'Have you kept--have you been keeping the commandments?'
'I will not dare to say that,' I suppose him to answer. 'I ought to
know better than that youth how much is implied in the keeping of the
commandments!'
'But,' I ask insisting, 'does your answer imply that, counting the Lord
a hard master, you have taken the less pains to do as he would have
you? or that, bending your energies to the absolute perfection he
requires, you have the more perceived the impossibility of fulfilling
the law? Can you have failed to note that it is the youth who has been
for years observing the commandments on whom the further, and to you
startling, command is laid, to part with all that he has? Surely not!
Are you then one on whom, because of correspondent condition, the same
command could be laid? Have you, in any sense like that in which the
youth answered the question, kept the commandments? Have you,
unsatisfied with the result of what keeping you have given them, and
filled with desire to be perfect, gone kneeling to the Master to learn
more of the way to eternal life? 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. What! is he to be obliged to one outside his kingdom--to the
untrue, the ignoble, for money? Bring him a true heart, an obedient
hand: he has given his life-blood for that; but your money--he neither
needs it nor cares for it.'
'Pray, do not deal harshly with me. I confess I have not been what I
ought, but I want to repent, and would fain enter into life. Do not
think, because I am not prepared, without the certainty that it is
required of me, to cast from me all I have that I have no regard for
higher things.'
'Once more, then, _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. When in keeping the commandments you have found the great
reward of loving righteousness--the further reward of discovering that,
with all the energy you can put forth, you are but an unprofitable
servant; when you have come to know that the law can be kept only by
such as need no law; when you have come to feel that you would rather
pass out of being than live on such a poor, miserable, selfish life as
alone you can call yours; when you are aware of a something beyond all
that your mind can think, yet not beyond what your heart can desire--a
something that is not yours, seems as if it never could be yours, which
yet your life is worthless without; when you have come therefore to the
Master with the cry, "What shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?"
it may be he will then say to you, "Sell all that you have and give to
the poor, and come follow me." If he do, then will you be of men most
honourable if you obey--of men most pitiable if you refuse. Till then
you would be no comfort to him, no pleasure to his friends. 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. Were one of the
disobedient, in the hope of the honour, to part with every straw he
possessed, he would but be sent back to keep the commandments in the
new and easier circumstances of his poverty.
'Does this comfort you? Then alas for you! A thousand times alas! 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! Wherein do you differ from the youth
of the story? In this, that he was invited to do more, to do
everything, to partake of the divine nature; you have not had it in
your power to refuse; you are not fit to be invited. Such as you can
never enter the kingdom. You would not even know you were in heaven if
you were in it; you would not see it around you if you sat on the very
footstool of the throne.'
'But I do not trust in my riches; I trust in the merits of my Lord and
Saviour. I trust in his finished work, I trust in the sacrifice he has
offered.'
'Yes; yes!--you will trust in anything but the Man himself who tells
you it is hard to be saved! Not all the merits of God and his Christ
can give you eternal life; only God and his Christ can; and they
cannot, would not if they could, without your keeping the commandments.
The knowledge of the living God _is_ eternal life. What have you to do
with his merits? You have to know his being, himself. And as to
trusting in your riches--who ever imagined he could have eternal life
by his riches? No man with half a conscience, half a head, and no heart
at all, could suppose that any man trusting in his riches to get him
in, could enter the kingdom. That would be too absurd. The money-confident
Jew might hope that, as his riches were a sign of the favour
of God, that favour would not fail him at the last; or their possession
might so enlarge his self-satisfaction that he could not entertain the
idea of being lost; but _trust in his riches_!--no. It is the last
refuge of the riches-lover, the riches-worshipper, the man to whom
their possession is essential for his peace, to say he does not trust
in them to take him into life. Doubtless the man who thinks of nothing
so much, trusts in them in a very fearful sense; but hundreds who do so
will yet say, "I do not trust in my riches; I trust in--" this or that
stock-phrase.'
'You forget yourself; you are criticizing the Lord's own words: he
said, "How hard is it _for them that trust in riches_ to enter into the
kingdom of heaven!"'
