George MacDonald. An Antology (edited by C.S.Lewis)
EDITED AND WITH A PREFACE BY C. S. LEWIS
TO MARY NEYLAN
C.S.Lewis "George MacDonald. An Antology"
Language: English
Date: Jan 9, 2003
Изд: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., NEW YORK, 1978
OCR: Дмитрий Машковский
Spellcheck: Дмитрий Машковский, Jan 9, 2003
"George MacDonald. An Antology"
EDITED AND WITH A PREFACE BY
C. S. LEWIS
TO MARY NEYLAN
CONTENTS
1 Dryness
2 Inexorable Love
3 Divine Burning
4 The Beginning of Wisdom
5 The Unawakened
6 Sinai
7 No
8 The Law of Nature
9 Escape Is Hopeless
10 The Word
11 I Knew a Child
12 Spiritual Murder
13 Impossibilities
14 Truth Is Truth
15 The White Stone
16 Personality
17 The Secret in Man
18 The Secrets in God
19 No Massing
20 No Comparing
21 The End
22 Moth and Rust
23 Caverns and Films
24 Various Kinds of Moth
25 Holy Scriptures
26 Command That These Stones Be Made Bread
27 Religious Feeling
28 Dryness
29 Presumption
30 The Knowledge of God
31 The Passion
32 Eli, Eli
33 The Same
34 Vicarious Desolation
35 Creeping Christians
36 Dryness
37 The Use of Dryness
38 The Highest Condition of the Human Will
39 Troubled Soul
40 Dangerous Moment
41 It Is Finished
42 Members of One Another
43 Originality
44 The Moral Law
45 The Same
46 Upward toward the Center
47 No One Loves Because He Sees Why
48 My Neighbor
49 The Same
50 What Cannot Be Loved
51 Lore and Justice
52 The Body
53 Goodness
54 Christ's Disregards
55 Easy to Please and Hard to Satisfy
56 The Moral Law
57 Bondage
58 The Rich Young Man
59 Law and Spirit
60 Our Nonage
61 Knowledge
62 Living Forever
63 Be Ye Perfect
64 Carrion Comfort
65 The Same
66 How Hard?
67 Things
68 Possession
69 The Torment of Death
70 The Utility of Death
71 Not the Rich Only
72 Fearful Thinking
73 Miracles
74 The Sacred Present
75 Forethought
76 Not the Rich Only
77 Care
78 The Sacred Present
79 Heaven
80 Shaky Foundations
81 Fussing
82 Housekeeping
83 Cares
84 God at the Door
85 Difficulties
86 Vain Vigilance
87 Incompleteness
88 Prayer
89 Knowledge That Would Be Useless
90 Prayer
91 Why Should It Be Necessary?
92 The Conditions of a Good Gift
93 False Spirituality
94 Small Prayers
95 Riches and Need
96 Providence
97 Divine Freedom
98 Providence
99 The Miracles of Our Lord
100 They Have No Wine
101 Intercessory Prayer
102 The Eternal Revolt
103 They .Say It Does Them Good
104 Perfected Prayer
105 Corrective Granting
106 Why We Must Wait
107 Gods Vengeance
108 The Way of Understanding
109 Penal Blindness
111 Agree with the Adversary Quickly
112 The Inexorable
113 Christ Our Righteousness
114 Agree Quickly
115 Duties to an Enemy
116 The Prison
117 Not Good to Be Alone
118 Be Ye Perfect
119 The Heart
120 Precious Blame
121 The Same
122 Man Glorified
123 Life in the Word
124 The Office of Christ
125 The Slowness of the New Creation
126 The New Creation
127 Pessimism
128 The Work of the Father
129 The End
130 Deadlock
131 The Two Worst Heresies
132 Christian Growth
133 Life and Shadow
134 False Refuge
135 A Silly Notion
136 Dryness
137 Perseverance
138 The Lower Forms
139 Life
140 The Eternal Round
141 The Great One Life
142 The Beginning of Wisdom
143 "Peace in Our Time"
144 Divine Fire
145 The Safe Place
146 God and Death
147 Terror
148 False Want
149 A Man's Right
150 Nature
151 The Same
152 Doubt
153 Job
154 The Close of the Book of Job
155 The Way
156 Self-Control
157 Self-Dental
158 Killing the Nerve
159 Self
160 My Yoke Is Easy
161 We Must Be Jealous
162 Facing Both Ways
163 The Careless Soul
164 There Is No Merit in It
165 Faith
166 The Misguided
167 The Way
168 The First and Second Persons
169 Warning
170 Creation
171 The Unknowable
172 Warning
173 The Two First Persons
174 The Imitation of Christ
175 Pain and Joy
176 "By Him All Things Consist"
177 "In Him Was Life"
