care to have you know it at secondhand? What if there would be no good
in that? There is some testimony on record, and perhaps there might be much
were it not that, having to do with things so immediately personal, and
generally so delicate, answers to prayer would naturally not often be talked
about; but no testimony concerning the thing can well be conclusive; for,
like a reported miracle, there is always some way to daff it; and besides,
the conviction to be got that way is of little value: it avails nothing to
know the thing by the best of evidence.
[ 90 ] Prayer
Reader, if you are in any trouble, try whether God will not help you:
if you are in no need, why should you ask questions about prayer? True, he
knows little of himself who does not know that he is wretched, and
miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked; but until he begins at least to
suspect a need, how can he pray?
[ 91 ] Why Should It Be Necessary?
"But if God is so good as you represent Him, and if He knows all that
we need, and better far than we do ourselves, why should it be necessary to
ask Him for anything?" I answer, What if He knows Prayer to be the thing we
need first and most? What if the main object in God's idea of prayer be the
supplying of our great, our endless need-the need of Himself? . . . Hunger
may drive the runaway child home, and he may or may not be fed at once, but
he needs his mother more than his dinner. Communion with God is the one need
of the soul beyond all other need: prayer is the beginning of that
communion, and some need is the motive of that prayer. ... So begins a
communion, a taking with God, a coming-to-one with Him, which is the sole
end of prayer, yea, of existence itself in its infinite phases. We must ask
that we may receive: but that we should receive what we ask in respect of
our lower needs, is not God's end in making us pray, for He could give us
everything without that: to bring His child to his knee, God withholds that
man may ask.
[ 92 ] The Conditions of a Good Gift
For the real good of every gift is essential first, that the giver be
in the gift-as God always is, for He is love-and next, that the receiver
know and receive the giver in the gift. Every gift of God is but a harbinger
of His greatest and only sufficing gift-that of Himself. No gift
unrecognized as coming from God is at its own best: therefore many things
that God would gladly give us, things even that we need because we are, must
wait until we ask for them, that we may know whence they come: when in all
gifts we find Him, then in Him we shall find all things.
[ 93 ] False Spirituality
Sometimes to one praying will come the feeling . . . "Were it not
better to abstain? If this thing be good, will He not give it me? Would He
not be better pleased if I left it altogether to Him?" It comes, I think, of
a lack of faith and childlikeness ... it may even come of ambition after
spiritual distinction.
[ 94 ] Small Prayers
In every request, heart and soul and mind ought to supply the low
accompaniment, "Thy will be done"; but the making of any request brings us
near to Him. . . . Anything large enough for a wish to light upon, is large
enough to hang a prayer upon: the thought of Him to whom that prayer goes
will purify and correct the desire.
[ 95 ] Riches and Need
There could be no riches but for need. God Himself is made rich by
man's necessity. By that He is rich to give; through that we are rich by
receiving.
[ 96 ] Providence
"How should any design of the All-wise be altered in response to prayer
of ours? How are we to believe such a thing?" By reflecting that He is the
All-wise, who sees before Him, and will not block His path. . .. Does God
care for suns and planets and satellites, for divine mathematics and ordered
harmonies, more than for His children? I venture to say He cares more for
oxen than for those. He lays no plans irrespective of His children; and, His
design being that they shall be free, active, live things, He sees that
space shall be kept for them.
[ 97 ] Divine Freedom
What stupidity of perfection would that be which left no margin about
God's work, no room for change of plan upon change of fact-yea, even the
mighty change that.. . now at length His child is praying! ... I may move my
arm as I please: shall God be unable so to move His?
[ 98 ] Providence
If His machine interfered with His answering the prayer of a single
child, He would sweep it from Him- not to bring back chaos but to make room
for His child.. .. We must remember that God is not occupied with a grand
toy of worlds and suns and planets, of attractions and repulsions, of
agglomerations and crystallizations, of forces and waves; that these but
constitute a portion of His workshops and tools for the bringing out of
righteous men and women to fill His house of love withal
[ 99 ] The Miracles of Our Lord
In all His miracles Jesus did only in miniature what His Father does
ever in the great. Poor, indeed, was the making of the wine in the ... pots
of stone, compared with its making in the lovely growth of the vine with its
clusters of swelling grapes-the live roots gathering from the earth the
water that had to be borne in pitchers and poured into the great vases; but
it is precious as the interpreter of the same, even in its being the outcome
of Our Lord's sympathy with ordinary human rejoicing.
[ 100 ] They Have No Wine (John 2:3)
At the prayer of His mother, He made room in His plans for the thing
she desired. It was not His wish then to work a miracle, but if His mother
wished it, He would. He did for His mother what for His own part He would
rather have left alone. Not always did He do as His mother would have Him;
but this was a case in which He could do so, for it would interfere nowise
with the will of His Father. . . . The Son, then, could change His intent
and spoil nothing: so, I say, can the Father; for the Son does nothing but
what He sees the Father do.
[ 101 ] Intercessory Prayer
And why should the good of anyone depend on the prayer of another? I
can only answer with the return question, "Why should my love be powerless
to help another?"
[ 102 ] The Eternal Revolt
There is endless room for rebellion against ourselves.
[ IO3 ] They Say It Does Them Good
There are those even who, not believing in any ear to hear, any heart
to answer, will yet pray. They say it does them good; they pray to nothing
at all, but they get spiritual benefit. I will not contradict their
testimony. So needful is prayer to the soul that the mere attitude of it may
encourage a good mood. Verily to pray to that which is not, is in logic a
folly: yet the good that, they say, comes of it, may rebuke the worse folly
of their unbelief, for it indicates that prayer is natural, and how could it
be natural if inconsistent with the very mode of our being?
[ 104 ] Perfected Prayer
And there is a communion with God that asks for nothing, yet asks for
everything. . . . He who seeks the Father more than anything He can give, is
likely to have what he asks, for he is not likely to ask amiss.
