version, that used to trouble me, seeming to make its publicity a
portion of the reward for doing certain right things in secret: I mean
the word _openly_, at the ends of the fourth, the sixth, and the
eighteenth verses, making the Lord seem to say, 'Avoid the praise of
men, and thou shalt at length have the praise of men.'--'Thy father,
which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly.' _Thy reward shall be
seen of men! and thou seen as the receiver of the reward!_ In what other
way could the word, then or now, be fairly understood? It must be the
interpolation of some Jew scribe, who, even after learning a little of
the Christ, continued unable to conceive as reward anything that did not
draw part at least of its sweetness from the gazing eyes of the
multitude. Glad was I to find that the word is not in the best
manuscripts; and God be thanked that it is left out in the revised
version. What shall we think of the daring that could interpolate it!
But of like sort is the daring of much exposition of the Master's words.
What men have not faith enough to receive, they will still dilute to the
standard of their own faculty of reception. If any one say, 'Why did the
Lord let the word remain there so long, if he never said it?' I answer:
Perhaps that the minds of his disciples might be troubled at its
presence, arise against it, and do him right by casting it out--and so
Wisdom be justified of her children.
But there are some who, if the notion of reward is not naturally a
trouble to them, yet have come to feel it such, because of the words of
certain objectors who think to take a higher stand than the Christian,
saying the idea of reward for doing right is a low, an unworthy idea.
Now, verily, it would be a low thing for any child to do his father's
will in the hope that his father would reward him for it; but it is
quite another thing for a father whose child endeavours to please him,
to let him know that he recognizes his childness toward him, and will be
fatherly good to him. What kind of a father were the man who, because
there could be no merit or desert in doing well, would not give his
child a smile or a pleased word when he saw him trying his best? Would
not such acknowledgment from the father be the natural correlate of the
child's behaviour? and what would the father's smile be but the perfect
reward of the child? Suppose the father to love the child so that he
wants to give him everything, but dares not until his character is
developed: must he not be glad, and show his gladness, at every shade of
a progress that will at length set him free to throne his son over all
that he has? 'I am an unprofitable servant,' says the man who has done
his duty; but his lord, coming unexpectedly, and finding him at his
post, girds himself, and makes him sit down to meat, and comes forth and
serves him. How could the divine order of things, founded for growth and
gradual betterment, hold and proceed without the notion of return for a
thing done? Must there be only current and no tide? How can we be
workers with God at his work, and he never say 'Thank you, my child'?
Will he take joy in his success and give none? Is he the husbandman to
take all the profit, and muzzle the mouth of his ox? When a man does
work for another, he has his wages for it, and society exists by the
dependence of man upon man through work and wages. The devil is not the
inventor of this society; he has invented the notion of a certain
degradation in work, a still greater in wages; and following this up,
has constituted a Society after his own likeness, which despises work,
leaves it undone, and so can claim its wages without disgrace.
If you say, 'No one ought to do right for the sake of reward,' I go
farther and say, 'No man _can_ do right for the sake of reward. A man
may do a thing indifferent, he may do a thing wrong, for the sake of
reward; but a thing in itself right, done for reward, would, in the very
doing, cease to be right.' At the same time, if a man does right, he
cannot escape being rewarded for it; and to refuse the reward, would be
to refuse life, and foil the creative love. The whole question is of the
kind of reward expected. What first reward for doing well, may I look
for? To grow purer in heart, and stronger in the hope of at length
seeing God. If a man be not after this fashion rewarded, he must perish.
As to happiness or any lower rewards that naturally follow the first--is
God to destroy the law of his universe, the divine sequence of cause and
effect in order to say: 'You must do well, but you shall gain no good by
it; you must lead a dull joyless existence to all eternity, that lack of
delight may show you pure'? Could Love create with such end in view?
Righteousness does not demand creation; it is Love, not Righteousness,
that cannot live alone. The creature must already be, ere Righteousness
can put in a claim. But, hearts and souls there, Love itself, which
created for love and joy, presses the demand of Righteousness first.