178 Why We Have Not Christs "Ipsissima Verba"
179 Warning
180 On Bad Religious Art
181 How to Read the Epistles
182 The Entrance of Christ
183 The Same
184 The Uses of Nature
185 Natural Science
186 The Value of Analysis
187 Nature
188 Water
189 Truth of Things
190 Caution
191 Duties
192 Why free Will Was Permitted
193 Eternal Death
194 The Redemption of Our Nature
195 No Mystery
196 The Live Truth
197 Likeness to Christ
198 Grace and Freedom
199 Glorious Liberty
200 No Middle Way
201 On Having One's Own Way
202 The Death of Christ
203 Hell
204 The Lie
205 The Author's Fear
206 Sincerity
207 First Things First
208 Inexorable Love
209 Salvation
210 Charity and Orthodoxy
211 Evasion
212 Inexorable Love
213 The Holy Ghost
214 The Sense of Sin
215 Mean Theologies
216 On Believing III of God
217 Condemnation
218 Excuses
219 Impossibilities
220 Disobedience
221 The Same
222 The God of Remembrance
223 Bereavement
224 Abraham's Faith
225 The Same
226 Perception of Duties
227 Righteousness of Faith
228 The Same
229 Reckoned unto Us for Righteousness
230 St. Paul's Faith
231 The Full-Grown Christian
232 Revealed to Babes
233 Answer
234 Useless Knowledge
235 The Art of Being Created
236 When We Do Not Find Him
237 Prayer
238 On One's Critics
239 Free Will
240 On Idle Tongues
241 Do We Love Light?
242 Shame
243 The Wakening
244 The Wakening of the Rich
245 Self-Deception
246 Warning
247 The Slow Descent
248 Justice and Revenge
249 Recognition Hereafter
250 From Dante
251 What God Means by "Good"
252 All Things from God
253 Absolute Being
254 Beasts
255 Diversity of Souls
256 The Disillusioned
257 Evil
258 The Loss of the Shadow
259 Love
260 From Spring to Summer
261 The Door into Life
262 A Lonely Religion
263 Love
264 A False Method
265 Assimilation
266 Looking
267 Progress
268 Providence
269 Ordinariness
270 Forgiveness
271 Visitors
272 Prose
273 Integrity
274 Contentment
275 Psychical Research
276 The Blotting Out
277 On a Chapter in Isaiah
278 Providence
279 No Other Way
280 Death
281 Criterion of a True Vision
282 One Reason for Sex
283 Easy Work
284 Lebensraum
285 Nature
286 For Parents
287 Hoarding
288 Today and Yesterday
289 Obstinate Illusion
290 Possessions
291 Lost in the Mountains
292 The Birth of Persecution
293 Daily Death
294 On Duty to Oneself
295 A Theory of Sleep
296 Sacred Idleness
297 The Modern Bane
298 Immortality
299 Prayer
300 Self
301 Visions
302 The Impervious Soul
303 An Old Garden
304 Experience
305 Difficulties
306 A Hard Saying
307 Truisms
308 On Asking Advice
309 No Heel Taps
310 Silence Before the Judge
311 Nothing So Deadening
312 Rounding and Completion
313 Immortality
314 The Eternal Now
315 The Silences Below
316 Dipsomania
317 Reminder
318 Things Rare and Common
319 Holy Laughter
320 The Self
321 Either-Or
322 Prayer
323 A Bad Conscience
324 Money
325 Scrubbing the Cell
326 The Mystery of Evil
327 Prudence
328 Competition
329 Method
330 Prudence
331 How To Become a Dunce
332 Love
333 Preacher's Repentance
334 Deeds
335 Prayer
336 The House Is Not for Me
337 Hoarding
338 The Day's First Job
339 Obstinate Illusion
340 The Rules of Conversation
341 A Neglected Form of Justice
342 Good
343 Thou Shall Not Make Any Graven Image
344 How to Become a Dunce
345 Our Insolvency
346 A Sad Pity 14*
347 On Method
348 Wishing
349 Fear
350 The Root of All Rebellion
351 Two Silly Young Women
352 Hospitality
353 Boredom
354 Counting the Cost
355 Realism
356 Avarice
357 The Lobster Pot
358 The First Meeting
359 Reminder
360 The Wrong Way with Anxiety
361 Deadlock
362 Solitude
363 Death
364 The Mystery of Evil
365 The Last Resource
Sources
Bibliography
PREFACE
all that I know of George MacDonald I have learned either from his own
books or from the biography (George MacDonald and His Wife) which his son,
Dr. Greville MacDonald, published in 1924; nor have I ever, but once, talked
of him to anyone who had met him. For the very few facts which I am going to
mention I am therefore entirely dependent on Dr. MacDonald.
We have learned from Freud and others about those distortions in
character and errors in thought which result from a man's early conflicts
with his father. Far the most important thing we can know about George
MacDonald is that his whole life illustrates the opposite process. An almost
perfect relationship with his father was the earthly root of all his wisdom.
From his own father, he said, he first learned that Fatherhood must be at
the core of the universe. He was thus prepared in an unusual way to teach
that religion in which the relation of Father and Son is of all relations
the most central.
His father appears to have been a remarkable man - a man hard, and
tender, and humorous all at once, in the old fashion of Scotch Christianity.
He had had his leg cut off above the knee in the days before chloroform,
refusing the customary dose of preliminary whisky, and "only for one moment,
when the knife first transfixed the flesh, did he turn his face away and
ejaculate a faint, sibilant whiff." He had quelled with a fantastic joke at
his own expense an ugly riot in which he was being burned in effigy. He
forbade his son to touch a saddle until he had learned to ride well without
one. He advised him "to give over the fruitless game of poetry." He asked
from him, and obtained, a promise to renounce tobacco at the age of
twenty-three. On the other hand he objected to grouse shooting on the score
of cruelty and had in general a tenderness for animals not very usual among
farmers more than a hundred years ago; and his son reports that he never, as
boy or man, asked him for anything without getting what he asked. Doubtless
this tells us as much about the son's character as the father's and should
be taken in connection with our extract on prayer (104). "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." The theological maxim is rooted in the
experiences of the author's childhood. This is what may be called the
"anti-Freudian predicament" in operation.
