When the man of the five senses talks of _truth_, he regards it but as
a predicate of something historical or scientific proved a fact; or, if
he allows that, for aught he knows, there may be higher truth, yet, as
he cannot obtain proof of it from without, he acts as if under no
conceivable obligation to seek any other satisfaction concerning it.
Whatever appeal be made to the highest region of his nature, such a one
behaves as if it were the part of a wise man to pay it no heed, because
it does not come within the scope of the lower powers of that nature.
According to the word of _the_ man, however, truth means more than
fact, more than relation of facts or persons, more than loftiest
abstraction of metaphysical entity--means being and life, will and
action; for he says, '_I am the truth_.'
I desire to help those whom I may to understand more of what is meant
by _the truth_, not for the sake of definition, or logical
discrimination, but that, when they hear the word from the mouth of the
Lord, the right idea may rise in their minds; that the word may neither
be to them a void sound, nor call up either a vague or false notion of
what he meant by it. If he says, 'I am the truth,' it must, to say the
least, be well to know what he means by the word with whose idea he
identifies himself. And at once we may premise that he can mean nothing
merely intellectual, such as may be set forth and left there; he means
something vital, so vital that the whole of its necessary relations are
subject to it, so vital that it includes everything else which, in any
lower plane, may go or have gone by the same name. Let us endeavour to
arrive at his meaning by a gently ascending stair.
A thing being so, the word that says it is so, is the truth. But the
fact may be of no value in itself, and our knowledge of it of no value
either. Of most facts it may be said that the truth concerning them is
of no consequence. For instance, it cannot be in itself important
whether on a certain morning I took one side of the street or the
other. It may be of importance to some one to know which I took, but in
itself it is of none. It would therefore be felt unfit if I said, 'It
is a _truth_ that I walked on the sunny side.' The correct word would
be a _fact_, not a truth. If the question arose whether a statement
concerning the thing were correct, we should still be in the region of
fact or no fact; but when we come to ask whether the statement was true
or false, then we are concerned with the matter as the assertion of a
human being, and ascend to another plane of things. It may be of no
consequence which side I was upon, or it may be of consequence to some
one to know which, but it is of vital importance to the witness and to
any who love him, whether or not he believes the statement he
makes--whether the man himself is true or false. Concerning the thing
it can be but a question of _fact_; it remains a question of fact even
whether the man has or has not spoken the truth; but concerning the man
it is a question of truth: he is either a pure soul, so far as this
thing witnesses, or a false soul, capable and guilty of a lie. In this
relation it is of no consequence whether the man spoke the fact or not;
if he meant to speak the fact, he remains a true man.
Here I would anticipate so far as to say that there are _truths_ as
well as _facts_, and lies against truths as well as against facts. When
the Pharisees said _Corban_, they lied against the truth that a man
must honour his father and mother.
Let us go up now from the region of facts that seem casual, to those
facts that are invariable, by us unchangeable, which therefore involve
what we call _law_. It will be seen at once that the _fact_ here is of
more dignity, and the truth or falsehood of a statement in this region
of more consequence in itself. It is a small matter whether the water
in my jug was frozen on such a morning; but it is a fact of great
importance that at thirty-two degrees of Fahrenheit water always
freezes. We rise a step here in the nature of the facts concerned: are
we come therefore into the region of truths? Is it a truth that water
freezes at thirty-two degrees? I think not. There is no principle, open
to us, involved in the changeless fact. The principle that lies at the
root of it in the mind of God must be a truth, but to the human mind
the fact is as yet only a fact. The word truth ought to be kept for
higher things. There are those that think such facts the highest that
can be known; they put therefore the highest word they know to the
highest thing they know, and call the facts of nature truths; but to me
it seems that, however high you come in your generalization, however
wide you make your law---including, for instance, all solidity under
the law of freezing--you have not risen higher than the statement that
such and such is an invariable fact. Call it a law if you will--a law
of nature if you choose--that it always is so, but not a truth. It
cannot be to us a truth until we descry the reason of its existence,
its relation to mind and intent, yea to self-existence. Tell us why it
_must_ be so, and you state a truth. When we come to see that a law is
such, because it is the embodiment of a certain eternal thought, beheld
by us in it, a fact of the being of God, the facts of which alone are
truths, then indeed it will be to us, not a law merely, but an embodied
truth. A law of God's nature is a way he would have us think of him; it
is a necessary truth of all being. When a law of Nature makes us see
this; when we say, I understand that law; I see why it ought to be; it
is just like God; then it rises, not to the dignity of a truth in
itself, but to the truth of its own nature--namely, a revelation of
character, nature, and will in God. It is a picture of something in
God, a word that tells a fact about God, and is therefore far nearer
being called a truth than anything below it. As a simple illustration:
What notion should we have of the unchanging and unchangeable, without
the solidity of matter? If, such as we are, we had nothing solid about
us, where would be our thinking about God and truth and law?
