_To him that overcometh, I will give a white stone, and in the stone a
new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.--
REV. ii. 17._
Whether the Book of the Revelation be written by the same man who wrote
the Gospel according to St John or not, there is, at least, one element
common to the two--the mysticism.
I use the word _mysticism_ as representing a certain mode of embodying
truth, common, in various degrees, to almost all, if not all, the
writers of the New Testament. The attempt to define it thoroughly would
require an essay. I will hazard but one suggestion towards it: A
mystical mind is one which, having perceived that the highest
expression of which the truth admits, lies in the symbolism of nature
and the human customs that result from human necessities, prosecutes
thought about truth so embodied by dealing with the symbols themselves
after logical forms. This is the highest mode of conveying the deepest
truth; and the Lord himself often employed it, as, for instance, in the
whole passage ending with the words, "If therefore the light that is in
thee be darkness, how great is the darkness!"
The mysticism in the Gospel of St John is of the simplest, and,
therefore, noblest nature. No dweller in this planet can imagine a
method of embodying truth that shall be purer, loftier, truer to the
truth embodied. There may be higher modes in other worlds, or there may
not--I cannot tell; but of all our modes these forms are best
illustrations of the highest. Apparently the mysticism of St John's own
nature enabled him to remember and report with sufficient accuracy the
words of our Lord, always, it seems to me, of a recognizably different
kind from those of any of the writers of the New Testament--chiefly,
perhaps, in the simplicity of their poetical mysticism.
But the mysticism in the Book of the Revelation is more complicated,
more gorgeous, less poetic, and occasionally, I think, perhaps
arbitrary, or approaching the arbitrary; _reminding_ one, in a word, of
the mysticism of Swedenborg. Putting aside both historical and literary
criticism, in neither of which with regard to the authorship of these
two books have I a right even to an opinion, I would venture to suggest
that possibly their difference in tone is just what one might expect
when the historian of a mystical teacher and the recorder of his
mystical sayings, proceeds to embody his own thoughts, feelings, and
inspirations; that is, when the revelation flows no longer from the
lips of the Master, but through the disciple's own heart, soul, and
brain. For surely not the most idolatrous of our Bible-worshipping
brothers and sisters will venture to assert that the Spirit of God
could speak as freely by the lips of the wind-swayed, reed-like,
rebukable Peter, or of the Thomas who could believe his own eyes, but
neither the word of his brethren, nor the nature of his Master, as by
the lips of Him who was blind and deaf to everything but the will of
him that sent him.
Truth is truth, whether from the lips of Jesus or Balaam. But, in its
deepest sense, _the truth_ is a condition of heart, soul, mind, and
strength towards God and towards our fellow--not an utterance, not even
a _right_ form of words; and therefore such truth coming forth in words
is, in a sense, the person that speaks. And many of the utterances of
truth in the Revelation, commonly called of St John, are not merely
lofty in form, but carry with them the conviction that the writer was
no mere "trumpet of a prophecy," but spoke that he did know, and
testified that he had seen.
In this passage about the gift of the white stone, I think we find the
essence of religion.
What the notion in the mind of the writer with regard to the white
stone was, is, I think, of comparatively little moment. I take the
stone to belong more to the arbitrary and fanciful than to the true
mystical imagery, although for the bringing out of the mystical thought
in which it is concerned, it is of high and honourable dignity. For
fancy itself will subserve the true imagination of the mystic, and so
be glorified. I doubt if the writer himself associated any essential
meaning with it. Certainly I will not allow that he had such a poor
notion in it as that of a voting pebble--white, because the man who
receives it is accepted or chosen. The word is used likewise for a
precious stone set as a jewel. And the writer thought of it mystically,
a mode far more likely to involve a reference to nature than to a
political custom. What his mystic meaning may be, must be taken
differently by different minds. _I_ think he sees in its whiteness
purity, and in its substance indestructibility. But I care chiefly to
regard the stone as the vehicle of the name,--as the form whereby the
name is represented as passing from God to the man, and what is
involved in this communication is what I wish to show. If my reader
will not acknowledge my representation as St John's meaning, I yet hope
so to set it forth that he shall see the representation to be true in
itself, and then I shall willingly leave the interpretation to its
fate.