[ 105 ] Corrective Granting
Even such as ask amiss may sometimes have their prayers answered. The
Father will never give the child a stone that asks for bread; but I am not
sure that He will never give the child a stone that asks for a stone. If the
Father says, "My child, that is a stone; it is no bread," and the child
answer, "I am sure it is bread; I want it," may it not be well that he
should try his "bread"?
[ 106 ] Why We Must Wait
Perhaps, indeed, the better the gift we pray for, the more time is
necessary for its arrival. To give us the spiritual gift we desire, God may
have to begin far back in our spirit, in regions unknown to us, and do much
work that we can be aware of only in the results; for our consciousness is
to the extent of our being but as the flame of the volcano to the world-gulf
whence it issues; in the gulf of our unknown being God works behind our
consciousness. With His holy influence, with His own presence (the one thing
for which most earnestly we cry) He may be approaching our consciousness
from behind, coming forward through regions of our darkness into our light,
long before we begin to be aware that He is answering our request-has
answered it, and is visiting His child.
[ 107 ] God's Vengeance
"Vengeance is mine," He says: with a right understanding of it, we
might as well pray for God's vengeance as for His forgiveness; that
vengeance is, to destroy the sin -to make the sinner abjure and hate it; nor
is there any satisfaction in a vengeance that seeks or effects less. The man
himself must turn against himself, and so be for himself. If nothing else
will do, then hellfire; if less will do, whatever brings repentance and
self-repudiation, is God's repayment. Friends, if any prayers are offered
against us; if the vengeance of God be cried out for, because of some wrong
you or I have done, God grant us His vengeance! Let us not think that we
shall get off!
[ 108 ] The Way of Understanding
He who does that which he sees, shall understand; he who is set upon
understanding rather than doing, shall go on stumbling and mistaking and
speaking foolishness. ... It is he that runneth that shall read, and no
other. It is not intended by the Speaker of the Parables that any other
should know intellectually what, known but intellectually, would be for his
injury-what, knowing intellectually, he would imagine he had grasped,
perhaps even appropriated. When the pilgrim of the truth comes on his
journey to the region of the parable, he finds its interpretation. It is not
a fruit or a jewel to be stored, but a well springing by the wayside.
[ 109 ] Penal Blindness
Those who by insincerity and falsehood close their deeper eyes, shall
not be capable of using in the matter the more superficial eyes of their
understanding... This will help to remove the difficulty that the parables
are plainly for the teaching of the truth, and yet the Lord speaks of them
as for the concealing of it. They are for the understanding of that man only
who is practical- who does the thing he knows, who seeks to understand
vitally. They reveal to the live conscience, otherwise not to the keenest
intellect.
[ 110 ] The Same
The former are content to have the light cast upon their way: the
latter will have it in their eyes and cannot; if they had, it would blind
them. For them to know more would be their worse condemnation. They are not
fit to know more, more shall not be given them yet.... "You choose the dark;
you shall stay in the dark till the terrors that dwell in the dark affray
you, and cause you to cry out." God puts a seal upon the will of man; that
seal is either His great punishment or His mighty favor: "Ye love the
darkness, abide in the darkness": "O woman great is thy faith: be it done
unto thee even as thou wilt!"
[ 111 ] Agree with the Adversary Quickly
Arrange what claim lies against you; compulsion waits behind it. Do at
once what you must do one day. As there is no escape from payment, escape at
least the prison that will enforce it. Do not drive justice to extremities.
Duty is imperative; it must be done. It is useless to think to escape the
eternal law of things: yield of yourself, nor compel God to compel you.
[ 112 ] The Inexorable
No, there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in
it-no plan to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets.
Out Satan must go, every hair and feather!
[ 113 ] Christ Our Righteousness
Christ is our righteousness, not that we should escape punishment,
still less escape being righteous, but as the live potent creator of
righteousness in us, so that we, with our wills receiving His spirit, shall
like Him resist unto blood, striving against sin.
[ 114 ] Agree Quickly
Arrange your matters with those who have anything against you, while
you are yet together and things have not gone too far to be arranged; you
will have to do it, and that under less easy circumstances than now. Putting
off is of no use. You must. The thing has to be done; there are means of
compelling you.
[ 115 ] Duties to an Enemy
It is a very small matter to you whether the man give you your right or
not: it is life or death to you whether or not you give him his. Whether he
pay you what you count his debt or no, you will be compelled to pay him all
you owe him. If you owe him a pound and he you a million, you must pay him
the pound whether he pay you the million or not; there is no business
parallel here. If, owing you love, he gives you hate, you, owing him love,
have yet to pay it.
[ 116 ] The Prison
I think I have seen from afar something of the final prison of all, the
innermost cell of the debtor of the universe. ... It is the vast outside;
the ghastly dark beyond the gates of the city of which God is the light-
where the evil dogs go ranging, silent as the dark, for there is no sound
any more than sight. The time of signs is over. Every sense has (had) its
signs, and they were all misused: there is no sense, no sign more-nothing
now by means of which to believe. The man wakes from the final struggle of
death, in absolute loneliness as in the most miserable moment of deserted
childhood he never knew. Not a hint, not a shadow of anything outside his
consciousness reaches him. . . . Soon misery will beget on his imagination a
thousand shapes of woe, which he will not be able to rule, direct, or even
distinguish from real presences.
[ 117 ] Not Good to Be Alone
In such evil case I believe the man would be glad to come in contact
with the worst loathed insect: it would be a shape of life, something beyond
and beside his own huge, void, formless being! I imagine some such feeling
lies in this-that the immortal, the infinite, created in the image of the
everlasting God, is housed with the fading and the corrupting, and clings to
them as its good-clings to them till it is infected and interpenetrated with
their proper diseases, which assume in it a form more terrible in proportion
to the superiority of its kind.
[ 25 ] Holy Scriptures
This story may not be just as the Lord told it, and yet may contain in
its mirror as much of the truth as we are able to receive, and as will
afford us scope for a life's discovery. The modifying influence of the human
channels may be essential to God's revealing mode.