George MacDonald's family (though hardly his father) were of course
Calvinists. On the intellectual side his history is largely a history of
escape from the theology in which he had been brought up. Stories of such
emancipation are common in the nineteenth century; but George MacDonald's
story belongs to this familiar pattern only with a difference. In most such
stories the emancipated person, not content with repudiating the doctrines,
comes also to hate the persons, of his forebears, and even the whole culture
and way of life with which they are associated. Thus books like The Way of
All flesh come to be written; and later generations, if they do not swallow
the satire wholesale as history, at least excuse the author for a
one-sidedness which a man in his circumstances could hardly have been
expected to avoid. Of such personal resentment I find no trace in MacDonald.
It is not we who have to find extenuating circumstances for his point of
view. On the contrary, it is he himself, in the very midst of his
intellectual revolt, who forces us, whether we will or no, to see elements
of real and perhaps irreplaceable worth in the thing from which he is
revolting.
All his life he continued to love the rock from which he had been hewn.
All that is best in his novels carries us back to that "kaleyard" world of
granite and heather, of bleaching greens beside burns that look as if they
flowed not with water but with stout, to the thudding of wooden machinery,
the oatcakes, the fresh milk, the pride, the poverty, and the passionate
love of hard-won learning. His best characters are those which reveal how
much real charity and spiritual wisdom can coexist with the profession of a
theology that seems to encourage neither. His own grandmother, a truly
terrible old woman wo had burnt his uncle's fiddle as a Satanic snare, might
well have appeared to him as what is now (inaccurately) called "a mere
sadist." Yet when something very like her is delineated in Robert Falconer
and again in What's Mine's Mine, we are compelled to look deeper-to see,
inside the repellent crust, something that we can wholeheartedly pity and
even, with reservations, respect. In this way MacDonald illustrates, not the
doubtful maxim that to know all is to forgive all, but the unshakeable truth
that to forgive is to know. He who loves, sees.
He was born in 1824 at Huntly in Aberdeenshire and entered King's
College at Aberdeen in 1840. In 1842 he spent some months in the North of
Scotland cataloguing the library of a great house which has never been
identified. I mention the fact because it made a lifelong impression on
MacDonald. The image of a great house seen principally from the library and
always through the eyes of a stranger or a dependent (even Mr. Vane in
Lilith never seems at home in the library which is called his) haunts his
books to the end. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that the "great
house in the North" was the scene of some important crisis or development in
his life. Perhaps it was here that he first came under the influence of
German Romanticism.
In 1850 he received what is technically known as a "Call" to become the
Minister of a dissenting chapel in Arundel. By 1852 he was in trouble with
the "deacons" for heresy, the charges being that he had expressed belief in
a future state of probation for heathens and that he was tainted with German
theology. The deacons took a roundabout method to be rid of him, by lowering
his salary-it had been ?150 a year and he was now married-in the hope that
this would induce him to resign. But they had misjudged their man. MacDonald
merely replied that this was bad enough news for him but that he supposed he
must try to live on less. And for some time he continued to do so, often
helped by the offerings of his poorest parishioners who did not share the
views of the more prosperous Deacons. In 1853, however, the situation became
impossible. He resigned and embarked on the career of lecturing, tutoring,
occasional preaching, writing, and "odd jobs" which was his lot almost to
the end. He died in 1905.
His lungs were diseased and his poverty was very great. Literal
starvation was sometimes averted only by those last moment deliverances
which agnostics attribute to chance and Christians to Providence. It is
against this background of reiterated failure and incessant peril that some
of the following extracts can be most profitably read. His resolute
condemnations of anxiety come from one who has a right to speak; nor does
their tone encourage the theory that they owe anything to the pathological
wishful thinking-the spes phthisica-of the consumptive. None of the evidence
suggests such a character. His peace of mind came not from building on the
future but from resting in what he called "the holy Present." His
resignation to poverty (see Number 274) was at the opposite pole from that
of the stoic. He appears to have been a sunny, playful man, deeply
appreciative of all really beautiful and delicious things that money can
buy, and no less deeply content to do without them. It is perhaps
significant-it is certainly touching-that his chief recorded weakness was a
Highland love of finery; and he was all his life hospitable as only the poor
can be.
In making these extracts I have been concerned with MacDonald not as a
writer but as a Christian teacher. If I were to deal with him as a writer, a
man of letters, I should be faced with a difficult critical problem. If we
define Literature as an art whose medium is words, then certainly MacDonald
has no place in its first rank- perhaps not even in its second. There are
indeed passages, many of them in this collection, where the wisdom and (I
would dare to call it) the holiness that are in him triumph over and even
burn away the baser elements in his style: the expression becomes precise,
weighty, economic; acquires a cutting edge. But he does not maintain this
level for long. The texture of his writing as a whole is undistinguished, at
times fumbling. Bad pulpit traditions cling to it; there is sometimes a
nonconformist verbosity, sometimes an old Scotch weakness for florid
ornament (it runs right through them from Dunbar to the Waverly Novels),
sometimes an oversweetness picked up from Novalis. But this does not quite
dispose of him even for the literary critic. What he does best is
fantasy-fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and the mythopoeic. And
this, in my opinion, he does better than any man. The critical problem with
which we are confronted is whether this art-the art of myth-making-is a
species of the literary art. The objection to so classifying it is that the
Myth does not essentially exist in words at all. We all agree that the story
of Balder is a great myth, a thing of inexhaustible value. But of whose
version-whose words-are we thinking when we say this?
For my own part, the answer is that I am not thinking of anyone's
-words. No poet, as far as I know or can remember, has told this story
supremely well. I am not thinking of any particular version of it. If the
story is anywhere embodied in words, that is almost an accident.
