call themselves the Lord's disciples derive from their notions of his
teaching! Well may they think of death as the one thing to be right
zealously avoided, and for ever lamented! Who would forsake even the
window-less hut of his sorrow for the poor mean place they imagine the
Father's house! Why, many of them do not even expect to know their
friends there! do not expect to distinguish one from another of all the
holy assembly! They will look in many faces, but never to recognize old
friends and lovers! A fine saviour of men is their Jesus! Glorious
lights they shine in the world of our sorrow, holding forth a word of
darkness, of dismallest death! Is the Lord such as they believe him?
'Good-bye, then, good Master!' cries the human heart. 'I thought thou
couldst save me, but, alas, thou canst not. If thou savest the part of
our being which can sin, thou lettest the part that can love sink into
hopeless perdition: thou art not he that should come; I look for
another! Thou wouldst destroy and not save me! Thy father is not my
father; thy God is not my God! Ah, to whom shall we go? He has not the
words of eternal life, this Jesus, and the universe is dark as chaos! O
father, this thy son is good, but we need a greater son than he. Never
will thy children love thee under the shadow of this new law, that they
are not to love one another as thou lovest them!' How does that man love
God--of what kind is the love he bears him--who is unable to believe
that God loves every throb of every human heart toward another? Did not
the Lord die that we should love one another, and be one with him and
the Father, and is not the knowledge of difference essential to the
deepest love? Can there be oneness without difference? harmony without
distinction? Are all to have the same face? then why faces at all? If
the plains of heaven are to be crowded with the same one face over and
over for ever, but one moment will pass ere by monotony bliss shall have
grown ghastly. Why not perfect spheres of featureless ivory rather than
those multitudinous heads with one face! Or are we to start afresh with
countenances all new, each beautiful, each lovable, each a revelation of
the infinite father, each distinct from every other, and therefore all
blending toward a full revealing--but never more the dear old precious
faces, with its whole story in each, which seem, at the very thought of
them, to draw our hearts out of our bosoms? Were they created only to
become dear, and be destroyed? Is it in wine only that the old is
better? Would such a new heaven be a thing to thank God for? Would this
be a prospect on which the Son of Man would congratulate the mourner, or
at which the mourner for the dead would count himself blessed? It is a
shame that such a preposterous, monstrous unbelief should call for
argument.
A heaven without human love it were inhuman, and yet more undivine to
desire; it ought not to be desired by any being made in the image of
God. The lord of life died that his father's children might grow perfect
in love--might love their brothers and sisters as he loved them: is it
to this end that they must cease to know one another? To annihilate the
past of our earthly embodiment, would be to crush under the heel of an
iron fate the very idea of tenderness, human or divine.
We shall all doubtless be changed, but in what direction?--to something
less, or to something greater?--to something that is less we, which
means degradation? to something that is not we, which means
annihilation? or to something that is more we, which means a farther
development of the original idea of us, the divine germ of us, holding
in it all we ever were, all we ever can and must become? What is it
constitutes this or that man? Is it what he himself thinks he is?
Assuredly not. Is it what his friends at any given moment think him? Far
from it. In which of his changing moods is he more himself? Loves any
lover so little as to desire _no_ change in the person loved--no
something different to bring him or her closer to the indwelling ideal?
In the loveliest is there not something not like her--something less
lovely than she--some little thing in which a change would make her, not
less, but more herself? Is it not of the very essence of the Christian
hope, that we shall be changed from much bad to all good? If a wife so
love that she would keep every opposition, every inconsistency in her
husband's as yet but partially harmonious character, she does not love
well enough for the kingdom of heaven. If its imperfections be essential
to the individuality she loves, and to the repossession of her joy in
it, she may be sure that, if he were restored to her as she would have
him, she would soon come to love him less--perhaps to love him not at
all; for no one who does not love perfection, will ever keep constant in
loving. Fault is not lovable; it is only the good in which the alien
fault dwells that causes it to seem capable of being loved. Neither is
it any man's peculiarities that make him beloved; it is the essential
humanity underlying those peculiarities. They may make him interesting,
and, where not offensive, they may come to be loved for the sake of the
man; but in themselves they are of smallest account.