I say, in brief, 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.
In order to see this, we must first understand what is the idea of a
name,--that is, what is the perfect notion of a name. For, seeing the
mystical energy of a holy mind here speaks of God as giving something,
we must understand that the essential thing, and not any of its
accidents or imitations, is intended.
_A name of the ordinary kind in this world, has nothing_ essential in
it. It is but a label by which one man and a scrap of his external
history may be known from another man and a scrap of his history. The
only names which have significance are those which the popular judgment
or prejudice or humour bestows, either for ridicule or honour, upon a
few out of the many. Each of these is founded upon some external
characteristic of the man, upon some predominant peculiarity of temper,
some excellence or the reverse of character, or something which he does
or has done well or ill enough, or at least, singularly enough, to
render him, in the eyes of the people, worthy of such distinction from
other men. As far as they go, these are real names, for, in some poor
measure, they express individuality.
The true name is one which expresses the character, the nature, the
being, 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, or even, seeing what he is,
could express in a name-word the sum and harmony of what he sees. To
whom is this name given? To him that overcometh. When is it given? When
he has overcome. Does God then not know what a man is going to become?
As surely as he sees the oak which he put there lying in the heart of
the acorn. Why then does he wait till the man has become by overcoming
ere he settles what his name shall be? He does not wait; he knows his
name from the first. But as--although repentance comes because God
pardons--yet the man becomes aware of the pardon only in the
repentance; so 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 completion, 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 then be the expression in a mystical word--a
word of that language which all who have overcome understand--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."
But we are still in the region of symbol. For supposing that such a
form were actually observed between God and him that overcometh, it
would be no less a symbol--only an acted one. We must therefore look
deeper still for the fulness of its meaning. Up to this point little
has been said to justify our expectations of discovery in the text. Let
us, I say, look deeper. We shall not look long before we find that the
mystic symbol has for its centre of significance the fact of the
personal individual relation of every man to his God. That every man
has affairs, and those his first affairs, with God, stands to the
reason of every man who associates any meaning or feeling with the
words, Maker, Father, God. Were we but children of a day, with the
understanding that some one had given us that one holiday, there would
be something to be thought, to be felt, to be done, because we knew it.
For then our nature would be according to our fate, and we could
worship and die. But it would be only the praise of the dead, not the
praise of the living, for death would be the deepest, the lasting, the
overcoming. We should have come out of nothingness, not out of God. He
could only be our Maker, not our Father, our Origin. But now we know
that God cannot be the God of the dead--must be the God of the living;
inasmuch as to know that we died, would freeze the heart of worship,
and we could not say Our God, or feel him worthy of such worth-ship as
we could render. To him who offers unto this God of the living his own
self of sacrifice, to him that overcometh, him who has brought his
individual life back to its source, who knows that he is _one_ of God's
children, _this_ one of the Father's making, he giveth the white stone.
To him who climbs on the stair of all his God-born efforts and
God-given victories up to the height of his being--that of looking face
to face upon his ideal self in the bosom of the Father--God's _him_,
realized in him through the Father's love in the Elder Brother's
devotion--to him God gives the new name written.
But I leave this, because that which follows embraces and intensifies
this individuality of relation in a fuller development of the truth.
For 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; for when he is
perfected he shall receive the new name which no one else can
understand. Hence he can worship God as no man else can worship him,--
can understand God as no man else can understand him. This or that man
may understand God more, may understand God better than he, but no
other man can understand God as he understands him. God give me grace
to be humble before thee, my brother, that I drag not my simulacrum of
thee before the judgment-seat of the unjust judge, but look up to
thyself for what revelation of God thou and no one else canst give. As
the fir-tree lifts up itself with a far different need from the need of
the palm-tree, so does each man stand before God, and lift up a
different humanity to the common Father. And for each God has a
different response. With every man he has a secret--the secret of the
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_--but a chamber into which no brother, nay, no sister
can come.
From this it follows that 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.
By his creation, then, each man is isolated with God; each, in respect
of his peculiar making, can say, "_my_ God;" each can come to him
alone, and speak with him face to face, as a man speaketh with his
friend. There is no _massing_ of men with God. When he speaks of
gathered men, it is as a spiritual _body_, not a _mass_. For in a body
every smallest portion is individual, and therefore capable of forming
a part of the body.