[ 26 ] Command That These Stones Be Made Bread
The Father said, That is a stone. The Son would not say, That is a
loaf. No one creative Fiat shall contradict another. The Father and the Son
are of one mind. The Lord could hunger, could starve, but would not change
into another thing what His Father had made one thing. There was no such
change in the feeding of the multitudes. The fish and the bread were fish
and bread before. . . . There was in these miracles, and I think in all,
only a hastening of appearances: the doing of that in a day, which may
ordinarily take a thousand years, for with God time is not what it is with
us. He makes it... Nor does it render the process one whit more miraculous.
Indeed, the wonder of the growing corn is to me greater than the wonder of
feeding the thousands. It is easier to understand the creative power going
forth at once- immediately-than through the countless, the lovely, the
seemingly forsaken wonders of the cornfield.
[ 27 ] Religious Feeling
In the higher aspect of this first temptation, arising from the fact
that a man cannot feel the things he believes except under certain
conditions of physical well-being dependent upon food, the answer is the
same: A man does not live by his feelings any more than by bread.
[ 28 ] Dryness
And when he can no longer feel the truth, he shall not therefore die.
He lives because God is true; and he is able to know that he lives because
he knows, having once understood the word that God is truth. He believes in
the God of former vision, lives by that word therefore, when all is dark and
there is no vision.
[ 29 ] Presumption
"If ye have faith and doubt not, if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be
thou removed and cast into the sea, it shall be done." Good people . . .
have been tempted to tempt the Lord their God upon the strength of this
saying. . . . Happily for such, the assurance to which they would give the
name of faith generally fails them in time. Faith is that which, knowing the
Lord's will, goes and does it; or, not knowing it, stands and waits... But
to put God to the question in any other way than by saying, "What wilt thou
have me to do?" is an attempt to compel God to declare Himself, or to hasten
His work. . . . The man is therein dissociating himself from God so far
that, instead of acting by the divine will from within, he acts in God's
face, as it were, to see what He will do. Man's first business is, "What
does God want me to do?", not "What will God do if I do so and so?"
[ 30 ] The Knowledge of God
To say Thou art God, without knowing what the Thou means-of what use is
it? God is a name only, except we know God.
[ 31] The Passion
It is with the holiest fear that we should approach the terrible fact
of the sufferings of Our Lord. Let no one think that these were less because
He was more. The more delicate the nature, the more alive to all that is
lovely and true, lawful and right, the more does it feel the antagonism of
pain, the inroad of death upon life; the more dreadful is that breach of the
harmony of things whose sound is torture.
[ 32 ] Eli, Eli
He could not see, could not feel Him near; and yet it is "My God" that
He cries. Thus the Will of Jesus, in the very moment when His faith seems
about to yield is finally triumphant. It has no feeling now to support it,
no beatific vision to absorb it. It stands naked in His soul and tortured,
as He stood naked and scourged before Pilate. Pure and simple and surrounded
by fire, it declares for God.
[ 33 ] The Same
Without this last trial of all, the temptations of our Master had not
been so full as the human cup could hold; there would have been one region
through which we had to pass wherein we might call aloud upon our
Captain-Brother, and there would be no voice or hearing: He had avoided the
fatal spot!
[ 34 ] Vicarious Desolation
This is the Faith of the Son of God. God withdrew, as it were, that the
perfect Will of the Son might arise and go forth to find the Will of the
Father. It is possible that even then He thought of the lost sheep who could
not believe that God was their Father; and for them, too, in all their loss
and blindness and unlove, cried, saying the word they might say, knowing for
them that God means Father and more.
[ 35 ] Creeping Christians
We are and remain such creeping Christians, because we look at
ourselves and not at Christ; because we gaze at the marks of our own soiled
feet, and the trail of our own defiled garments. . . . Each, putting his
foot in the footprint of the Master, and so defacing it, turns to examine
how far his neighbor's footprint corresponds with that which he still calk
the Master's, although it is but his own. Or, having committed a petty
fault, I mean a fault such as only a petty creature could commit, we mourn
over the defilement to ourselves, and the shame of it before our friends,
children, or servants, instead of hastening to make the due confession and
amends to our fellow, and then, forgetting our own paltry self with its
well-earned disgrace, lift up our eyes to the glory which alone will quicken
the true man in us, and kill the peddling creature we so wrongly call our
self.
[ 36 ] Dryness
So long as we have nothing to say to God, nothing to do with Him, save
in the sunshine of the mind when we feel Him near us, we are poor creatures,
willed upon, not willing. . . . And how in such a condition do we generally
act? Do we sit mourning over the loss of feeling? Or worse, make frantic
efforts to rouse them?
[ 37 ] The Use of Dryness
God does not, by the instant gift of His Spirit, make us always feel
right, desire good, love purity, aspire after Him and His Will. Therefore
either He will not, or He cannot. If He will not, it must be because it
would not be well to do so. If He cannot, then He would not if He could;
else a better condition than God's is conceivable to the mind of God. . . .
The truth is this: He wants to make us in His own image, choosing the good,
refusing the evil. How should He effect this if He were always moving us
from within, as He does at divine intervals, toward the beauty of holiness?
. . . For God made our individuality as well as, and a greater marvel than,
our dependence; made our apartness from Himself, that freedom should bind us
divinely dearer to Himself, with a new and inscrutable marvel of love; for
the Godhead is still at the root, is the making root of our individuality,
and the freer the man, the stronger the bond that binds him to Him who made
his freedom.
[ 38 ] The Highest Condition of the Human Will
The highest condition of the human will is in sight.... I say not the
highest condition of the Human Being; that surely lies in the Beatific
Vision, in the sight of God. But the highest condition of the Human Will, as
distinct, not as separated from God, is when, not seeing God, not seeming to
itself to grasp Him at all, it yet holds Him fast.
[ 39 ] Troubled Soul
Troubled soul, thou are not bound to feel but thou art bound to arise.