We must not however confound peculiarity with diversity. Diversity is in
and from God; peculiarity in and from man. The real man is the divine
idea of him; the man God had in view when he began to send him forth out
of thought into thinking; the man he is now working to perfect by
casting out what is not he, and developing what is he. But in God's real
men, that is, his ideal men, the diversity is infinite; he does not
repeat his creations; every one of his children differs from every
other, and in every one the diversity is lovable. God gives in his
children an analysis of himself, an analysis that will never be
exhausted. It is the original God-idea of the individual man that will
at length be given, without spot or blemish, into the arms of love.
Such, surely, is the heart of the comfort the Lord will give those whose
love is now making them mourn; and their present blessedness must be the
expectation of the time when the true lover shall find the restored the
same as the lost--with precious differences: the things that were not
like the true self, gone or going; the things that were loveliest,
lovelier still; the restored not merely more than the lost, but more the
person lost than he or she that was lost. For the things which made him
or her what he or she was, the things that rendered lovable, the things
essential to the person, will be more present, because more developed.
Whether or not the Lord was here thinking specially of the mourners for
the dead, as I think he was, he surely does not limit the word of
comfort to them, or wish us to believe less than that his father has
perfect comfort for every human grief. Out upon such miserable
theologians as, instead of receiving them into the good soil of a
generous heart, to bring forth truth an hundred fold, so cut and pare
the words of the Lord as to take the very life from them, quenching all
their glory and colour in their own inability to believe, and still
would have the dead letter of them accepted as the comfort of a creator
to the sore hearts he made in his own image! Here, 'as if they were
God's spies,' some such would tell us that the Lord proclaims the
blessedness of those that mourn for their sins, and of them only. What
mere honest man would make a promise which was all a reservation, except
in one unmentioned point! Assuredly they who mourn for their sins will
be gloriously comforted, but certainly such also as are bowed down with
any grief. The Lord would have us know that sorrow is not a part of
life; that it is but a wind blowing throughout it, to winnow and
cleanse. Where shall the woman go whose child is at the point of death,
or whom the husband of her youth has forsaken, but to her Father in
heaven? Must she keep away until she knows herself sorry for her sins?
How should that woman care to be delivered from her sins, how could she
accept any comfort, who believed the child of her bosom lost to her for
ever? Would the Lord have such a one be of good cheer, of merry heart,
because her sins were forgiven her? Would such a mother be a woman of
whom the saviour of men might have been born? If a woman forget the
child she has borne and nourished, how shall she remember the father
from whom she has herself come? The Lord came to heal the
broken-hearted; therefore he said, 'Blessed are the mourners.' Hope in
God, mother, for the deadest of thy children, even for him who died in
his sins. Thou mayest have long to wait for him--but he will be found.
It may be, thou thyself wilt one day be sent to seek him and find him.
Rest thy hope on no excuse thy love would make for him, neither upon any
quibble theological or sacerdotal; hope on in him who created him, and
who loves him more than thou. God will excuse him better than thou, and
his uncovenanted mercy is larger than that of his ministers. Shall not
_the_ Father do _his_ best to find his prodigal? the good shepherd to
find his lost sheep? The angels in his presence know the Father, and
watch for the prodigal. Thou shalt be comforted.
There is one phase of our mourning for the dead which I must not leave
unconsidered, seeing it is the pain within pain of all our mourning--the
sorrow, namely, with its keen recurrent pangs because of things we have
said or done, or omitted to say or do, while we companied with the
departed. The very life that would give itself to the other, aches with
the sense of having, this time and that, not given what it might. We
cast ourselves at their feet, crying, Forgive me, my heart's own! but
they are pale with distance, and do not seem to hear. It may be that
they are longing in like agony of love after us, but know better, or
perhaps only are more assured than we, that we shall be comforted
together by and by.
Bethink thee, brother, sister, I say; bethink thee of the splendour of
God, and answer--Would he be perfect if in his restitution of all things
there were no opportunity for declaring our bitter grief and shame for
the past? no moment in which to sob--Sister, brother, I am thy slave? no
room for making amends? At the same time, when the desired moment comes,
one look in the eyes may be enough, and we shall know one another even
as God knows us. Like the purposed words of the prodigal in the parable,
it may be that the words of our confession will hardly find place. Heart
may so speak to heart as to forget there were such things. Mourner, hope
in God, and comfort where thou canst, and the lord of mourners will be
able to comfort thee the sooner. It may be thy very severity with
thyself, has already moved the Lord to take thy part.