'I do not forget myself; to this I have been leading you:--our Lord, I
believe, never said those words. The reading of both the Sinaitic and
the Vatican manuscript, the oldest two we have, that preferred, I am
glad to see, by both Westcott and Tischendorf, though not by Tregelles
or the Revisers, is, "Children, how hard is it to enter into the
kingdom of God!" These words I take to be those of the Lord. Some
copyist, with the mind at least of a rich man, dissatisfied with the
Lord's way of regarding money, and like yourself anxious to compromize,
must forsooth affix his marginal gloss--to the effect that it is not
the possessing of riches, but the trusting in them, that makes it
difficult to enter into the kingdom! _Difficult_? Why, it is eternally
impossible for the man who trusts in his riches to enter into the
kingdom! it is for the man who has riches it is difficult. Is the Lord
supposed to teach that for a man who trusts in his riches it is
_possible_ to enter the kingdom? that, though impossible with men, this
is possible with God? God take the Mammon-worshipper into his glory!
No! the Lord never said it. The annotation of Mr. Facingbothways crept
into the text, and stands in the English version. Our Lord was not in
the habit of explaining away his hard words. He let them stand in all
the glory of the burning fire wherewith they would purge us. Where
their simplicity finds corresponding simplicity, they are understood.
The twofold heart must mistake. It is hard for a rich man, just because
he is a rich man, to enter into the kingdom of heaven.'
Some, no doubt, comfort themselves with the thought that, if it be so
hard, the fact will be taken into account: it is but another shape of
the fancy that the rich man must be differently treated from his
fellows; that as he has had his good things here, so he must have them
there too. Certain as life they will have absolute justice, that is,
fairness, but what will that avail, if they enter not into the kingdom?
It is life they must have; there is no enduring of existence without
_life_. They think _they can do without eternal life, if only they may
live for ever_! Those who know what eternal life means count it the one
terror to have to live on without it.
Take then the Lord's words thus: 'Children, how hard is it to enter
into the kingdom of God!' It is quite like his way of putting things.
Calling them first to reflect on the original difficulty for every man
of entering into the kingdom of God, he reasserts in yet stronger
phrase the difficulty of the rich man: 'It is easier for a camel to go
through a needle's eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom
of God.' It always was, always will be, hard to enter into the kingdom
of heaven. It is hard even to believe that one must be born from
above--must pass into a new and unknown consciousness. The law-faithful
Jew, the ceremonial Christian, shrinks from the self-annihilation, the
Life of grace and truth, the upper air of heavenly delight, the
all-embracing love that fills the law full and sets it aside. They
cannot accept a condition of being as in itself eternal life. And hard
to believe in, 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: 'If any man
cometh unto me, and hateth not .... his own life also, he cannot be my
disciple.' And the rich man must find it harder than another to hate
his own life. There is so much associated with it to swell out the self
of his consciousness, that the difficulty of casting it from him as the
mere ugly shadow of the self God made, is vastly increased.
None can know how difficult it is to enter into the kingdom of heaven,
but those who have tried--tried hard, and have not ceased to try. I
care not to be told that one may pass at once into all possible
sweetness of assurance; it is not assurance I desire, but the thing
itself; not the certainty of eternal life, but eternal life. I care not
what other preachers may say, while I know that in St. Paul the spirit
and the flesh were in frequent strife. They only, I repeat, know how
hard it is to enter into life, who are in conflict every day, are
growing to have this conflict every hour--nay, begin to see that no
moment is life, without the presence that maketh strong. Let any tell
me of peace and content, yea, joy unspeakable as the instant result of
the new birth; I deny no such statement, refuse no such testimony; all
I care to say is, that, if by salvation they mean less than absolute
oneness with God, I count it no salvation, neither would be content
with it if it included every joy in the heaven of their best imagining.
If they are not righteous even as he is righteous, they are not saved,
whatever be their gladness or their content; they are but on the way to
be saved. If they do not love their neighbour--not as themselves: that
is a phrase ill to understand, and not of Christ, but--as Christ loves
him, I cannot count them entered into life, though life may have begun
to enter into them. Those whose idea of life is simply an eternal one,
best know how hard it is to enter into life. The Lord said, 'Children
how hard is it to enter into the kingdom!' the disciples little knew
what was required of them!
Demands unknown before are continually being made upon the Christian:
it is the ever fresh rousing and calling, asking and sending of the
Spirit that worketh in the children of obedience. When he thinks he has
attained, then is he in danger; when he finds the mountain he has so
long been climbing show suddenly a distant peak, radiant in eternal
whiteness, and all but lost in heavenly places, a peak whose
glory-crowned apex it seems as if no human foot could ever reach--then
is there hope for him; proof there is then that he has been climbing, for
he beholds the yet unclimbed; he sees what he could not see before; if
he knows little of what he is, he knows something of what he is not. He
learns ever afresh that he is not in the world as Jesus was in the
world; but the very wind that breathes courage as he climbs is the hope
that one day he shall be like him, seeing him as he is.