A righteousness that created misery in order to up-hold itself, would be
a righteousness that was unrighteous. God will die for righteousness,
but never create for a joyless righteousness. To call into being the
necessarily and hopelessly incomplete, would be to wrong creation in its
very essence. To create for the knowledge of himself, and then not give
himself, would be injustice even to cruelty; and if God give himself,
what other reward--there can be no _further_--is not included, seeing he
is Life and all her children--the All in all? It will take the utmost
joy God can give, to let men know him; and what man, knowing him, would
mind losing every other joy? Only what other joy could keep from
entering, where the God of joy already dwelt? The law of the universe
holds, and will hold, the name of the Father be praised:--'Whatsoever a
man soweth, that shall he also reap.' 'They have sown the wind, and they
shall reap the whirlwind.' 'He that soweth to his flesh, shall of the
flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the spirit, shall of the
spirit reap life everlasting.' 'Whosoever hath, to him shall be given,
and he shall have more abundance; but whosoever hath not, from him shall
be taken away even that he hath.'
To object to Christianity as selfish, is utter foolishness; Christianity
alone gives any hope of deliverance from selfishness. Is it selfish to
desire to love? Is it selfish to hope for purity and the sight of God?
What better can we do for our neighbour than to become altogether
righteous toward him? Will he not be the nearer sharing in the exceeding
great reward of a return to the divine idea?
Where is the evil toward God, where the wrong to my neighbour, if I
think sometimes of the joys to follow in the train of perfect loving? Is
not the atmosphere of God, love itself, the very breath of the Father,
wherein can float no thinnest pollution of selfishness, the only
material wherewithal to build the airy castles of heaven? 'Creator,' the
childlike heart might cry, 'give me all the wages, all the reward thy
perfect father-heart can give thy unmeriting child. My fit wages may be
pain, sorrow, humiliation of soul: I stretch out my hands to receive
them. Thy reward will be to lift me out of the mire of self-love, and
bring me nearer to thyself and thy children: welcome, divinest of good
things! Thy highest reward is thy purest gift; thou didst make me for it
from the first; thou, the eternal life, hast been labouring still to fit
me for receiving it--the vision, the knowledge, the possession of
thyself. I can seek but what thou waitest and watchest to give: I would
be such into whom thy love can flow.'
It seems to me that the only merit that could live before God, is the
merit of Jesus--who of himself, at once, untaught, unimplored, laid
himself aside, and turned to the Father, refusing his life save in the
Father. Like God, of himself he chose righteousness, and so merited to
sit on the throne of God. In the same spirit he gave himself afterward
to his father's children, and merited the power to transfuse the
life-redeeming energy of his spirit into theirs: made perfect, he became
the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him. But it is a
word of little daring, that Jesus had no thought of merit in what he
did--that he saw only what he had to be, what he must do.--I speak after
the poor fashion of a man lost in what is too great for him, yet is his
very life.--Where can be a man's merit in refusing to go down to an
abyss of loss--loss of the right to be, loss of his father, loss of
himself? Would Satan, with all the instincts and impulses of his origin
in him, have _merited_ eternal life by refusing to be a devil? Not the
less would he have had eternal life; not the less would he have been
wrapt in the love and confidence of the Father. He would have had his
reward. I cannot imagine thing created meriting aught save by divine
courtesy.
I suspect the notion of merit belongs to a low development, and the
higher a man rises, the less will he find it worth a thought. Perhaps we
shall come to see that it owes what being it has, to man, that it is a
thing thinkable only by man. I suspect it is not a thought of the
eternal mind, and has in itself no existence, being to God merely a
thing thought by man.
For merit lives from man to man,
And not from man, O Lord, to thee.
The man, then, who does right, and seeks no praise from men, while he
merits nothing, shall be rewarded by his Father, and his reward will be
right precious to him.