But there is a region perhaps not so high as this from the scientific
point of view, where yet the word truth may begin to be rightly
applied. I believe that every fact in nature is a revelation of God, is
there such as it is because God is such as he is; and I suspect that
all its facts impress us so that we learn God unconsciously. True, we
cannot think of any one fact thus, except as we find the soul of
it--its fact of God; but from the moment when first we come into
contact with the world, it is to us a revelation of God, his things
seen, by which we come to know the things unseen. How should we imagine
what we may of God, without the firmament over our heads, a visible
sphere, yet a formless infinitude! What idea could we have of God
without the sky? The truth of the sky is what it makes us feel of the
God that sent it out to our eyes. If you say the sky could not but be
so and such, I grant it--with God at the root of it. There is nothing
for us to conceive in its stead--therefore indeed it must be so. In its
discovered laws, light seems to me to be such because God is such. Its
so-called laws are the waving of his garments, waving so because he is
thinking and loving and walking inside them.
We are here in a region far above that commonly claimed for science,
open only to the heart of the child and the childlike man and woman--a
region in which the poet is among his own things, and to which he has
often to go to fetch them. For things as they are, not as science deals
with them, are the revelation of God to his children. I would not be
misunderstood: there is no fact of science not yet incorporated in a
law, no law of science that has got beyond the hypothetic and
tentative, that has not in it the will of God, and therefore may not
reveal God; but neither fact nor law is there for the sake of fact or
law; each is but a mean to an end; in the perfected end we find the
intent, and there God--not in the laws themselves, save as his means.
For that same reason, human science cannot discover God; for human
science is but the backward undoing of the tapestry-web of God's
science, works with its back to him, and is always leaving him--his
intent, that is, his perfected work--behind it, always going farther
and farther away from the point where his work culminates in
revelation. Doubtless it thus makes some small intellectual approach to
him, but at best it can come only to his back; science will never find
the face of God; while those who would reach his heart, those who, like
Dante, are returning thither where they are, will find also the
spring-head of his science. Analysis is well, as death is well;
analysis is death, not life. It discovers a little of the way God walks
to his ends, but in so doing it forgets and leaves the end itself
behind. I do not say the man of science does so, but the very process
of his work is such a leaving of God's ends behind. It is a following
back of his footsteps, too often without appreciation of the result for
which the feet took those steps. To rise from the perfected work is the
swifter and loftier ascent. If the man could find out why God worked
so, then he would be discovering God; but even then he would not be
discovering the best and the deepest of God; for his means cannot be so
great as his ends. I must make myself clearer.
Ask a man of mere science, what is the truth of a flower: he will pull
it to pieces, show you its parts, explain how they operate, how they
minister each to the life of the flower; he will tell you what changes
are wrought in it by scientific cultivation; where it lives originally,
where it can live; the effects upon it of another climate; what part
the insects bear in its varieties--and doubtless many more facts about
it. Ask the poet what is the truth of the flower, and he will answer:
'Why, the flower itself, the perfect flower, and what it cannot help
saying to him who has ears to hear it.' The truth of the flower is, not
the facts about it, be they correct as ideal science itself, but the
shining, glowing, gladdening, patient thing throned on its stalk--the
compeller of smile and tear from child and prophet. The man of science
laughs at this, because he is only a man of science, and does not know
what it means; but the poet and the child care as little for his
laughter as the birds of God, as Dante calls the angels, for his
treatise on aerostation. The children of God must always be mocked by
the children of the world, whether in the church or out of it--children
with sharp ears and eyes, but dull hearts. Those that hold love the
only good in the world, understand and smile at the world's children,
and can do very well without anything they have got to tell them. In
the higher state to which their love is leading them, they will
speedily outstrip the men of science, for they have that which is at
the root of science, that for the revealing of which God's science
exists. What shall it profit a man to know all things, and lose the
bliss, the consciousness of well-being, which alone can give value to
his knowledge?