God loves thee whether thou feelest or not. Thou canst not love when thou
wilt, but thou art bound to fight the hatred in thee to the last. Try not to
feel good when thou art not good, but cry to Him who is good. He changes not
because thou changest. Nay, He has an especial tenderness of love toward
thee for that thou art in the dark and hast no light, and His heart is glad
when thou doest arise and say, "I will go to my Father." . . . Fold the arms
of thy faith, and wait in the quietness until light goes up in thy darkness.
For the arms of thy Faith I say, but not of thy Action: bethink thee of
something that thou oughtest to do, and, go to do it, if it be but the
sweeping of a room, or the preparing of a meal, or a visit to a friend. Heed
not thy feeling: Do thy work.
[ 40 ] Dangerous Moment
Am I going to do a good deed? Then, of all times- Father into thy
hands: lest the enemy should have me now.
[ 41 ] It Is Finished
... when the agony of death was over, when the storm of the world died
away behind His retiring spirit, and He entered the regions where there is
only life, and therefore all that is not music is silence...
[ 42 ] Members of One Another
We shall never be able, I say, to rest in the bosom of the Father, till
the fatherhood is fully revealed to us in the love of the brothers. For He
cannot be our Father, save as He is their Father; and if we do not see Him
and feel Him as their Father, we cannot know Him as ours.
[ 43 ] Originality
Our Lord never thought of being original.
[ 44 ] The Moral Law
Of what use then is the Law? To lead us to Christ, the Truth-to waken
in our minds a sense of what our deepest nature, the presence, namely, of
God in us, requires of us-to let us know, in part by failure, that the
purest efforts of will of which we are capable cannot lift us up even to the
abstaining from wrong to our neighbor.
[ 45 ] The Same
In order to fulfill the commonest law ... we must rise into a loftier
region altogether, a region that is above law, because it is spirit and life
and makes the law.
[ 46 ] Upward toward the Center
"But how," says a man, who is willing to recognize the universal
neighborhood, but finds himself unable to fulfill the bare law toward the
woman even whom he loves best-"How am I then to rise into that higher
region, that empyrean of love?" And, beginning straightaway to try to love
his neighbor, he finds that the empyrean of which he spoke is no more to be
reached in itself than the law was to be reached in itself. As he cannot
keep the law without first rising into the love of his neighbor, so he
cannot love his neighbor without first rising higher still. The whole system
of the universe works upon this law-the driving of things upward toward the
center. The man who will love his neighbor can do so by no immediately
operative exercise of the will. It is the man fulfilled of God from whom he
came and by whom he is, who alone can as himself love his neighbor who came
from God too and is by God too. The mystery of individuality and consequent
relation is deep as the beginnings of humanity, and the questions thence
arising can be solved only by him who has, practically at least, solved the
holy necessities resulting from his origin. In God alone can man meet man.
In Him alone the converging lines of existence touch and cross not. When the
mind of Christ, the life of the Head, courses through that atom which the
man is of the slowly revivifying body, when he is alive too, then the love
of the brothers is there as conscious life. ... It is possible to love our
neighbor as ourselves. Our Lord never spoke hyperbolically.
[ 47 ] No One Loves Because He Sees Why
Where a man does not love, the not-loving must seem rational. For no
one loves because he sees why, but because he loves. No human reason can be
given for the highest necessity of divinely created existence. For reasons
are always from above downward.
[ 48 ] My Neighbor
A man must not choose his neighbor: he must take the neighbor that God
sends him. . . . The neighbor is just the man who is next to you at the
moment, the man with whom any business has brought you into contact.
[ 49 ] The Same
The love of our neighbor is the only door out of the dungeon of self,
where we mope and mow, striking sparks, and rubbing phosphorescences out of
the walls, and blowing our own breath in our own nostrils, instead of
issuing to the fair sunlight of God, the sweet winds of the universe.
[ 50 ] What Cannot Be Loved
But how can we love a man or a woman who ... is mean, unlovely,
carping, uncertain, self-righteous, self-seeking, and self-admiring?-who can
even sneer, the most inhuman of human faults, far worse in its essence than
mere murder? These things cannot be loved. The best man hates them most; the
worst man cannot love them. But are these the man? . . . Lies there not
within the man and the woman a divine element of brotherhood, of sisterhood,
a something lovely and lovable- slowly fading, it may be-dying away under
the fierce heat of vile passions, or the yet more fearful cold of sepulchral
selfishness, but there? ... It is the very presence of this fading humanity
that makes it possible for us to hate. If it were an animal only, and not a
man or a woman, that did us hurt, we should not hate: we should only kill.
[ 51 ] Love and Justice
Man is not made for justice from his fellow, but for love, which is
greater than justice, and by including supersedes justice. Mere justice is
an impossibility, a fiction of analysis.... Justice to be justice must be
much more than justice. Love is the law of our condition, without which we
can no more render justice than a man can keep a straight line, walking in
the dark.
[ 52 ] The Body
It is by the body that we come into contact with Nature, with our
fellowmen, with all their revelations to us. It is through the body that we
receive all the lessons of passion, of suffering, of love, of beauty, of
science. It is through the body that we are both trained outward from
ourselves, and driven inward into our deepest selves to find God. There is
glory and might in this vital evanescence, this slow glacierlike flow of
clothing and revealing matter, this ever uptossed rainbow of tangible
humanity. It is no less of God's making than the spirit that is clothed
therein.
[ 53 ] Goodness
The Father was all in all to the Son, and the Son no more thought of
His own goodness than an honest man thinks of his honesty. When the good man
sees goodness, he thinks of his own evil: Jesus had no evil to think of, but
neither does He think of His goodness: He delights in His Father's. "Why
callest thou Me good?"
[ 54 ] Christ's Disregards
The Lord cared neither for isolated truth nor for orphaned deed. It was
truth in the inward parts, it was the good heart, the mother of good deeds,
He cherished. ... It was good men He cared about, not notions of good
things, or even good actions, save as the outcome of life, save as the
bodies in which the primary live actions of love and will in the soul took
shape and came forth.