Such as mourn the loss of love, such from whom the friend, the brother,
the lover, has turned away--what shall I cry to them?--You too shall be
comforted--only hearken: Whatever selfishness clouds the love that
mourns the loss of love, that selfishness must be taken out of
it--burned out of it even by pain extreme, if such be needful. By cause
of that in thy love which was not love, it may be thy loss has come;
anyhow, because of thy love's defect, thou must suffer that it may be
supplied. God will not, like the unjust judge, avenge thee to escape the
cry that troubles him. No crying will make him comfort thy selfishness.
He will not render thee incapable of loving truly. He despises neither
thy love though mingled with selfishness, nor thy suffering that springs
from both; he will disentangle thy selfishness from thy love, and cast
it into the fire. His cure for thy selfishness at once and thy
suffering, is to make thee love more--and more truly; not with the love
of love, but with the love of the person whose lost love thou bemoanest.
For the love of love is the love of thyself. Begin to love as God loves,
and thy grief will assuage; but for comfort wait his time. What he will
do for thee, he only knows. It may be thou wilt never know what he will
do, but only what he has done: it was too good for thee to know save by
receiving it. The moment thou art capable of it, thine it will be.
One thing is clear in regard to every trouble--that the natural way
with it is straight to the Father's knee. The Father is father _for_ his
children, else why did he make himself their father? Wouldst thou not,
mourner, be comforted rather after the one eternal fashion--the child by
the father--than in such poor temporary way as would but leave thee the
more exposed to thy worst enemy, thine own unreclaimed self?--an enemy
who has but this one good thing in him--that he will always bring thee
to sorrow!
The Lord has come to wipe away our tears. He is doing it; he will have
it done as soon as he can; and until he can, he would have them flow
without bitterness; to which end he tells us it is a blessed thing to
mourn, because of the comfort on its way. Accept his comfort now, and so
prepare for the comfort at hand. He is getting you ready for it, but you
must be a fellow worker with him, or he will never have done. He _must_
have you pure in heart, eager after righteousness, a very child of his
father in heaven.
_GOD'S FAMILY._
'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.' 'Blessed are
they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be
filled.' 'Blessed are the peace-makers, for they shall be called the
children of God.'--_Matthew_ v. 8, 6, 9.
The cry of the deepest in man has always been, to see God. It was the
cry of Moses and the cry of Job, the cry of psalmist and of prophet; and
to the cry, there has ever been faintly heard a far approach of coming
answer. In the fullness of time the Son appears with the proclamation
that a certain class of men shall behold the Father: 'Blessed are the
pure in heart,' he cries, 'for they shall see God.' He who saw God, who
sees him now, who always did and always will see him, says, 'Be pure,
and you also shall see him.' To see God was the Lord's own, eternal, one
happiness; therefore he knew that the essential bliss of the creature is
to behold the face of the creator. In that face lies the mystery of a
man's own nature, the history of a man's own being. He who can read no
line of it, can know neither himself nor his fellow; he only who knows
God a little, can at all understand man. The blessed in Dante's Paradise
ever and always read each other's thoughts in God. Looking to him, they
find their neighbour. All that the creature needs to see or know, all
that the creature can see or know, is the face of him from whom he came.
Not seeing and knowing it, he will never be at rest; seeing and knowing
it, his existence will yet indeed be a mystery to him and an awe, but no
more a dismay. To know that it is, and that it has power neither to
continue nor to cease, must to any soul alive enough to appreciate the
fact, be merest terror, save also it knows one with it the Power by
which it exists. From the man who comes to know and feel that Power in
him and one with him, loneliness, anxiety, and fear vanish; he is no
more an orphan without a home, a little one astray on the cold waste of
a helpless consciousness. 'Father,' he cries, 'hold me fast to thy
creating will, that I may know myself one with it, know myself its
outcome, its willed embodiment, and rejoice without trembling. Be this
the delight of my being, that thou hast willed, hast loved me forth; let
me know that I am thy child, born to obey thee. Dost thou not justify
thy deed to thyself by thy tenderness toward me? dost thou not justify
it to thy child by revealing to him his claim on thee because of thy
disparture of him from thyself, because of his utter dependence on thee?