We must let our light shine, make our faith, our hope, our love,
manifest--that men may praise, not us for shining, but the Father for
creating the light. No man with faith, hope, love, alive in his soul,
could make the divine possessions a show to gain for himself the
admiration of men: not the less must they appear in our words, in our
looks, in our carriage--above all, in honourable, unselfish, hospitable,
helpful deeds. Our light must shine in cheerfulness, in joy, yea, where
a man has the gift, in merriment; in freedom from care save for one
another, in interest in the things of others, in fearlessness and
tenderness, in courtesy and graciousness. In our anger and indignation,
specially, must our light shine. But we must give no quarter to the most
shadowy thought of how this or that will look. From the faintest
thought of the praise of men, we must turn away. No man can be the
disciple of Christ and desire fame. To desire fame is ignoble; it is a
beggarly greed. In the noble mind, it is the more of an infirmity. There
is no aspiration in it--nothing but ambition. It is simply selfishness
that would be proud if it could. Fame is the applause of the many, and
the judgment of the many is foolish; therefore the greater the fame, the
more is the foolishness that swells it, and the worse is the foolishness
that longs after it. Aspiration is the sole escape from ambition. He who
aspires--that is, does his endeavour to rise above himself--neither
lusts to be higher than his neighbour, nor seeks to mount in his
opinion. What light there is in him shines the more that he does nothing
to be seen of men. He stands in the mist between the gulf and the glory,
and looks upward. He loves not his own soul, but longs to be clean.
Out of the gulf into the glory,
Father, my soul cries out to be lifted.
Dark is the woof of my dismal story,
Thorough thy sun-warp stormily drifted!--
Out of the gulf into the glory,
Lift me, and save my story.
I have done many things merely shameful;
I am a man ashamed, my father!
My life is ashamed and broken and blameful--
The broken and blameful, oh, cleanse and gather!
Heartily shame me, Lord, of the shameful!
To my judge I flee with my blameful.
Saviour, at peace in thy perfect purity,
Think what it is, not to be pure!
Strong in thy love's essential security,
Think upon those who are never secure.
Full fill my soul with the light of thy purity;
Fold me in love's security.
O Father, O Brother, my heart is sore aching
Help it to ache as much as is needful;
Is it you cleansing me, mending, remaking,
Dear potter-hands, so tender and heedful?
Sick of my past, of my own self aching--
Hurt on, dear hands, with your making.
Proud of the form thou hadst given thy vessel,
Proud of myself, I forgot my donor;
Down in the dust I began to nestle,
Poured thee no wine, and drank deep of dishonour!
Lord, thou hast broken, thou mendest thy vessel!
In the dust of thy glory I nestle.
O Lord, the earnest expectation of thy creature waiteth for the
manifestation of the sons of God.
_THE HOPE OF THE UNIVERSE._
For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the
manifestation of the sons of God.--_Romans_ viii. 19.
Let us try, through these words, to get at the idea in St Paul's mind
for which they stand, and have so long stood. It can be no worthless
idea they represent--no mere platitude, which a man, failing to
understand it at once, may without loss leave behind him. The words mean
something which Paul believes vitally associated with the life and death
of his Master. He had seen Jesus with his bodily eyes, I think, but he
had not seen him with those alone; he had seen and saw him with the real
eyes, the eyes that do not see except they understand; and the sight of
him had uplifted his whole nature--first his pure will for
righteousness, and then his hoping imagination; and out of these, in the
knowledge of Jesus, he spoke.
The letters he has left behind him, written in the power of this
uplifting, have waked but poor ideas in poor minds; for words, if they
seem to mean anything, must always seem to mean something within the
scope of the mind hearing them. Words cannot convey the thought of a
thinker to a no-thinker; of a largely aspiring and self-discontented
soul, to a creature satisfied with his poverty, and counting his meagre
faculty the human standard. Neither will they readily reveal the mind of
one old in thought, to one who has but lately begun to think. The higher
the reader's notion of what St Paul intends--the higher the idea, that
is, which his words wake in him, the more likely is it to be the same
which moved the man who had seen Jesus, and was his own no more. If a
man err in his interpretation, it will hardly be by attributing to his
words an intent too high.