What really delights and nourishes me is a particular pattern of
events, which would equally delight and nourish if it had reached me by some
medium which involved no words at all-say by a mime, or a film. And I find
this to be true of all such stories. When I think of the story of the
Argonauts and praise it, I am not praising Apollonius Rhodius (whom I never
finished) nor Kingsley (whom I have forgotten) nor even Morris, though I
consider his version a very pleasant poem. In this respect stories of the
mythical type are at the opposite pole from lyrical poetry. If you try to
take the "theme" of Keats's Nightingale apart from the very words in which
he has embodied it, you find that you are talking about almost nothing. Form
and content can there be separated only by a fake abstraction. But in a
myth-in a story where the mere pattern of events is all that matters-this is
not so. Any means of communication whatever which succeeds in lodging those
events in our imagination has, as we say, "done the trick." After that you
can throw the means of communication away. To be sure, if the means of
communication are words, it is desirable that a letter which brings you
important news should be fairly written. But this is only a minor
convenience; for the letter will, in any case, go into the wastepaper basket
as soon as you have mastered its contents, and the words (those of Lempriere
would have done) are going to be forgotten as soon as you have mastered the
Myth. In poetry the words are the body and the "theme" or "content" is the
soul. But in myth the imagined events are the body and something
inexpressible is the soul: the words, or mime, or film, or pictorial series
are not even clothes-they are not much more than a telephone. Of this I had
evidence some years ago when I first heard the story of Kafka's Castle
related in conversation and afterwards read the book for myself. The reading
added nothing. I had already received the myth, which was all that mattered.
Most myths were made in prehistoric times, and, I suppose, not
consciously made by individuals at all. But every now and then there occurs
in the modern world a genius-a Kafka or a Novalis-who can make such a story.
MacDonald is the greatest genius of this kind whom I know. But I do not know
how to classify such genius. To call it literary genius seems unsatisfactory
since it can coexist with great inferiority in the art of words-nay, since
its connection with words at all turns out to be merely external and, in a
sense, accidental. Nor can it be fitted into any of the other arts. It
begins to look as if there were an art, or a gift, which criticism has
largely ignored. It may even be one of the greatest arts; for it produces
works which give us (at the first meeting) as much delight and (on prolonged
acquaintance) as much wisdom and strength as the works of the greatest
poets. It is in some ways more akin to music than to poetry-or at least to
most poetry. It goes beyond the expression of things we have already felt.
It arouses in us sensations we have never had before, never anticipated
having, as though we had broken out of our normal mode of consciousness and
"possessed joys not promised to our birth." It gets under our skin, hits us
at a level deeper than our thoughts or even our passions, troubles oldest
certainties till all questions are reopened, and in general shocks us more
fully awake than we are for most of our lives.
It was in this mythopoeic art that MacDonald excelled. And from this it
follows that his best art is least represented in this collection. The great
works are Phantastes, the Curdie books, The Golden Key, The Wise Woman, and
Lilith. From them, just because they are supremely good in their own kind,
there is little to be extracted. The meaning, the suggestion, the radiance,
is incarnate in the whole story: it is only by chance that you find any
detachable merits. The novels, on the other hand, have yielded me a rich
crop. This does not mean that they are good novels. Necessity made MacDonald
a novelist, but few of his novels are good and none is very good. They are
best when they depart most from the canons of novel writing, and that in two
directions. Sometimes they depart in order to come nearer to fantasy, as in
the whole character of the hero in Sir Gibbie or the opening chapters of
Wilfred Cumbermede. Sometimes they diverge into direct and prolonged
preachments which would be intolerable if a man were reading for the story,
but which are in fact welcome because the author, though a poor novelist, is
a supreme preacher. Some of his best things are thus hidden in his dullest
books: my task here has been almost one of exhumation. I am speaking so far
of the novels as I think they would appear if judged by any reasonably
objective standard. But it is, no doubt, true that any reader who loves
holiness and loves MacDonald-yet perhaps he will need to love Scotland
too-can find even in the worst of them something that disarms criticism and
will come to feel a queer, awkward charm in their very faults. (But that, of
course, is what happens to us with all favorite authors.) One rare, and all
but unique, merit these novels must be allowed. The "good" characters are
always the best and most convincing. His saints live; his villains are
stagey.
This collection, as I have said, was designed not to revive MacDonald's
literary reputation but to spread his religious teaching. Hence most of my
extracts are taken from the three volumes of Unspoken Sermons. My own debt
to this book is almost as great as one man can owe to another: and nearly
all serious inquirers to whom I have introduced it acknowledge that it has
given them great help-sometimes indispensable help toward the very
acceptance of the Christian faith.
I will attempt no historical or theological classification of
MacDonald's thought, partly because I have not the learning to do so, still
more because I am no great friend to such pigeonholing. One very effective
way of silencing the voice of conscience is to impound in an Ism the teacher
through whom it speaks: the trumpet no longer seriously disturbs our rest
when we have murmured "Thomist," "Barthian," or "Existentialist." And in
Mac-Donald it is always the voice of conscience that speaks. He addresses
the will: the demand for obedience, for "something to be neither more nor
less nor other than done" is incessant. Yet in that very voice of conscience
every other faculty somehow speaks as well-intellect, and imagination, and
humor, and fancy, and all the affections; and no man in modern times was
perhaps more aware of the distinction between Law and Gospel, the inevitable
failure of mere morality. The Divine Sonship is the key-conception which
unites all the different elements of his thought. I dare not say that he is
never in error; but to speak plainly I know hardly any other writer who
seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ
Himself. Hence his Christ-like union of tenderness and severity. Nowhere
else outside the New Testament have I found terror and comfort so
intertwined. The title "Inexorable Love" which I have given to several
individual extracts would serve for the whole collection. Inexorability-but
never the inexorability of anything less than love-runs through it like a
refrain; "escape is hopeless"-"agree quickly with your
adversary"-"compulsion waits behind"-"the uttermost farthing will be
exacted." Yet this urgency never becomes shrill. All the sermons are
suffused with a spirit of love and wonder which prevents it from doing so.