Father, thou art in me, else I could not be in thee, could have no house
for my soul to dwell in, or any world in which to walk abroad,'
These truths are, I believe, the very necessities of fact, but a man
does not therefore, at a given moment, necessarily know them. It is
absolutely necessary, none the less, to his real being, that he should
know these spiritual relations in which he stands to his Origin; yea,
that they should be always present and potent with him, and become the
heart and sphere and all-pervading substance of his consciousness, of
which they are the ground and foundation. Once to have seen them, is not
always to see them. There are times, and those times many, when the
cares of this world--with no right to any part in our thought, seeing
either they are unreasonable or God imperfect--so blind the eyes of the
soul to the radiance of the eternally true, that they see it only as if
it ought to be true, not as if it must be true; as if it might be true
in the region of thought, but could not be true in the region of fact.
Our very senses, filled with the things of our passing sojourn, combine
to cast discredit upon the existence of any world for the sake of which
we are furnished with an inner eye, an eternal ear. But had we once
seen God face to face, should we not be always and for ever sure of him?
we have had but glimpses of the Father. Yet, if we had seen God face to
face, but had again become impure of heart--if such a fearful thought be
a possible idea--we should then no more believe that we had ever beheld
him. A sin-beclouded soul could never recall the vision whose essential
verity was its only possible proof. None but the pure in heart see God;
only the growing-pure hope to see him. Even those who saw the Lord, the
express image of his person, did not see God. They only saw Jesus--and
then but the outside Jesus, or a little more. They were not pure in
heart; they saw him and did not see him. They saw him with their eyes,
but not with those eyes which alone can see God. Those were not born in
them yet. Neither the eyes of the resurrection-body, nor the eyes of
unembodied spirits can see God; only the eyes of that eternal something
that is of the very essence of God, the thought-eyes, the truth-eyes,
the love-eyes, can see him. It is not because we are created and he
uncreated, it is not because of any difference involved in that
difference of all differences, that we cannot see him. If he pleased to
take a shape, and that shape were presented to us, and we saw that
shape, we should not therefore be seeing God. Even if we knew it was a
shape of God--call it even God himself our eyes rested upon; if we had
been told the fact and believed the report; yet, if we did not see the
_Godness_, were not capable of recognizing him, so as without the report
to know the vision him, we should not be seeing God, we should only be
seeing the tabernacle in which for the moment he dwelt. In other words,
not seeing what in the form made it a form fit for him to take, we
should not be seeing a presence which could only be God.
To see God is to stand on the highest point of created being. Not until
we see God--no partial and passing embodiment of him, but the abiding
presence--do we stand upon our own mountain-top, the height of the
existence God has given us, and up to which he is leading us. That there
we should stand, is the end of our creation. This truth is at the heart
of everything, means all kinds of completions, may be uttered in many
ways; but language will never compass it, for form will never contain
it. Nor shall we ever see, that is know God perfectly. We shall indeed
never absolutely know man or woman or child; but we may know God as we
never can know human being--as we never can know ourselves. We not only
may, but we must so know him, and it can never be until we are pure in
heart. Then shall we know him with the infinitude of an ever-growing
knowledge.
'What is it, then, to be pure in heart?'
I answer, It is not necessary to define this purity, or to have in the
mind any clear form of it. For even to know perfectly, were that
possible, what purity of heart is, would not be to be pure in heart.
'How then am I to try after it? can I do so without knowing what it is?'
Though you do not know any definition of purity, you know enough to
begin to be pure. You do not know what a man is, but you know how to
make his acquaintance--perhaps even how to gain his friendship. Your
brain does not know what purity is; your heart has some acquaintance
with purity itself. Your brain in seeking to know what it is, may even
obstruct your heart in bettering its friendship with it. To know what
purity is, a man must already be pure; but he who can put the question,
already knows enough of purity, I repeat, to begin to become pure. If
this moment you determine to start for purity, your conscience will at
once tell you where to begin. If you reply, 'My conscience says nothing
definite'; I answer, 'You are but playing with your conscience.
Determine, and it will speak.'