[ 55 ] Easy to Please and Hard to Satisfy
That no keeping but a perfect one will satisfy God, I hold with all my
heart and strength; but that there is none else He cares for, is one of the
lies of the enemy. What father is not pleased with the first tottering
attempt of his little one to walk? What father would be satisfied with
anything but the manly step of the full-grown son!
[ 56 ] The Moral Law
The immediate end of the commandments never was that men should succeed
in obeying them, but that, finding they could not do that which yet must be
done, finding the more they tried the more was required of them, they should
be driven to the source of life and law-of their life and His law-to seek
from Him such reinforcement of life as should make the fulfillment of the
law as possible, yea, as natural, as necessary.
[ 57 ] Bondage
A man is in bondage to whatever he cannot part with that is less than
himself.
[ 58 ] The Rich Young Man (Matthew 19: 16-22)
It was time . . . that he should refuse, that he should know what
manner of spirit he was of, and meet the confusions of soul, the sad
searchings of heart that must follow. A time comes to every man when he must
obey, or make such refusal-and know it. . . . The time will come, God only
knows its hour, when he will see the nature of his deed, with the knowledge
that he was dimly seeing it so even when he did it: the alternative had been
put before him.
[ 59 ] Law and Spirit
The commandments can never be kept while there is a strife to keep
them: the man is overwhelmed in the weight of their broken pieces. It needs
a clean heart to have pure hands, all the power of a live soul to keep the
law-a power of life, not of struggle; the strength of love, not the effort
of duty.
[ 60 ] Our Nonage
The number of fools not yet acknowledging the first condition of
manhood nowise alters the fact that he who has begun to recognize duty and
acknowledge the facts of his being, is but a tottering child on the path of
life. He is on the path: he is as wise as at the time he can be; the
Father's arms are stretched out to receive him; but he is not therefore a
wonderful being; not therefore a model of wisdom; not at all the admirable
creature his largely remaining folly would, in his worst moments (that is,
when he feels best) persuade him to think himself; he is just one of God's
poor creatures.
[ 61 ] Knowledge
Had he done as the Master told him, he would soon have come to
understand. Obedience is the opener of eyes.
[ 62 ] Living Forever
The poor idea of living forever, all that commonplace minds grasp at
for eternal life-(is) its mere concomitant shadow, in itself not worth
thinking about. When a man is ... one with God, what should he do but live
forever?
[ 63 ] Be Ye Perfect
"I cannot be perfect; it is hopeless; and He does not expect it." -It
would be more honest if he said, "I do not want to be perfect: I am content
to be saved." Such as he do not care for being perfect as their Father in
heaven is perfect, but for being what they called saved.
[ 64 ] Carrion Comfort
Or are you so well satisfied with what you are, that you have never
sought eternal life, never hungered and thirsted after the righteousness of
God, the perfection of your being? If this latter be your condition, then be
comforted; the Master does not require of you to sell what you have and give
to the poor. You follow Him! You go with Him to preach good tidings!-you who
care not for righteousness! You are not one whose company is desirable to
the Master. Be comforted, I say: He does not want you; He will not ask you
to open your purse for Him; you may give or withhold: it is nothing to Him.
... Go and keep the commandments. It is not come to your money yet. The
commandments are enough for you. You are not yet a child in the kingdom. You
do not care for the arms of your Father; you value only the shelter of His
roof. As to your money, let the commandments direct you how to use it. It is
in you but pitiable presumption to wonder whether it is required of you to
sell all that you have ... for the Young Man to have sold all and followed
Him would have been to accept God's patent of peerage: to you it is not
offered.
[ 65 ] The Same
Does this comfort you? Then alas for you! . . . Your relief is to know
that the Lord has no need of you- does not require you to part with your
money, does not offer you Himself instead. You do not indeed sell Him for
thirty pieces of silver, but you are glad not to buy Him with all that you
have.
[ 66 ] How Hard?
This life, this Kingdom of God, this simplicity of absolute existence,
is hard to enter. How hard? As hard as the Master of salvation could find
words to express the hardness.
[ 67 ] Things
The man who for consciousness of well-being depends upon anything but
life, the life essential, is a slave; he hangs on what is less than
himself.... Things are given us-this body, first of things-that through them
we may be trained both to independence and true possession of them. We must
possess them; they must not possess us. Their use is to mediate-as shapes
and manifestations in lower kind of the things that are unseen, that is, in
themselves unseeable, the things that belong, not to the world of speech but
the world of silence, not to the world of showing, but the world of being,
the world that cannot be shaken, and must remain. These things unseen take
the form in the things of time and space- not that they may exist, for they
exist in and from eternal Godhead, but that their being may be known to
those in training for the eternal; these things unseen the sons and
daughters of God must possess. But instead of reaching out after them, they
grasp at their forms, regard the things seen as the things to be possessed,
fall in love with the bodies instead of the souls of them.
[ 68 ] Possession
He who has God, has all things, after the fashion in which He who made
them has them.
[ 69 ] The Torment of Death
It is imperative on us to get rid of the tyranny of things. See how
imperative: let the young man cling with every fiber to his wealth, what God
can do He will do; His child shall not be left in the Hell of possession.
Comes the angel of death-and where are the things that haunted the poor soul
with such manifold hindrance and obstruction? ... Is the man so freed from
the dominion of things? Does Death so serve him-so ransom him? . . . Not so;
for then first, I presume, does the man of things become aware of their
tyranny. When a man begins to abstain, then first he recognizes the strength
of his passion: it may be, when a man has not a thing left, he will begin to
know what a necessity he had made of things.
[ 70 ] The Utility of Death
Wherein then lies the service of Death? ... In this: it is not the
fetters that gall, but the fetters that soothe, which eat into the soul. In
this way is the loss of things ... a motioning, hardly toward, yet in favor
of, deliverance. It may seem to a man the first of his slavery when it is in
truth the beginning of his freedom. Never soul was set free without being
made to feel its slavery.