God's science in the flower exists for the existence of the flower in
its relation to his children. If we understand, if we are at one with,
if we love the flower, we have that for which the science is there,
that which alone can equip us for true search into the means and ways
by which the divine idea of the flower was wrought out to be presented
to us. The idea of God _is_ the flower; his idea is not the botany of
the flower. Its botany is but a thing of ways and means--of canvas and
colour and brush in relation to the picture in the painter's brain. The
mere intellect can never find out that which owes its being to the
heart supreme. The relation of the intellect to that which is born of
the heart is an unreal except it be a humble one. The idea of God, I
repeat, is the flower. He thought it; invented its means; sent it, a
gift of himself, to the eyes and hearts of his children. When we see
how they are loved by the ignorant and degraded, we may well believe
the flowers have a place in the history of the world, as written for
the archives of heaven, which we are yet a long way from understanding,
and which science could not, to all eternity, understand, or enable to
understand. Watch that child! He has found one of his silent and
motionless brothers, with God's clothing upon it, God's thought in its
face. In what a smile breaks out the divine understanding between them!
Watch his mother when he takes it home to her--no nearer understanding
it than he! It is no old association that brings those tears to her
eyes, powerful in that way as are flowers, and things far inferior to
flowers; it is God's thought, unrecognized as such, holding communion
with her. She weeps with a delight inexplicable. It is only a daisy!
only a primrose! only a pheasant-eye-narcissus! only a lily of the
field! only a snowdrop! only a sweet-pea! only a brave yellow crocus!
But here to her is no mere fact; here is no law of nature; here is a
truth of nature, the truth of a flower--a perfect thought from the
heart of God--a truth of God!--not an intellectual truth, but a divine
fact, a dim revelation, a movement of the creative soul! Who but a
father could think the flowers for his little ones? We are nigh the
region now in which the Lord's word is at home--'I am the truth.'
I will take an illustrative instance altogether to my mind and special
purpose. What, I ask, is the truth of water? Is it that it is formed of
hydrogen and oxygen?--That the chemist has now another mode of stating
the _fact_ of water, will not affect my illustration. His new mode will
probably be one day yet more antiquated than mine is now.--Is it for
the sake of the fact that hydrogen and oxygen combined form water, that
the precious thing exists? Is oxygen-and-hydrogen the divine idea of
water? Or has God put the two together only that man might separate and
find them out? He allows his child to pull his toys to pieces; but were
they made that he might pull them to pieces? He were a child not to be
envied for whom his inglorious father would make toys to such an end! A
school-examiner might see therein the best use of a toy, but not a
father! Find for us what in the constitution of the two gases makes
them fit and capable to be thus honoured in forming the lovely thing,
and you will give us a revelation about more than water, namely about
the God who made oxygen and hydrogen. There is no water in oxygen, no
water in hydrogen: it comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the
living God, rushing from under the great white throne of the glacier.
The very thought of it makes one gasp with an elemental joy no
metaphysician can analyse. The water itself, that dances, and sings,
and slakes the wonderful thirst--symbol and picture of that draught for
which the woman of Samaria made her prayer to Jesus--this lovely thing
itself, whose very wetness is a delight to every inch of the human body
in its embrace--this live thing which, if I might, I would have running
through my room, yea, babbling along my table--this water is its own
self its own truth, and is therein a truth of God. Let him who would
know the love of the maker, become sorely athirst, and drink of the
brook by the way--then lift up his heart--not at that moment to the
maker of oxygen and hydrogen, but to the inventor and mediator of
thirst and water, that man might foresee a little of what his soul may
find in God. If he become not then as a hart panting for the
water-brooks, let him go back to his science and its husks: they will
at last make him thirsty as the victim in the dust-tower of the
Persian. As well may a man think to describe the joy of drinking by
giving thirst and water for its analysis, as imagine he has revealed
anything about water by resolving it into its scientific elements. Let
a man go to the hillside and let the brook sing to him till he loves
it, and he will find himself far nearer the fountain of truth than the
triumphal car of the chemist will ever lead the shouting crew of his
half-comprehending followers. He will draw from the brook the water of
joyous tears, 'and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the
sea, and the fountains of waters.'
