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