[ 71 ] Not the Rich Only
But it is not the rich man only who is under the dominion of things;
they too are slaves who, having no money, are unhappy from the lack of it.
[ 72 ] Fearful Thinking
Because we easily imagine ourselves in want, we imagine God ready to
forsake us.
[ 73 ] Miracles
The miracles of Jesus were the ordinary works of His Father, wrought
small and swift that we might take them in.
[ 74 ] The Sacred Present
The next hour, the next moment, is as much beyond our grasp and as much
in God's care, as that a hundred years away. Care for the next minute is
just as foolish as care for the morrow, or for a day in the next thousand
years-in neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything. Those
claims only of the morrow which have to be prepared today are of the duty of
today: the moment which coincides with work to be done, is the moment to be
minded; the next is nowhere till God has made it.
[ 75 ] Forethought
If a man forget a thing, God will see to that: man is not Lord of his
memory or his intellect. But man is lord of his will, his action; and is
then verily to blame when, remembering a duty, he does not do it, but puts
it off, and Jo forgets it. If a man lay himself out to do the immediate duty
of the moment, wonderfully little forethought, I suspect, will be found
needful. That forethought only is right which has to determine duty, and
pass into action. To the foundation of yesterday's work well done, the work
of the morrow will be sure to fit. Work done is of more consequence for the
future than the foresight of an archangel.
[ 76 ] Not the Rich Only
If it be things that slay you, what matter whether things you have, or
things you have not?
[ 77 ] Care
Tomorrow makes today's whole head sick, its whole heart faint. When we
should be still, sleeping or dreaming, we are fretting about an hour that
lies a half sun's journey away! Not so doest thou, Lord; thou doest the work
of thy Father!
[ 78 ] The Sacred Present
The care that is filling your mind at this moment, or but waiting till
you lay the book aside to leap upon you -that need which is no need, is a
demon sucking at the spring of your life. "No; mine is a reasonable care- an
unavoidable care, indeed." Is it something you have to do this very moment?
"No." Then you are allowing it to usurp the place of something that is
required of you this moment. "There is nothing required of me at this
moment." Nay but there is-the greatest thing that can be required of man.
"Pray, what is it?" Trust in the living God.... "I do trust Him in spiritual
matters." Everything is an affair of the spirit.
[ 79 ] Heaven
For the only air of the soul, in which it can breathe and live, is the
present God and the spirits of the just: that is our heaven, our home, our
all-right place.... We shall be God's children on the little hills and in
the fields of that heaven, not one desiring to be before another any more
than to cast that other out; for ambition and hatred will then be seen to be
one and the same spirit.
[ 80 ] Shaky Foundations
The things readiest to be done, those which lie, not at the door but on
the very table, of a man's mind, are not merely in general the most
neglected, but even by the thoughtful man, the oftenest let alone, the
oftenest postponed. . . . Truth is one, and he who does the truth in the
small thing is of the truth; he who will do it only in a great thing, who
postpones the small thing near him to the great farther from him, is not of
the truth.
[ 81 ] Fussing
We, too, dull our understandings with trifles, fill the heavenly spaces
with phantoms, waste the heavenly time with hurry. When I trouble myself
over a trifle, even a trifle confessed-the loss of some little article, say-
spurring my memory, and hunting the house, not from immediate need, but from
dislike of loss; when a book has been borrowed of me and not returned, and I
have forgotten the borrower, and fret over the missing volume ... is it not
time I lost a few things when I care for them so unreasonably? This losing
of things is of the mercy of God: it comes to teach us to let them go. Or
have I forgotten a thought that came to me, which seemed of the truth? ... I
keep trying and trying to call it back, feeling a poor man till that thought
be recovered- to be far more lost, perhaps, in a notebook, into which I
shall never look again to find it! I forgot that it is live things God cares
about.
[ 82 ] Housekeeping
I appeal especially to all who keep house concerning the size of
troubles that suffices to hide word and face of God.
[ 83 ] Cares
With every haunting trouble then, great or small, the loss of thousands
or the lack of a shilling, go to God.... If your trouble is such that you
cannot appeal to Him, the more need you should appeal to him!
[ 84 ] God at the Door
Nor will God force any door to enter in. He may send a tempest about
the house; the wind of His admonishment may burst doors and windows, yea,
shake the house to its foundations; but not then, not so, will He enter. The
door must be opened by the willing hand, ere the foot of Love will cross the
threshold. He watches to see the door move from within. Every tempest is but
an assault in the siege of Love. The terror of God is but the other side of
His love; it is love outside, that would be inside-love that knows the house
is no house, only a place, until it enter.
[ 85 ] Difficulties
Everything difficult indicates something more than our theory of life
yet embraces, checks some tendency to abandon the straight path, leaving
open only the way ahead. But there is a reality of being in which all things
are easy and plain-oneness, that is, with the Lord of Life; to pray for this
is the first thing; and to the point of this prayer every difficulty hedges
and directs us.
[ 86 ] Vain Vigilance
Do those who say, "Lo here or lo there are the signs of His coming,"
think to be too keen for Him, and spy His approach? When he tells them to
watch lest He find them neglecting their work, they stare this way and that,
and watch lest He should succeed in coming like a thief! ... Obedience is
the one key of life.
[ 87 ] Incompleteness
He that is made in the image of God must know Him or be desolate. . . .
Witness the dissatisfaction, yea, desolation of my soul-wretched, alone,
unfinished, without Him. It cannot act from itself, save in God; acting from
what seems itself without God, is no action at all, it is a mere yielding to
impulse. All within is disorder and spasm. There is a cry behind me, and a
voice before; instincts of betterment tell me I must rise above my present
self-perhaps even above all my possible self: I see not how to obey, how to
carry them out! I am shut up in a world of consciousness, an unknown I in an
unknown world: surely this world of my unwilled, un-chosen, compelled
existence, cannot be shut out from Him, cannot be unknown to Him, cannot be
impenetrable, impermeable, unpresent to Him from whom I am?