MacDonald shows God threatening, but (as Jeremy Taylor says) "He threatens
terrible things if we will not be happy."
In many respects MacDonald's thought has, in a high degree, just those
excellences which his period and his personal history would lead us to
expect least. A romantic, escaping from a drily intellectual theology, might
easily be betrayed into valuing mere emotion and "religious experience" too
highly: but in fact few nineteenth-century writers are more firmly catholic
in relegating feeling to its proper place. (See Numbers 1, 27, 28, 37, 39,
351.) His whole philosophy of Nature (Numbers 52, 67, 150, 151, 184, 185,
187, 188, 189, 285) with its resolute insistence on the concrete, owes
little to the thought of an age which hovered between mechanism and
idealism; he would obviously have been more at home with Professor Whitehead
than with Herbert Spencer or T. H. Green. Number 285 seems to me
particularly admirable. All romantics are vividly aware of mutability, but
most of them are content to bewail it: for MacDonald this nostalgia is
merely the starting point-he goes on and discovers what it is made for. His
psychology also is worth noticing: he is quite as well aware as the moderns
that the conscious self, the thing revealed by introspection, is a
superficies. Hence the cellars and attics of the King's castle in The
Princess and the Goblins, and the terror of his own house which falls upon
Mr. Vane in Lilith: hence also his formidable critique (201) of our daily
assumptions about the self. Perhaps most remarkable of all is the function-a
low and primitive, yet often indispensable function-which he allows to Fear
in the spiritual life (Numbers 3, 5, 6, 7, 137, 142, 143, 349). Reaction
against early teachings might on this point have very easily driven him into
a shallow liberalism. But it does not. He hopes, indeed, that all men will
be saved; but that is because he hopes that all will repent. He knows (none
better) that even omnipotence cannot save the uncoverted. He never trifles
with eternal impossibilities. He is as golden and genial as Traherne; but
also as astringent as the Imitation.
So at least I have found him. In making this collection I was
discharging a debt of justice. I have never concealed the fact that I
regarded him as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in
which I did not quote from him. But it has not seemed to me that those who
have received my books kindly take even now sufficient notice of the
affiliation. Honesty drives me to emphasize it. And even if honesty did
not-well, I am a don, and "source-hunting" (Quellenforschung) is perhaps in
my marrow. It must be more than thirty years ago that I bought-almost
unwillingly, for I had looked at the volume on that bookstall and rejected
it on a dozen previous occasions-the Everyman edition of Phantasies. A few
hours later I knew that I had crossed a great frontier. I had already been
waist-deep in Romanticism; and likely enough, at any moment, to flounder
into its darker and more evil forms, slithering down the steep descent that
leads from the love of strangeness to that of eccentricity and thence to
that of perversity. Now Phantasies was romantic enough in all conscience;
but there was a difference. Nothing was at that time further from my
thoughts than Christianity and I therefore had no notion what this
difference really was. I was only aware that if this new world was strange,
it was also homely and humble; that if this was a dream, it was a dream in
which one at least felt strangely vigilant; that the whole book had about it
a sort of cool, morning innocence, and also, quite unmistakably, a certain
quality of Death, good Death. What it actually did to me was to convert,
even to baptize (that was where the Death came in) my imagination. It did
nothing to my intellect nor (at that time) to my conscience. Their turn came
far later and with the help of many other books and men. But when the
process was complete-by which, of course, I mean "when it had really
begun"-I found that I was still with MacDonald and that he had accompanied
me all the way and that I was now at last ready to hear from him much that
he could not have told me at that first meeting. But in a sense, what he was
now telling me was the very same that he had told me from the beginning.
There was no question of getting through to the kernel and throwing away the
shell: no question of a gilded pill. The pill was gold all through.
The quality which had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out
to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying, and
ecstatic reality in which we all live. I should have been shocked in my
teens if anyone had told me that what I learned to love in Phantastes was
goodness. But now that I know, I see there was no deception. The deception
is all the other way round-in that prosaic moralism which confines goodness
to the region of Law and Duty, which never lets us feel in our face the
sweet air blowing from "the land of righteousness," never reveals that
elusive Form which if once seen must inevitably be desired with all but
sensuous desire-the thing (in Sappho's phrase) "more gold than gold."
It is no part of my aim to produce a critical text of MacDonald. Apart
from my unconscious errors in transcription, I have "tampered" in two ways.
The whole difficulty of making extracts is to leave the sense perfectly
clear while not retaining anything you do not want. In attempting to do so,
I have sometimes interpolated a word (always enclosed in brackets) and
sometimes altered the punctuation. I have also introduced a capital H for
pronouns that refer to God, which the printer, in some of my originals, did
not employ; not because I consider this typographical reverence of much
importance, but because, in a language where pronouns are so easily confused
as they are in English, it seems foolish to reject such an aid to clarity.
- C. S. lewis
GEORGE MACDONALD
AN ANTHOLOGY
[ 1 ] Dryness
That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth
of his feelings and desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the
weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and
say to Him, "Thou art my refuge."*
* The source of this quotation and of the subsequent quotations will be
found in "Sources,"
[ 2 ] Inexorable Love
Nothing is inexorable but love. Love which will yield to prayer is
imperfect and poor. Nor is it then the love that yields, but its alloy. . .
