The youth, climbing the stair of eternal life, had come to a landing-place
where not a step more was visible. On the cloud-swathed platform
he stands looking in vain for further ascent. What he thought with
himself he wanted, I cannot tell: his idea of eternal life I do not
know; I can hardly think it was but the poor idea of living for ever,
all that commonplace minds grasp at for eternal life--its mere
concomitant shadow, in itself not worth thinking about, not for a
moment to be disputed, and taken for granted by all devout Jews: when a
man has eternal life, that is, when he is one with God, what should he
do but live for ever? without oneness with God, the continuance of
existence would be to me the all but unsurpassable curse--the
unsurpassable itself being, a God other than the God I see in Jesus;
but whatever his idea, it must have held in it, though perhaps only in
solution, all such notions as he had concerning God and man and a
common righteousness. While thus he stands, then, alone and helpless,
behold the form of the Son of Man! It is God himself come to meet the
climbing youth, to take him by the hand, and lead him up his own stair,
the only stair by which ascent can be made. He shows him the first step
of it through the mist. His feet are heavy; they have golden shoes. To
go up that stair he must throw aside his shoes. He must walk
bare-footed into life eternal. Rather than so, rather than stride
free-limbed up the everlasting stair to the bosom of the Father, he will
keep his precious shoes! It is better to drag them about on the earth,
than part with them for a world where they are useless!
But how miserable his precious things, his golden vessels, his
embroidered garments, his stately house, must have seemed when he went
back to them from the face of the Lord! Surely it cannot have been long
before in shame and misery he cast all from him, even as Judas cast
from him the thirty pieces of silver, in the agony of every one who
wakes to the fact that he has preferred money to the Master! For,
although never can man be saved without being freed from his
possessions, it is yet only _hard_, not impossible, _for a rich man to
enter into the kingdom of God_.