First then, what does Paul, the slave of Christ, intend by 'the
creature' or 'the creation'? If he means the _visible world_, he did not
surely, and without saying so, mean to exclude the noblest part of
it--the sentient! If he did, it is doubly strange that he should
immediately attribute not merely sense, but conscious sense, to that
part, the insentient, namely, which remained. If you say he does so but
by a figure of speech, I answer that a figure that meant less than it
said--and how much less would not this?--would be one altogether
unworthy of the Lord's messenger.
First, I repeat, to exclude the sentient from the term common to both in
the word _creation_ or _creature_--and then to attribute the
capabilities of the sentient to the insentient, as a mere figure to
express the hopes of men with regard to the perfecting of the insentient
for the comfort of men, were a violence as unfit in rhetoric as in its
own nature. Take another part of the same utterance: 'For we know that
the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now:'
is it not manifest that to interpret such words as referring to the mere
imperfections of the insensate material world, would be to make of the
phrase a worthless hyperbole? I am inclined to believe the apostle
regarded the whole visible creation as, in far differing degrees of
consciousness, a live outcome from the heart of the living one, who is
all and in all: such view, at the same time, I do not care to insist
upon; I only care to argue that the word _creature_ or _creation_ must
include everything in creation that has sentient life. That I should in
the class include a greater number of phenomena than a reader may be
prepared to admit, will nowise affect the force of what I have to say,
seeing my point is simply this: that in the term _creation_, Paul
comprises all creatures capable of suffering; the condition of which
sentient, therefore superior portion, gives him occasion to speak of
the whole creation as suffering in the process of its divine evolution
or development, groaning and travailing as in the pangs of giving birth
to a better self, a nobler world. It is not necessary to the idea that
the creation should know what it is groaning after, or wherein the
higher condition constituting its deliverance must consist. The human
race groans for deliverance: how much does the race know that its
redemption lies in becoming one with the Father, and partaking of his
glory? Here and there one of the race knows it--which is indeed a pledge
for the race--but the race cannot be said to know its own lack, or to
have even a far-off notion of what alone can stay its groaning. In like
manner the whole creation is groaning after an unforeseen yet essential
birth--groans with the necessity of being freed from a state that is but
a transitional and not a true one, from a condition that nowise answers
to the intent in which existence began. In both the lower creation and
the higher, this same groaning of the fettered idea after a freer life,
seems the first enforced decree of a holy fate, and itself the first
movement of the hampered thing toward the liberty of another birth.
To believe that God made many of the lower creatures merely for prey, or
to be the slaves of a slave, and writhe under the tyrannies of a cruel
master who will not serve his own master; that he created and is
creating an endless succession of them to reap little or no good of
life but its cessation--a doctrine held by some, and practically
accepted by multitudes--is to believe in a God who, so far as one
portion at least of his creation is concerned, is a demon. But a
creative demon is an absurdity; and were such a creator possible, he
would not be God, but must one day be found and destroyed by the real
God. Not the less the fact remains, that miserable suffering abounds
among them, and that, even supposing God did not foresee how creation
would turn out for them, the thing lies at his door. He has besides made
them so far dumb that they cannot move the hearts of the oppressors into
whose hands he has given them, telling how hard they find the world, how
sore their life in it. The apostle takes up their case, and gives us
material for an answer to such as blame God for their sad condition.
There are many, I suspect, who from the eighth chapter of St Paul's
epistle to the Romans, gather this much and no more:--that the lower
animals alive at the coming of the Lord, whensoever that may be, will
thenceforward, with such as thereafter may come into existence, lead a
happy life for the time allotted them! Strong champions of God, these
profound believers! What lovers of life, what disciples of St Paul, nay,
what disciples of Jesus, to whom such a gloss is consolation for the
moans of a universe! Truly, the furnace of affliction they would
extinguish thus, casts out the more an evil odour! For all the creatures
who through ages of misery have groaned and travailed and died, to these
mild Christians it is enough that they are dead, therefore, as they
would argue, out of it now! 'It is well with them,' I seem to hear such
say; 'they are mercifully dealt with; their sufferings are over; they
had not to live on for ever in oppression. The God of their life has
taken from them their past, and troubles them with no future!' It is
true this were no small consolation concerning such as are gone away!