The truth _of a thing_, then, is the blossom of it, the thing it is
made for, the topmost stone set on with rejoicing; truth in a man's
imagination is the power to recognize this truth of a thing; and
wherever, in anything that God has made, in the glory of it, be it sky
or flower or human face, we see the glory of God, there a true
imagination is beholding a truth of God. And now we must advance to a
yet higher plane.
We have seen that the moment whatever goes by the name of truth comes
into connection with man; the moment that, instead of merely mirroring
itself in his intellect as a thing outside of him, it comes into
contact with him as a being of action; the moment the knowledge of it
affects or ought to affect his sense of duty, it becomes a thing of far
nobler import; the question of truth enters upon a higher phase, looks
out of a loftier window. A fact which in itself is of no value, becomes
at once a matter of life and death--moral life and death, when a man
has the choice, the imperative choice of being true or false concerning
it. When the truth, the heart, the summit, the crown of a thing, is
perceived by a man, he approaches the fountain of truth whence the
thing came, and perceiving God by understanding what is, becomes more
of a man, more of the being he was meant to be. In virtue of this truth
perceived, he has relations with the universe undeveloped in him till
then. But far higher will the doing of the least, the most
insignificant duty raise him. He begins thereby to be a true man. A man
may delight in the vision and glory of a truth, and not himself be
true. The man whose vision is weak, but who, as far as he sees, and
desirous to see farther, does the thing he sees, is a true man. If a
man knows what is, and says it is not, his knowing does not make him
less than a liar. The man who recognizes the truth of any human
relation, and neglects the duty involved, is not a true man. The man
who knows the laws of nature, and does not heed them, the more he
teaches them to others, the less is he a true man. But he may obey them
all and be the falsest of men, because of far higher and closer duties
which he neglects. The man who takes good care of himself and none of
his brother and sister, is false. A man may be a poet, aware of the
highest truth of a thing, of that beauty which is the final cause of
its existence; he may draw thence a notion of the creative loveliness
that thought it out; he may be a man who would not tell a lie, or
steal, or slander--and yet he may not be a true man, inasmuch as the
essentials of manhood are not his aim: having nowise come to the flower
of his own being, nowise, in his higher degree, attained the truth of
_a thing_--namely, that for which he exists, the creational notion of
him--neither is he striving after the same. There are relations closer
than those of the facts around him, plainer than those that seem to
bring the maker nigh to him, which he is failing to see, or seeing
fails to acknowledge, or acknowledging fails to fulfil. Man is man only
in the doing of the truth, perfect man only in the doing of the highest
truth, which is the fulfilling of his relations to his origin. But he
has relations with his fellow man, closer infinitely than with any of
the things around him, and to many a man far plainer than his relations
with God. Now the nearer is plainer that he may step on it, and rise to
the higher, till then the less plain. These relations make a large part
of his being, are essential to his very existence, and spring from the
very facts of the origination of his being. They are the relation of
thought to thought, of being to being, of duty to duty. The very nature
of a man depends upon or is one with these relations. They are
_truths_, and the man is a true man as he fulfils them. Fulfilling them
perfectly, he is himself a _truth_, a living truth. As regarded merely
by the intellect, these relations are facts of man's nature; but that
they are of man's nature makes them truths, and the fulfilments of them
are duties. He is so constituted as to understand them at first more
than he can love them, with the resulting advantage of having thereby
the opportunity of choosing them purely because they are true; so doing
he chooses to love them, and is enabled to love them in the doing,
which alone can truly reveal them to him, and make the loving of them
possible. Then they cease to show themselves in the form of duties, and
appear as they more truly are, absolute truths, essential realities,
eternal delights. The man is a true man who chooses duty; he is a
perfect man who at length never thinks of duty, who forgets the name of
it. The duty of Jesus was the doing in lower forms than the perfect
that which he loved perfectly, and did perfectly in the highest forms
also. Thus he fulfilled all righteousness. One who went to the truth by
mere impulse, would be a holy animal, not a true man. Relations,
truths, duties, are shown to the man away beyond him, that he may
choose them, and be a child of God, choosing righteousness like him.
Hence the whole sad victorious human tale, and the glory to be
revealed!