Possessions are _Things_, and _Things_ in general, save as affording
matter of conquest and means of spiritual annexation, are very ready to
prove inimical to the better life. 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. He is not perfect who,
deprived of every _thing_, would not sit down calmly content, aware of
a well-being untouched; for none the less would he be possessor of all
things, the child of the Eternal. _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 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, reward the things
seen as the things to be possessed, fall in love with the bodies
instead of the souls of them. There are good people who can hardly
believe that, if the young man had consented to give up his wealth, the
Lord would not then have told him to keep it; they too seem to think
the treasure in heaven insufficient as a substitute. They cannot
believe he would have been better off without his wealth. 'Is not
wealth power?' they ask. It is indeed power, and so is a wolf hid in
the robe; it is power, but as of a brute machine, of which the owner
ill knows the handles and cranks, valves and governor. The multitude of
those who read the tale are of the same mind as the youth himself--in
his worst moment, as he turned and went--with one vast difference, that
they are not sorrowful.
_Things_ can never be really possessed by the man who cannot do without
them--who would not be absolutely, divinely content in the
consciousness that the cause of his being is within it--and _with him_.
I would not be misunderstood: no man can have the consciousness of God
with him and not be content; I mean that no man who has not the Father
so as to be eternally content in him alone, can possess a sunset or a
field of grass or a mine of gold or the love of a fellow-creature
according to its nature--as God would have him possess it--in the
eternal way of inheriting, having, and holding. He who has God, has all
things, after the fashion in which he who made them has them. To man,
woman, and child, I say--if you are not content, it is because God is
not with you as you need him, not with you as he would be with you, as
you _must_ have him; for you need him as your body never needed food or
air, need him as your soul never hungered after joy, or peace, or
pleasure.
It is imperative on us to get rid of the tyranny of _things_. See how
imperative: let the young man cling with every fibre 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! The
world, and all that is in the world, drops and slips, from his feet,
from his hands, carrying with it his body, his eyes, his ears, every
pouch, every coffer, that could delude him with the fancy of
possession.
'Is the man so freed from the dominion of things? does Death so serve
him--so ransom him? Why then hasten the hour? Shall not the youth abide
the stroke of Time's clock--await the Inevitable on its path to free
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; and if then he begin to contend with them, to cast out of his
soul what Death has torn from his hands, then first will he know the
full passion of possession, the slavery of prizing the worthless part
of the precious.
'Wherein then lies the service of Death? He takes the sting, but leaves
the poison!'
In this: it is not the fetters that gall, but the fetters that soothe,
which eat into the soul. When the fetters of gold are gone, on which
the man delighted to gaze, though they held him fast to his dungeon-wall,
buried from air and sunshine, then first will he feel them in the
soreness of their lack, in the weary indifference with which he looks
on earth and sea, on space and stars. When the truth begins to dawn
upon him that those fetters were a horror and a disgrace, then will the
good of saving death appear, and the man begin to understand that
having never was, never could be well-being; that it is not by
possessing we live, but by life we possess. In this way is the loss of
the things he thought he had, a motioning, hardly _towards_, yet in
favour of deliverance. It may seem to the 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; nothing but itself can
enslave a soul, nothing without itself free it.
When the drunkard, free of his body, but retaining his desire unable to
indulge it, has time at length to think, in the lack of the means of
destroying thought, surely there dawns for him then at last a fearful
hope!--not until, by the power of God and his own obedient effort, he
is raised into such a condition that, be the temptation what it might,
he would not yield for an immortality of unrequited drunkenness--all
its delights and not one of its penalties--is he saved.
Thus death may give a new opportunity--with some hope for the multitude
counting themselves Christians, who are possessed by _things_ as by a
legion of devils; who stand well in their church; whose lives are
regarded as stainless; who are kind, friendly, give largely, believe in
the redemption of Jesus, talk of the world and the church; yet whose
care all the time is to heap up, to make much into more, to add house
to house and field to field, burying themselves deeper and deeper in
the ash-heap of _Things_.
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. The man who is ever digging his grave is little better than he who
already lies mouldering in it. The money the one has, the money the
other would have, is in each the cause of an eternal stupidity. To the
one as to the other comes the word, '_How is it that ye do not
understand_?'