Surely rest is better than ceaseless toil and pain! But what shall we
say of such a heedless God as those Christians are content to worship!
Is he a merciful God? Is he a loving God? How shall he die to escape the
remorse of the authorship of so much misery? Our pity turns from the
dead creature to the live creator who could live and know himself the
maker of so many extinguished hearts, whose friend was--not he, but
Death. Blessed be the name of the Father of Jesus, there is no such
creator!
Be we have not to do with the dead only; there are those which live and
suffer: is there no comfort concerning them, but that they too shall at
length die and leave their misery? And what shall we say of those
coming, and yet to come and pass--evermore issuing from the fountain of
life, daily born into evil things? Will the consolation that they will
soon die, suffice for the heart of the child who laments over his dead
bird or rabbit, and would fain love that father in heaven who keeps on
making the creatures? Alas, they are crowding in; they cannot help
themselves; their misery is awaiting them! Would those Christians have
me believe in a God who differentiates creatures from himself, only that
they may be the prey of other creatures, or spend a few hours or years,
helpless and lonely, speechless and without appeal, in merciless hands,
then pass away into nothingness? I will not; in the name of Jesus, I
will not. Had he not known something better, would he have said what he
did about the father of men and the sparrows?
What many men call their beliefs, are but the prejudices they happen to
have picked up: why should such believers waste a thought as to how
their paltry fellow-inhabitants of the planet fare? Many indeed have all
their lives been too busy making their human fellows groan and sweat for
their own fancied well-being, to spare a thought for the fate of the yet
more helpless. But there are not a few, who would be indignant at having
their belief in God questioned, who yet seem greatly to fear imagining
him better than he is: whether is it he or themselves they dread
injuring by expecting too much of him? 'You see the plain facts of the
case!' they say. 'There is no questioning them! What can be done for the
poor things--except indeed you take the absurd notion into your head,
that they too have a life beyond the grave?'
Why should such a notion seem to you absurd? I answer. The teachers of
the nation have unwittingly, it seems to me through unbelief, wronged
the animals deeply by their silence anent the thoughtless popular
presumption that they have no hereafter; thus leaving them deprived of a
great advantage to their position among men. But I suppose they too have
taken it for granted that the Preserver of man and beast never had a
thought of keeping one beast alive beyond a certain time; in which case
heartless men might well argue he did not care how they wronged them,
for he meant them no redress. Their immortality is no new faith with me,
but as old as my childhood.
Do you believe in immortality for yourself? I would ask any reader who
is not in sympathy with my hope for the animals. If not, I have no
argument with you. But if you do, why not believe in it for them?
Verily, were immortality no greater a thing for the animals than it
seems for men to some who yet profess to expect it, I should scarce care
to insist upon their share in it. But if the thought be anywise precious
to you, is it essential to your enjoyment in it, that nothing less than
yourself should share its realization? Are you the lowest kind of
creature that _could_ be permitted to live? Had God been of like heart
with you, would he have given life and immortality to creatures so much
less than himself as we? Are these not worth making immortal? How, then,
were they worth calling out of the depth of no-being? It is a greater
deed, to make be that which was not, than to seal it with an infinite
immortality: did God do that which was not worth doing? What he thought
worth making, you think not worth continuing made! You would have him go
on for ever creating new things with one hand, and annihilating those he
had made with the other--for I presume you would not prefer the earth to
be without animals! If it were harder for God to make the former go on
living, than to send forth new, then his creatures were no better than
the toys which a child makes, and destroys as he makes them. For what
good, for what divine purpose is the maker of the sparrow present at its
death, if he does not care what becomes of it? What is he there for, I
repeat, if he have no care that it go well with his bird in its dying,
that it be neither comfortless nor lost in the abyss? If his presence be
no good to the sparrow, are you very sure what good it will be to you
when your hour comes? Believe it is not by a little only that the heart
of the universe is tenderer, more loving, more just and fair, than yours
or mine.