The moral philosopher who regards duties only as facts of his system;
nay, even the man who rewards them as truths, essential realities of
his humanity, but goes no farther, is essentially a liar, a man of
untruth. He is a man indeed, but not a true man. He is a man in
possibility, but not a real man yet. The recognition of these things is
the imperative obligation to fulfil them. Not fulfilling these
relations, the man is undoing the right of his own existence,
destroying his _raison d'etre_, making of himself a monster, a live
reason why he should not live, for nothing on those terms could ever
have begun to be. His presence is a claim upon his creator for
destruction.
The facts of human relation, then, are truths indeed, and of awfullest
import. 'Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer; and ye know that
no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him!' The man who lives a
hunter after pleasure, not a labourer in the fields of duty, who thinks
of himself as if he were alone on the earth, is in himself a lie.
Instead of being the man he looks, the man he was made to be, he lives
as the beasts seem to live--with this difference, I trust, that they
are rising, while he, so far as lies in himself, is sinking. But he
cannot be allowed to sink beyond God's reach; hence all the holy--that
is, healing--miseries that come upon him, of which he complains as so
hard and unfair: they are for the compelling of the truth he will not
yield--a painful suasion to be himself, to be a truth.
But suppose, for the sake of my progressive unfolding, that a man did
everything required of him--fulfilled all the relations to his fellows
of which I have been speaking, was toward them at least, a true man; he
would yet feel, doubtless would feel it the more, that something was
lacking to him--lacking to his necessary well-being. Like a live
flower, he would feel that he had not yet blossomed, and could not tell
what the blossom ought to be. In this direction the words of the Lord
point, when he says to the youth, 'If thou wouldst be perfect.' The man
whom I suppose, would feel that his existence was not yet justified to
itself, that the truth of his being and nature was not yet revealed to
his consciousness. He would remain unsatisfied; and the cause would be
that there was in him a relation, and that the deepest, closest, and
strongest, which had not yet come into live fact, which had not yet
become a truth in him, toward which he was not true, whereby his being
remained untrue, he was not himself, was not ripened into the divine
idea, which alone can content itself. A child with a child's heart who
does not even know that he has a father, yet misses him--with his whole
nature, even if not with his consciousness. This relation has not yet
so far begun to be fulfilled in him, as that the coming blossom should
send before it patience and hope enough to enable him to live by faith
without sight. When the flower begins to come, the human plant begins
to rejoice in the glory of God not yet revealed, the inheritance of the
saints in light; with uplifted stem and forward-leaning bud expects the
hour when the lily of God's field shall know itself alive, with God
himself for its heart and its atmosphere; the hour when God and the man
shall be one, and all that God cares for shall be the man's. But again
I forget my progression.
The highest truth to the intellect, the abstract truth, is the relation
in which man stands to the source of his being--his will to the will
whence it became a will, his love to the love that kindled his power to
love, his intellect to the intellect that lighted his. If a man deal
with these things only as things to be dealt with, as objects of
thought, as ideas to be analysed and arranged in their due order and
right relation, he treats them as facts and not as truths, and is no
better, probably much the worse, for his converse with them, for he
knows in a measure, and is false to all that is most worthy of his
faithfulness.
But when the soul, or heart, or spirit, or what you please to call that
which is the man himself and not his body, sooner or later becomes
aware that he needs some one above him, whom to obey, in whom to rest,
from whom to seek deliverance from what in himself is despicable,
disappointing, unworthy even of his own interest; when he is aware of
an opposition in him, which is not harmony; that, while he hates it,
there is yet present with him, and seeming to be himself, what
sometimes he calls _the old Adam_, sometimes _the flesh_, sometimes
_his lower nature_, sometimes _his evil self_; and sometimes recognizes
as simply that part of his being where God is not; then indeed is the
man in the region of truth, and beginning to come true in himself. Nor
will it be long ere he discover that there is no part in him with which
he would be at strife, so God were there, so that it were true, what it
ought to be--in right relation to the whole; for, by whatever name
called, the old Adam, or antecedent horse, or dog, or tiger, it would
then fulfil its part holily, intruding upon nothing, subject utterly to
the rule of the higher; horse or dog or tiger, it would be good horse,
good dog, good tiger.