If you care to see God, be pure. If you will not be pure, you will grow
more and more impure; and instead of seeing God, will at length find
yourself face to face with a vast inane--a vast inane, yet filled full
of one inhabitant, that devouring monster, your own false self. If for
this neither do you care, I tell you there is a Power that will not have
it so; a Love that will make you care by the consequences of not caring.
You who seek purity, and would have your fellow-men also seek it, spend
not your labour on the stony ground of their intellect, endeavouring to
explain what purity is; give their imagination the one pure man; call up
their conscience to witness against their own deeds; urge upon them the
grand resolve to be pure. With the first endeavour of a soul toward her,
Purity will begin to draw nigh, calling for admittance; and never will a
man have to pause in the divine toil, asking what next is required of
him; the demands of the indwelling Purity will ever be in front of his
slow-labouring obedience.
If one should say, 'Alas, I am shut out from this blessing! I am not
pure in heart: never shall I see God!' here is another word from the
same eternal heart to comfort him, making his grief its own consolation.
For this man also there is blessing with the messenger of the Father.
Unhappy men were we, if God were the God of the perfected only, and not
of the growing, the becoming! 'Blessed are they,' says the Lord,
concerning the not yet pure, 'which do hunger and thirst after
righteousness, for they shall be filled.' Filled with righteousness,
they are pure; pure, they shall see God.
Long ere the Lord appeared, ever since man was on the earth, nay,
surely, from the very beginning, was his spirit at work in it for
righteousness; in the fullness of time he came in his own human person,
to fulfil all righteousness. He came to his own of the same mind with
himself, who hungered and thirsted after righteousness. They should be
fulfilled of righteousness!
To hunger and thirst after anything, implies a sore personal need, a
strong desire, a passion for that thing. Those that hunger and thirst
after righteousness, seek with their whole nature the design of that
nature. Nothing less will give them satisfaction; that alone will set
them at ease. They long to be delivered from their sins, to send them
away, to be clean and blessed by their absence--in a word to become men,
God's men; for, sin gone, all the rest is good. It was not in such
hearts, it was not in any heart that the revolting legal fiction of
imputed righteousness arose. Righteousness itself, God's righteousness,
rightness in their own being, in heart and brain and hands, is what they
desire. Of such men was Nathanael, in whom was no guile; such, perhaps,
was Nicodemus too, although he did come to Jesus by night; such was
Zacchaeus. The temple could do nothing to deliver them; but, by their
very futility, its observances had done their work, developing the
desires they could not meet, making the men hunger and thirst the more
after genuine righteousness: the Lord must bring them this bread from
heaven. With him, the live, original rightness, in their hearts, they
must speedily become righteous. With that Love their friend, who is at
once both the root and the flower of things, they would strive
vigorously as well as hunger eagerly after righteousness. Love is the
father of righteousness. It could not be, and could not be hungered
after, but for love. The lord of righteousness himself could not live
without Love, without the Father in him. Every heart was created for,
and can live no otherwise than in and upon love eternal, perfect, pure,
unchanging; and love necessitates righteousness. In how many souls has
not the very thought of a real God waked a longing to be different, to
be pure, to be right! The fact that this feeling is possible, that a
soul can become dissatisfied with itself, and desire a change in itself,
reveals God as an essential part of its being; for in itself the soul is
aware that it cannot be what it would, what it ought--that it cannot set
itself right: a need has been generated in the soul for which the soul
can generate no supply; a presence higher than itself must have caused
that need; a power greater than itself must supply it, for the soul
knows its very need, its very lack, is of something greater than itself.
But the primal need of the human soul is yet greater than this; the
longing after righteousness is only one of the manifestations of it; the
need itself is that of _existence not self-existent_ for the
consciousness of the presence of the causing Self-existent. It is the
man's need of God. A moral, that is, a human, a spiritual being, must
either be God, or one with God. This truth begins to reveal itself when
the man begins to feel that he cannot cast out the thing he hates,
cannot be the thing he loves. That he hates thus, that he loves thus, is
because God is in him, but he finds he has not enough of God. His
awaking strength manifests itself in his sense of weakness, for only
strength can know itself weak. The negative cannot know itself at all.
Weakness cannot know itself weak. It is a little strength that longs for
more; it is infant righteousness that hungers after righteousness.