. For love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness
of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot
love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may
love more; it strives for perfection, even that itself may be perfected-not
in itself, but in the object. . . . Therefore all that is not beautiful in
the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love's kind, must be
destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire.
[ 3 ] Divine Burning
He will shake heaven and earth, that only the unshakable may remain: he
is a consuming fire, that only that which cannot be consumed may stand forth
eternal. It is the nature of God, so terribly pure that it destroys all that
is not pure as fire, which demands like purity in our worship. He will have
purity. It is not that the fire will burn us if we do not worship thus; yea,
will go on burning within us after all that is foreign to it has yielded to
its force, no longer with pain and consuming, but as the highest
consciousness of life, the presence of God.
[ 4 ] The Beginning of Wisdom
How should the Hebrews be other than terrified at that which was
opposed to all they knew of themselves, beings judging it good to honor a
golden calf? Such as they were, they did well to be afraid. ... Fear is
nobler than sensuality. Fear is better than no God, better than a god made
with hands. ... The worship of fear is true, although very low: and though
not acceptable to God in itself, for only the worship of spirit and of truth
is acceptable to Him, yet even in his sight it is precious. For He regards
men not as they are merely, but as they shall be; not as they shall be
merely, but as they are now growing, or capable of growing, toward that
image after which He made them that they might grow to it. Therefore a
thousand stages, each in itself all but valueless, are of inestimable worth
as the necessary and connected gradations of an infinite progress. A
condition which of declension would indicate a devil, may of growth indicate
a saint.
[ 5 ] The Unawakened
Can it be any comfort to them to be told that God loves them so that He
will burn them clean? . . . They do not want to be clean, and they cannot
bear to be tortured.
[ 6 ] Sinai
And is not God ready to do unto them even as they fear, though with
another feeling and a different end from any which they are capable of
supposing? He is against sin: insofar as, and while, they and sin are one,
He is against them-against their desires, their aims, their fears, and their
hopes; and thus He is altogether and always for them. That thunder and
lightning and tempest, that blackness torn with the sound of a trumpet, that
visible horror billowed with the voice of words, was all but a faint image
... of what God thinks and feels against vileness and selfishness, of the
unrest of unassuageable repulsion with which He regards such conditions.
[ 7 ] No
When we say that God is Love, do we teach men that their fear of Him is
groundless? No. As much as they fear will come upon them, possibly far more.
. . . The wrath will consume what they call themselves; so that the selves
God made shall appear.
[ 8 ] The Law of Nature
For that which cannot be shaken shall remain. That which is immortal in
God shall remain in man. The death that is in them shall be consumed. It is
the law of Nature- that is, the law of God-that all that is destructible
shall be destroyed.
[ 9 ] Escape Is Hopeless
The man whose deeds are evil, fears the burning. But the burning will
not come the less that he fears it or denies it. Escape is hopeless. For
Love is inexorable. Our God is a consuming fire. He shall not come out till
he has paid the uttermost farthing.
[ 10 ] The Word
But herein is the Bible itself greatly wronged. It nowhere lays claim
to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus,
the inexhaustible, the ever unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ "in
whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge," not the Bible, save
as leading to Him.
[ 11 ] I Knew a Child
I knew a child who believed she had committed the sin against the Holy
Ghost, because she had, in her toilette, made an improper use of a pin. Dare
not to rebuke me for adducing the diseased fancy of a child in a weighty
matter of theology. "Despise not one of these little ones." Would the
theologians were as near the truth in such matters as the children. Diseased
fancy! The child knew, and was conscious that she knew, that she was doing
wrong because she had been forbidden. There was rational ground for her
fear. . . . He would not have told her she was silly, and "never to mind."
Child as she was, might He not have said to her, "I do not condemn thee: and
go and sin no more"?
[12] Spiritual Murder
It may be an infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to
forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion: the latter is
the heart's choice. It is spiritual murder, the worst, to hate, to brood
over the feeling that excludes, that, in our microcosm, kills the image, the
idea of the hated.
[ 13 ] Impossibilities
No man who will not forgive his neighbor, can believe that God is
willing, yea wanting, to forgive him.... If God said, "I forgive you" to a
man who hated his brother, and if (as impossible) that voice of forgiveness
should reach the man, what would it mean to him? How much would the man
interpret it? Would it not mean to him "You may go on hating. I do not mind
it. You have had great provocation and are justified in your hate"? No doubt
God takes what wrong there is, and what provocation there is, into the
account: but the more provocation, the more excuse that can be urged for the
hate, the more reason, if possible, that the hater should be delivered from
the hell of his hate. . . . The man would think, not that God loved the
sinner, but that he forgave the sin, which God never does [i.e. What is
usually called "forgiving the sin" means forgiving the sinner and destroying
the sin]. Every sin meets with its due fate-inexorable expulsion from the
paradise of God's Humanity. He loves the sinner so much that He cannot
forgive him in any other way than by banishing from his bosom the demon that
possesses him.
[ 14 ] Truth is Truth
Truth is truth, whether from the lips of Jesus or Balaam.
[ 15 ] The White Stone (Revelations 2:17)
The giving of the white stone with the new name is the communication of
what God thinks about the man to the man. It is the divine judgment, the
solemn holy doom of the righteous man, the "Come, thou blessed," spoken to
the individual. . . . The true name is one which expresses the character,
the nature, the meaning of the person who bears it. It is the man's own
symbol -his soul's picture, in a word-the sign which belongs to him and to
no one else. Who can give a man this, his own name? God alone. For no one
but God sees what the man is. ... It is only when the man has become his
name that God gives him the stone with the name upon it, for then first can
he understand what his name signifies. It is the blossom, the perfection,
the completeness, that determines the name: and God foresees that from the
first because He made it so: but the tree of the soul, before its blossom
comes, cannot understand what blossom it is to bear and could not know what
the word meant, which, in representing its own unarrived completeness, named
itself. Such a name cannot be given until the man is the name. God's name
for a man must be the expression of His own idea of the man, that being whom
He had in His thought when he began to make the child, and whom He kept in
His thought through the long process of creation that went to realize the
idea. To tell the name is to seal the success-to say "In thee also I am well
pleased."