When the man bows down before a power that can account for him, a power
to whom he is no mystery as he is to himself; a power that knows whence
he came and whither he is going; who knows why he loves this and hates
that, why and where he began to go wrong; who can set him right, longs
indeed to set him right, making of him a creature to look up to himself
without shadow of doubt, anxiety or fear, confident as a child whom his
father is leading by the hand to the heights of happy-making truth,
knowing that where he is wrong, the father is right and will set him
right; when the man feels his whole being in the embrace of
self-responsible paternity--then the man is bursting into his flower;
then the truth of his being, the eternal fact at the root of his new
name, his real nature, his idea--born in God at first, and responsive
to the truth, the being of God, his origin--begins to show itself; then
his nature is almost in harmony with itself. For, obeying the will that
is the cause of his being, the cause of that which demands of itself to
be true, and that will being righteousness and love and truth, he
begins to stand on the apex of his being, to know himself divine. He
begins to feel himself free. The truth--not as known to his intellect,
but as revealed in his own sense of being true, known by his essential
consciousness of his divine condition, without which his nature is
neither his own nor God's--trueness has made him free. Not any abstract
truth, not all abstract truth, not truth its very metaphysical self,
held by purest insight into entity, can make any man free; but the
truth done, the truth loved, the truth lived by the man; the truth _of_
and not merely _in_ the man himself; the honesty that makes the man
himself a child of the honest God.
When a man is, with his whole nature, loving and willing the truth, he
is then a live truth. But this he has not originated in himself. He has
seen it and striven for it, but not originated it. The one originating,
living, visible truth, embracing all truths in all relations, is Jesus
Christ. He is true; he is the live Truth. His truth, chosen and willed
by him, the ripeness of his being, the flower of his sonship which is
his nature, the crown of his one topmost perfect relation acknowledged
and gloried in, is his absolute obedience to his father. The obedient
Jesus is Jesus the Truth. He is true and the root of all truth and
development of truth in men. Their very being, however far from the
true human, is the undeveloped Christ in them, and his likeness to
Christ is the truth of a man, even as the perfect meaning of a flower
is the truth of a flower. Every man, according to the divine idea of
him, must come to the truth of that idea; and under every form of
Christ is the Christ. The truth of every man, I say, is the perfected
Christ in him. As Christ is the blossom of humanity, so the blossom of
every man is the Christ perfected in him. The vital force of humanity
working in him is Christ; he is his root--the generator and perfecter
of his individuality. The stronger the pure will of the man to be true;
the freer and more active his choice; the more definite his
individuality, ever the more is the man and all that is his, Christ's.
Without him he could not have been; being, he could not have become
capable of truth; capable of truth, he could never have loved it;
loving and desiring it, he could not have attained to it. Nothing but
the heart-presence, the humanest sympathy, and whatever deeper thing
else may be betwixt the creating Truth and the responding soul, could
make a man go on hoping, until at last he forget himself, and keep open
house for God to come and go. He gives us the will wherewith to will,
and the power to use it, and the help needed to supplement the power,
whatever in any case the need may be; but we ourselves must will the
truth, and for that the Lord is waiting, for the victory of God his
father in the heart of his child. In this alone can he see of the
travail of his soul, in this alone be satisfied. The work is his, but
we must take our willing share. When the blossom breaks forth in us,
the more it is ours the more it is his, for the highest creation of the
Father, and that pre-eminently through the Son, is the being that can,
like the Father and the Son, of his own self will what is right. The
groaning and travailing, the blossom and the joy, are the Father's and
the Son's and ours. The will, the power of willing, may be created, but
the willing is begotten. Because God wills first, man wills also.
When my being is consciously and willedly in the hands of him who
called it to live and think and suffer and be glad--given back to him
by a perfect obedience--I thenceforward breathe the breath, share the
life of God himself. Then I am free, in that I am true--which means one
with the Father. And freedom knows itself to be freedom. When a man is
true, if he were in hell he could not be miserable. He is right with
himself because right with him whence he came. To be right with God is
to be right with the universe; one with the power, the love, the will
of the mighty Father, the cherisher of joy, the lord of laughter, whose
are all glories, all hopes, who loves everything, and hates nothing but
selfishness, which he will not have in his kingdom.
Christ then is the Lord of life; his life is the light of men; the
light mirrored in them changes them into the image of him, the Truth;
and thus _the truth, who is the Son, makes them free_.