[ 88 ] Prayer
Shall I not tell Him my troubles-how He, even He, has troubled me by
making me?-how unfit I am to be that which I am?-that my being is not to me
a good thing yet?-that I need a law that shall account to me for it in
righteousness-reveal to me how I am to make it a good-how I am to be* a.
good and not an evil?
[ 89 ] Knowledge That Would Be Useless
Why should the question admit of doubt? We know that the wind blows;
why should we not know that God answers prayer? I reply, What if God does
not care to have you know it at secondhand? What if there would be no good
in that? There is some testimony on record, and perhaps there might be much
were it not that, having to do with things so immediately personal, and
generally so delicate, answers to prayer would naturally not often be talked
about; but no testimony concerning the thing can well be conclusive; for,
like a reported miracle, there is always some way to daff it; and besides,
the conviction to be got that way is of little value: it avails nothing to
know the thing by the best of evidence.
[ 90 ] Prayer
Reader, if you are in any trouble, try whether God will not help you:
if you are in no need, why should you ask questions about prayer? True, he
knows little of himself who does not know that he is wretched, and
miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked; but until he begins at least to
suspect a need, how can he pray?
[ 91 ] Why Should It Be Necessary?
"But if God is so good as you represent Him, and if He knows all that
we need, and better far than we do ourselves, why should it be necessary to
ask Him for anything?" I answer, What if He knows Prayer to be the thing we
need first and most? What if the main object in God's idea of prayer be the
supplying of our great, our endless need-the need of Himself? . . . Hunger
may drive the runaway child home, and he may or may not be fed at once, but
he needs his mother more than his dinner. Communion with God is the one need
of the soul beyond all other need: prayer is the beginning of that
communion, and some need is the motive of that prayer. ... So begins a
communion, a taking with God, a coming-to-one with Him, which is the sole
end of prayer, yea, of existence itself in its infinite phases. We must ask
that we may receive: but that we should receive what we ask in respect of
our lower needs, is not God's end in making us pray, for He could give us
everything without that: to bring His child to his knee, God withholds that
man may ask.
[ 92 ] The Conditions of a Good Gift
For the real good of every gift is essential first, that the giver be
in the gift-as God always is, for He is love-and next, that the receiver
know and receive the giver in the gift. Every gift of God is but a harbinger
of His greatest and only sufficing gift-that of Himself. No gift
unrecognized as coming from God is at its own best: therefore many things
that God would gladly give us, things even that we need because we are, must
wait until we ask for them, that we may know whence they come: when in all
gifts we find Him, then in Him we shall find all things.
[ 93 ] False Spirituality
Sometimes to one praying will come the feeling . . . "Were it not
better to abstain? If this thing be good, will He not give it me? Would He
not be better pleased if I left it altogether to Him?" It comes, I think, of
a lack of faith and childlikeness ... it may even come of ambition after
spiritual distinction.
[ 94 ] Small Prayers
In every request, heart and soul and mind ought to supply the low
accompaniment, "Thy will be done"; but the making of any request brings us
near to Him. . . . Anything large enough for a wish to light upon, is large
enough to hang a prayer upon: the thought of Him to whom that prayer goes
will purify and correct the desire.
[ 95 ] Riches and Need
There could be no riches but for need. God Himself is made rich by
man's necessity. By that He is rich to give; through that we are rich by
receiving.
[ 96 ] Providence
"How should any design of the All-wise be altered in response to prayer
of ours? How are we to believe such a thing?" By reflecting that He is the
All-wise, who sees before Him, and will not block His path. . .. Does God
care for suns and planets and satellites, for divine mathematics and ordered
harmonies, more than for His children? I venture to say He cares more for
oxen than for those. He lays no plans irrespective of His children; and, His
design being that they shall be free, active, live things, He sees that
space shall be kept for them.
[ 97 ] Divine Freedom
What stupidity of perfection would that be which left no margin about
God's work, no room for change of plan upon change of fact-yea, even the
mighty change that.. . now at length His child is praying! ... I may move my
arm as I please: shall God be unable so to move His?
[ 98 ] Providence
If His machine interfered with His answering the prayer of a single
child, He would sweep it from Him- not to bring back chaos but to make room
for His child.. .. We must remember that God is not occupied with a grand
toy of worlds and suns and planets, of attractions and repulsions, of
agglomerations and crystallizations, of forces and waves; that these but
constitute a portion of His workshops and tools for the bringing out of
righteous men and women to fill His house of love withal
[ 99 ] The Miracles of Our Lord
In all His miracles Jesus did only in miniature what His Father does
ever in the great. Poor, indeed, was the making of the wine in the ... pots
of stone, compared with its making in the lovely growth of the vine with its
clusters of swelling grapes-the live roots gathering from the earth the
water that had to be borne in pitchers and poured into the great vases; but
it is precious as the interpreter of the same, even in its being the outcome
of Our Lord's sympathy with ordinary human rejoicing.
[ 100 ] They Have No Wine (John 2:3)
At the prayer of His mother, He made room in His plans for the thing
she desired. It was not His wish then to work a miracle, but if His mother
wished it, He would. He did for His mother what for His own part He would
rather have left alone. Not always did He do as His mother would have Him;
but this was a case in which He could do so, for it would interfere nowise
with the will of His Father. . . . The Son, then, could change His intent
and spoil nothing: so, I say, can the Father; for the Son does nothing but
what He sees the Father do.
[ 101 ] Intercessory Prayer
And why should the good of anyone depend on the prayer of another? I
can only answer with the return question, "Why should my love be powerless
to help another?"
[ 102 ] The Eternal Revolt
There is endless room for rebellion against ourselves.
[ IO3 ] They Say It Does Them Good
There are those even who, not believing in any ear to hear, any heart
to answer, will yet pray. They say it does them good; they pray to nothing
at all, but they get spiritual benefit. I will not contradict their
testimony. So needful is prayer to the soul that the mere attitude of it may
encourage a good mood. Verily to pray to that which is not, is in logic a
folly: yet the good that, they say, comes of it, may rebuke the worse folly
of their unbelief, for it indicates that prayer is natural, and how could it
be natural if inconsistent with the very mode of our being?