[ 16 ] Personality
The name is one "which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it." Not
only then has each man his individual relation to God, but each man has his
peculiar relation to God. He is to God a peculiar being, made after his own
fashion, and that of no one else. Hence he can worship God as no man else
can worship Him.
[ 17 ] The Secret In Man
For each, God has a different response. With every man He has a
secret-the secret of a new name. In every man there is a loneliness, an
inner chamber of peculiar life into which God only can enter. I say not it
is the innermost chamber.
[ 18 ] The Secrets in God
There is a chamber also (O God, humble and accept my speech)-a chamber
in God Himself, into which none can enter but the one, the individual, the
peculiar man-out of which chamber that man has to bring revelation and
strength for his brethren. This is that for which he was made-to reveal the
secret things of the Father.
[ 19 ] No Massing
There is no massing of men with God. When he speaks of gathered men, it
is as a spiritual body, not as a mass.
[ 2O ] No Comparing
Here there is no room for ambition. Ambition is the desire to be above
one's neighbor; and here there is no possibility of comparison with one's
neighbor: no one knows what the white stone contains except the man who
receives it.... Relative worth is not only unknown -to the children of the
Kingdom it is unknowable.
[ 23 ] Caverns and Films
If God sees that heart corroded with the rust of cares, riddled into
caverns and films by the worms of ambition and greed, then your heart is as
God sees it, for God sees things as they are. And one day you will be
compelled to see, nay, to feel your heart as God sees it.
[ 21 ] The End
"God has cared to make me for Himself," says the victor with the white
stone, "And has called me that which I like best."
[ 22 ] Moth and Rust
What is with the treasure must fare as the treasure. . .. The heart
which haunts the treasure house where the moth and rust corrupt, will be
exposed to the same ravages as the treasure.... Many a man, many a woman,
fair and flourishing to see, is going about with a rusty moth-eaten heart
within that form of strength or beauty. "But this is only a figure." True.
But is the reality intended, less or more than the figure?
[ 24 ] Various Kinds of Moth
Nor does the lesson apply to those only who worship Mammon. ... It
applies to those equally who in any way worship the transitory; who seek the
praise of men more than the praise of God; who would make a show in the
world by wealth, by taste, by intellect, by power, by art, by genius of any
kind, and so would gather golden opinions to be treasured in a storehouse of
earth. Nor to such only, but surely to those as well whose pleasures are of
a more evidently transitory nature still, such as the pleasures of the
senses in every direction- whether lawfully indulged, if the joy of being is
centered in them-do these words bear terrible warning. For the hurt lies not
in this-that these pleasures are false like the deceptions of magic, for
such they are not; . . . nor yet in this-that they pass away and leave a
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
in the prayer of the devils for leave to go into the swine. . . . Without
the correction, the reflection, the support of other presences, being is not
merely unsafe, it is a horror-for anyone but God, who is His own being. For
him whose idea is God's, and the image of God, his own being is far too
fragmentary and imperfect to be anything like good company. It is the lovely
creatures God has made all around us, in them giving us Himself, that, until
we know Him, save us from the frenzy of aloneness-for that aloneness is
self.
[ 118 ] Be Ye Perfect
Whoever will live must cease to be a slave and become a child of God.
There is no halfway house of rest, where ungodliness may be dallied with,
nor prove quite fatal Be they few or many cast into such prison as I have
endeavored to imagine, there can be no deliverance for human soul, whether
in that prison or out of it, but in paying the last farthing, in becoming
lowly, penitent, self-refusing-so receiving the sonship and learning to cry,
Father!
[ 119 ] The Heart
And no scripture is of private interpretation, so is there no feeling
in (a) human heart which exists in that heart alone-which is not, in some
form or degree, in every heart.
[ 120 ] Precious Blame
No matter how His image may have been defaced in me, the thing defaced
is His image, remains His defaced image-an image yet, that can hear His
word. What makes me evil and miserable is that the thing spoiled in me is
the image of the Perfect. Nothing can be evil but in virtue of a good
hypostasis. No, no! Nothing can make it that I am not the child of God. If
one say, "Look at the animals: God made them; you do not call them the
children of God!" I answer, "But I am to blame: they are not to blame! I
cling fast to my blame: it is the seal of my childhood." I have nothing to
argue from in the animals, for I do not understand them. Two things I am
sure of: that God is "a faithful creator" and that the sooner I put in force
my claim to be a child of God, the better for them; for they too are fallen,
though without blame.
[ 121 ] The Same
However bad I may be, I am the child of God, and therein lies my blame.
Ah, I would not lose my blame! In my blame lies my hope.
[ 122 ] Man Glorified
Everything muse at length be subject to man, as it was to The Man. When
God can do what He will with a man, the man may do what he will with the
world; he may walk on the sea like his Lord; the deadliest thing will not be
able to hurt him.
[ 123 ] Life in the Word
All things were made through the Word, but that which was made in the
Word was life, and that life is the light of men: they who live by this
light, that is live as Jesus lived, by obedience, namely, to the Father,
have a share in their own making; the light becomes life in them; they are,
in their lower way, alive with the life that was first born in Jesus, and
through Him has been born in them-by obedience they become one with the
Godhead: "As many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons
of God."