See, now, what a significance the symbolism of our text assumes. Each
of us is a distinct flower or tree in the spiritual garden of God,--
precious, each for his own sake, in the eyes of him who is even now
making us,--each of us watered and shone upon and filled with life, for
the sake of his flower, his completed being, which will blossom out of
him at last to the glory and pleasure of the great gardener. For each
has within him a secret of the Divinity; each is growing towards the
revelation of that secret to himself, and so to the full reception,
according to his measure, of the divine. Every moment that he is true
to his true self, some new shine of the white stone breaks on his
inward eye, some fresh channel is opened upward for the coming glory of
the flower, the conscious offering of his whole being in beauty to the
Maker. Each man, then, is in God's sight worth. Life and action,
thought and intent, are sacred. And what an end lies before us! To have
a consciousness of our own ideal being flashed into us from the thought
of God! Surely for this may well give way all our paltry
self-consciousnesses, our self-admirations and self-worships! Surely to
know what he thinks about us will pale out of our souls all our
thoughts about ourselves! and we may well hold them loosely now, and be
ready to let them go. Towards this result St Paul had already drawn
near, when he who had begun the race with a bitter cry for deliverance
from the body of his death, was able to say that he judged his own self
no longer.
"But is there not the worst of all dangers involved in such teaching--
the danger of spiritual pride?" If there be, are we to refuse the
spirit for fear of the pride? Or is there any other deliverance from
pride except the spirit? Pride springs from supposed success in the
high aim: with attainment itself comes humility. But here there is no
room for ambition. Ambition is the desire to be above one's neighbour;
and here there is no possibility of comparison with one's neighbour: no
one knows what the white stone contains except the man who receives it.
Here is room for endless aspiration towards the unseen ideal; none for
ambition. Ambition would only be higher than others; aspiration would
be high. Relative worth is not only unknown--to the children of the
kingdom it is unknowable. Each esteems the other better than himself.
How shall the rose, the glowing heart of the summer heats, rejoice
against the snowdrop risen with hanging head from the white bosom of
the snow? Both are God's thoughts; both are dear to him; both are
needful to the completeness of his earth and the revelation of himself.
"God has cared to make me for himself," says the victor with the white
stone, "and has called me that which I like best; for my own name must
be what I would have it, seeing it is myself. What matter whether I be
called a grass of the field, or an eagle of the air? a stone to build
into his temple, or a Boanerges to wield his thunder? I am his; his
idea, his making; perfect in my kind, yea, perfect in his sight; full
of him, revealing him, alone with him. Let him call me what he will.
The name shall be precious as my life. I seek no more."
Gone then will be all anxiety as to what his neighbour may think about
him. It is enough that God thinks about him. To be something to God--is
not that praise enough? To be a thing that God cares for and would have
complete for himself, because it is worth caring for--is not that life
enough?
Neither will he thus be isolated from his fellows. For that we say of
one, we say of all. It is as _one_ that the man has claims amongst his
fellows. Each will feel the sacredness and awe of his neighbour's dark
and silent speech with his God. Each will regard the other as a
prophet, and look to him for what the Lord hath spoken. Each, as a high
priest returning from his Holy of Holies, will bring from his communion
some glad tidings, some gospel of truth, which, when spoken, his
neighbours shall receive and understand. Each will behold in the other
a marvel of revelation, a present son or daughter of the Most High,
come forth from him to reveal him afresh. In God each will draw nigh to
each.
Yes, there will be danger--danger as everywhere; but he giveth more
grace. And if the man who has striven up the heights should yet fall
from them into the deeps, is there not that fire of God, the consuming
fire, which burneth and destroyeth not?
To no one who has not already had some speech with God, or who has not
at least felt some aspiration towards the fount of his being, can all
this appear other than foolishness. So be it.
But, Lord, help them and us, and make our being grow into thy likeness.
If through ages of strife and ages of growth, yet let us at last see
thy face, and receive the white stone from thy hand. That thus we may
grow, give us day by day our daily bread. Fill us with the words that
proceed out of thy mouth. Help us to lay up _treasures in heaven, where
neither moth nor rust doth corrupt_.