[ 104 ] Perfected Prayer
And there is a communion with God that asks for nothing, yet asks for
everything. . . . He who seeks the Father more than anything He can give, is
likely to have what he asks, for he is not likely to ask amiss.
[ 105 ] Corrective Granting
Even such as ask amiss may sometimes have their prayers answered. The
Father will never give the child a stone that asks for bread; but I am not
sure that He will never give the child a stone that asks for a stone. If the
Father says, "My child, that is a stone; it is no bread," and the child
answer, "I am sure it is bread; I want it," may it not be well that he
should try his "bread"?
[ 106 ] Why We Must Wait
Perhaps, indeed, the better the gift we pray for, the more time is
necessary for its arrival. To give us the spiritual gift we desire, God may
have to begin far back in our spirit, in regions unknown to us, and do much
work that we can be aware of only in the results; for our consciousness is
to the extent of our being but as the flame of the volcano to the world-gulf
whence it issues; in the gulf of our unknown being God works behind our
consciousness. With His holy influence, with His own presence (the one thing
for which most earnestly we cry) He may be approaching our consciousness
from behind, coming forward through regions of our darkness into our light,
long before we begin to be aware that He is answering our request-has
answered it, and is visiting His child.
[ 107 ] God's Vengeance
"Vengeance is mine," He says: with a right understanding of it, we
might as well pray for God's vengeance as for His forgiveness; that
vengeance is, to destroy the sin -to make the sinner abjure and hate it; nor
is there any satisfaction in a vengeance that seeks or effects less. The man
himself must turn against himself, and so be for himself. If nothing else
will do, then hellfire; if less will do, whatever brings repentance and
self-repudiation, is God's repayment. Friends, if any prayers are offered
against us; if the vengeance of God be cried out for, because of some wrong
you or I have done, God grant us His vengeance! Let us not think that we
shall get off!
[ 108 ] The Way of Understanding
He who does that which he sees, shall understand; he who is set upon
understanding rather than doing, shall go on stumbling and mistaking and
speaking foolishness. ... It is he that runneth that shall read, and no
other. It is not intended by the Speaker of the Parables that any other
should know intellectually what, known but intellectually, would be for his
injury-what, knowing intellectually, he would imagine he had grasped,
perhaps even appropriated. When the pilgrim of the truth comes on his
journey to the region of the parable, he finds its interpretation. It is not
a fruit or a jewel to be stored, but a well springing by the wayside.
[ 109 ] Penal Blindness
Those who by insincerity and falsehood close their deeper eyes, shall
not be capable of using in the matter the more superficial eyes of their
understanding... This will help to remove the difficulty that the parables
are plainly for the teaching of the truth, and yet the Lord speaks of them
as for the concealing of it. They are for the understanding of that man only
who is practical- who does the thing he knows, who seeks to understand
vitally. They reveal to the live conscience, otherwise not to the keenest
intellect.
[ 110 ] The Same
The former are content to have the light cast upon their way: the
latter will have it in their eyes and cannot; if they had, it would blind
them. For them to know more would be their worse condemnation. They are not
fit to know more, more shall not be given them yet.... "You choose the dark;
you shall stay in the dark till the terrors that dwell in the dark affray
you, and cause you to cry out." God puts a seal upon the will of man; that
seal is either His great punishment or His mighty favor: "Ye love the
darkness, abide in the darkness": "O woman great is thy faith: be it done
unto thee even as thou wilt!"
[ 111 ] Agree with the Adversary Quickly
Arrange what claim lies against you; compulsion waits behind it. Do at
once what you must do one day. As there is no escape from payment, escape at
least the prison that will enforce it. Do not drive justice to extremities.
Duty is imperative; it must be done. It is useless to think to escape the
eternal law of things: yield of yourself, nor compel God to compel you.
[ 112 ] The Inexorable
No, there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in
it-no plan to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets.
Out Satan must go, every hair and feather!
[ 113 ] Christ Our Righteousness
Christ is our righteousness, not that we should escape punishment,
still less escape being righteous, but as the live potent creator of
righteousness in us, so that we, with our wills receiving His spirit, shall
like Him resist unto blood, striving against sin.
[ 114 ] Agree Quickly
Arrange your matters with those who have anything against you, while
you are yet together and things have not gone too far to be arranged; you
will have to do it, and that under less easy circumstances than now. Putting
off is of no use. You must. The thing has to be done; there are means of
compelling you.
[ 115 ] Duties to an Enemy
It is a very small matter to you whether the man give you your right or
not: it is life or death to you whether or not you give him his. Whether he
pay you what you count his debt or no, you will be compelled to pay him all
you owe him. If you owe him a pound and he you a million, you must pay him
the pound whether he pay you the million or not; there is no business
parallel here. If, owing you love, he gives you hate, you, owing him love,
have yet to pay it.
[ 116 ] The Prison
I think I have seen from afar something of the final prison of all, the
innermost cell of the debtor of the universe. ... It is the vast outside;
the ghastly dark beyond the gates of the city of which God is the light-
where the evil dogs go ranging, silent as the dark, for there is no sound
any more than sight. The time of signs is over. Every sense has (had) its
signs, and they were all misused: there is no sense, no sign more-nothing
now by means of which to believe. The man wakes from the final struggle of
death, in absolute loneliness as in the most miserable moment of deserted
childhood he never knew. Not a hint, not a shadow of anything outside his
consciousness reaches him. . . . Soon misery will beget on his imagination a
thousand shapes of woe, which he will not be able to rule, direct, or even
distinguish from real presences.
[ 117 ] Not Good to Be Alone
In such evil case I believe the man would be glad to come in contact
with the worst loathed insect: it would be a shape of life, something beyond
and beside his own huge, void, formless being! I imagine some such feeling