[ 124 ] The Office of Christ
Never could we have known the heart of the Father, never felt it
possible to love Him as sons, but for Him who cast Himself into the gulf
that yawned between us. In and through Him we were foreordained to the
son-ship: sonship, even had we never sinned, never could we reach without
Him. We should have been little children loving the Father indeed, but
children far from the son-hood that understands and adores.
[ 125 ] The Slowness of the New Creation
As the world must be redeemed in a few men to begin with, so the soul
is redeemed in a few of its thoughts, and works, and ways to begin with: it
takes a long time to finish the new creation of this redemption.
[ 126 ] The New Creation
When the sons of God show as they are, taking, with the character, the
appearance and the place, that belong to their sonship; when the sons of God
sit with the Son of God on the throne of their Father; then shall they be in
potency of fact the lords of the lower creation, the bestowers of liberty
and peace upon it: then shall the creation, subjected to vanity for their
sakes, find its freedom in their freedom, its gladness in their sonship. The
animals will glory to serve them, will joy to come to them for help. Let the
heartless scoff, the unjust despise! the heart that cries Abba, Father,
cries to the God of the sparrow and the oxen; nor can hope go too far in
hoping what God will do for the creation that now groaneth and travaileth in
pain because our higher birth is delayed.
[ 127 ] Pessimism
Low-sunk life imagines itself weary of life, but it is death, not life,
it is weary of.
[ 128 ] The Work of the Father
All things are possible with God, but all things are not easy. ... In
the very nature of being-that is, God- it must be hard-and divine history
shows how hard -to create that which shall be not Himself, yet like Himself.
The problem is, so far to separate from Himself that which must yet on Him
be ever and always and utterly dependent, that it shall have the existence
of an individual, and be able to turn and regard him, choose Him, and say "I
will arise and go to my Father. ..." I imagine the difficulty of doing this
thing, of affecting this creation, this separation from Himself such that
Will in the creature shall be possible-I imagine, I say, that for it God
must begin inconceivably far back in the infinitesimal regions of
beginnings.
[ 129 ] The End
The final end of the separation is not individuality; that is but a
means to it: the final end is oneness-an impossibility without it. For there
can be no unity, no delight of love, no harmony, no good in being, where
there is but one. Two at least are needed for oneness.
[ 130 ] Deadlock
Man finds it hard to get what he wants, because he does not want the
best; God finds it hard to give, because He would give the best, and man
will not take it.
[ 131 ] The Two Worst Heresies
The worst heresy, next to that of dividing religion and righteousness,
is to divide the Father from the Son; . . . to represent the Son as doing
that which the Father does not Himself do.
[ 132 ] Christian Growth
All the growth of the Christian is the more and more life he is
receiving. At first his religion may hardly be distinguishable from the mere
prudent desire to save his soul: but at last he loses that very soul in the
glory of love, and so saves itself; self becomes but the cloud on which the
white light of God divides into harmonies unspeakable.
[ 133 ] Life and Shadow
Life is everything. Many doubtless mistake the joy of life for life
itself, and, longing after the joy, languish with a thirst at once poor and
inextinguishable; but even that, thirst points to the one spring. These love
self, not life, and self is but the shadow of life. When it is taken for
life itself, and set as the man's center, it becomes a live death in the
man, a devil he worships as his God: the worm of the death eternal he clasps
to his bosom as his one joy.
[ 134 ] False Refuge
Of all things let us avoid the false refuge of a weary collapse, a
hopeless yielding to things as they are. It is the life in us that is
discontented: we need more of what is discontented, not more of the cause of
its discontent.
[ 135 ] A Silly Notion
No silly notion of playing the hero-what have creatures like us to do
with heroism who are not yet barely honest?
[ 136 ] Dryness
The true man trusts in a strength which is not his, and which he does
not feel, does not even always desire.
[ 137 ] Perseverance
To believe in the wide-awake real, through all the stupefying,
enervating, distorting dream: to will to wake, when the very being seems
athirst for Godless repose:-these are the broken steps up to the high fields
where repose is but a form of strength, strength but a form of joy, joy but
a form of love.
[ 138 ] The Lower Forms
I trust that life in its lowest forms is on the way to thought and
blessedness, is in the process of that separation, so to speak, from God, in
which consists the creation of living souls.
[ 139 ] Life
He who has it not cannot believe in it: how should death believe in
life, though all the birds of God are singing jubilant over the empty tomb?
[ 140 ] The Eternal Round
Obedience is the joining of the links of the eternal round. Obedience
is but the other side of the creative will. Will is God's will, obedience is
man's will; the two make one. The root life, knowing well the thousand
troubles it would bring upon Him, has created, and goes on creating, other
lives, that though incapable of self-being they may, by willed obedience,
share in the bliss of His essential self-ordained being. If we do the will
of God, eternal life is ours-no mere continuity of existence, for that in
itself is worthless as hell, but a being that is one with the essential
life.
[ 141 ] The Great One Life
The infinite God, the great one life, than whom is no other-only
shadows, lovely shadows of Him.
[ 142 ] The Beginning of Wisdom
Naturally the first emotion of man toward the being he calls God, but
of whom he knows so little, is fear. Where it is possible that fear should
exist, it is well it should exist, cause continual uneasiness, and be cast
out by nothing less than love. . . . Until love, which is the truth toward
God, is able to cast out far, it is well that fear should hold; it is a
bond, however poor, between that which is and That which creates-a bond that
must be broken, but a bond that can be