failed to rise to his high calling. Instead of devoting the sword of his
free will to the service of good, and assuring thereby the overthrow of
evil in time as it had been overthrown in eternity, man, thinking
thereby to serve himself, turned it to the service of evil. Thus evil,
defeated in eternity, became victorious in time. The adversary’s power,
till then bound by the limited consciousness of animal life, was
enormously increased by its new hold on human mind and will. He was now
the Prince of this World, its ruler and potentate, and would inevitably
have destroyed it if the Almighty King of Heaven had not decided that
evil should not triumph even in time—that mankind’s lost battle should
be fought over again, and won.
By assuming our manhood, God fought our lost battle over again in his
own person, and won it for us, redeeming not only ourselves but the
kingdom of nature which we had betrayed. The serpent’s head was
bruised—he lost his kingdom. He has no more real power even in time—he
is bound by time and must end in time. The Prince of this World is
judged.
* * * * *
This is only a dream of good and evil, of the mystery of their conflict.
It is only a theory, a guess at the explanation of the apparently
distorted processes of nature, and the slavery of mankind to the
elements of the world. The eternal issues between good and evil have
been fought outside time, by beings of a different nature from
ourselves, in that symbolic heavenly war wherein Michael and his angels
triumphed over the devil and his angels. In that conflict the victory is
already won by the forces of good. Evil is already cast out of the
eternal sphere, neither is its place found any more in heaven. There is
no dualism in the Christian religion, no setting of Satan against God as
Ahriman is set against Ormuzd in the Persian myth. For evil is
definitely cast out and trampled under the foot of triumphant Godhead.
It has only a secondary and limited existence—in time; whereas good is
primary, unlimited and eternal.
In time, the forces of good are in conflict with the forces of evil,
though outside time their victory is won. Michael and his angels still
have need to succour and defend us on earth, and their power lies in the
fact that they also do continual service in heaven. Their power is not
secondary and limited by time as is the power of their adversary and
ours—it derives from an eternal source, it is the same power that
overthrew the Dragon on the plains of heaven—the power of God.
The power of the dragon lies in the life he is able to absorb from
creation—from ourselves—just as the meteor owes its light to its passing
through our earth’s atmosphere. In one of Dr. M. R. James’s ghost
stories there is a spectre which makes itself a body out of some
bedclothes, but is unable to injure its victim, as its strength lies
entirely in the medium it has chosen, which is merely a bundle of linen.
So the harm that evil can do is merely a question of the body it
acquires. It rests with us whether it embodies itself in our highest
thoughts and strivings or can do no more than frighten us with a bogey
made of our discarded primitive instincts. Its most common embodiment is
in the elements of our human psychology which we inherit from our animal
ancestors—the grave clothes that the risen man has cast aside.
In our fight against evil we fight against what is merely temporary,
parasitic and doomed, and on our side are forces which are primary,
self-existing and eternal. On our side are the unchanging stars in their
order, and our adversary is only the meteor that streaks the sky for a
moment of earth-derived brightness, falls and is lost.
November
_Month of the Holy Souls_
There is a great silence over all the land. The furrows hold in
stillness the new seed—brown, bare, and earth-smelling, they keep the
secret of the life that has been buried in them. There is darkness too.
At night the galaxy has faded from the sky—here and there rarely some
greater lamp shines through the mists that veil the zenith, but more
often even the moon herself is hidden, fog-wrapped, a mere dim spilling
of light into the clouds. By day too the mists hang thick. The earth
lies motionless and silent under a veil. Trees and hedges near at hand
are hidden away or only loom occasionally through the mists as
monstrous, unnatural shapes. There is something terrifying about the
familiar barns and haystacks that the mist has blotted into ghostliness.
The dimness and the silence bring a sense of fear, as of a land changed.
Yet it is only the exhalations of the earth that have given this
sinister, mysterious cast to loved, familiar objects. A gleam of
sunlight falls upon the mists, and for a moment they part and show us
the waiting furrow, and the hedgerows pearled with moisture and bloomed
with a soft, spring-like purple that reminds us of March’s brave
passional livery of redemption. Though despoiled, and bound, the earth
is not dead, and in her already a new harvest sleeps.
* * * * *
“For thou, O Lord, changest, but takest not away the life of thy
people....” They are changed, they have gone from us, the mists of earth
hide them from us and give to their loved, familiar personalities a
touch of the sinister, of ghostliness. If we would let her, the earth
would make them ghosts. But as our prayers strive through the mists that
veil not them but us, a gleam of sunlight falls, and for a moment we
catch a glimpse of them in their passional livery of redemption, waiting
there under the altar, the prisoners of hope. “Turn ye to the
stronghold, ye prisoners of hope.”
They are changed. They no longer look into the same mirror as ourselves,
the mirror of nature where supernature lies reflected as in a glass
darkly. They do not yet see face to face, but theirs is no longer the
mirror of the months, where together with divine things strange
troubling things of earth are shown, where often Narcissus sees but his
own image calling him down into the well of shadows. Their mirror,
though a reflector only, is unclouded and cannot deceive. They have
escaped out of the deceiver’s power, and can no longer be touched by the
evil that preys on the world. They have left that evil behind in space
and time, by virtue of him who for their sake assumed space and time
that he might bind with them the enemy of eternity.
They are changed. They have entered as it were into a new function as
mediators, for they are now a link between us and those unknown worlds
whose complexity makes the unity of creation. We cannot limit our
conception of life to beings like ourselves. If they live, and we know
that they live, they do not live as we do, but manifest themselves in
other ways and under other conditions. Spirit and manifestation—the
first is always the same, the latter is constantly changing. But spirit
shall never be without manifestation—that truth was proclaimed for all
time in Joseph of Arimathea’s garden, and is preserved for all time in
the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body. We shall not live as the
helpless and futile shades of a Greek paradise, but as body and spirit,
though that idea of a body need not bind us to the body as we know it
now. The body of the springing corn in May is very different from the
body of the seed that was cast into the November furrow, but it is as
much the corn as ever was the seed—indeed it is more, for in the seed
the idea of the corn slept undeveloped, uncertain and incomplete.
Nevertheless the body of the springing corn was formed invisibly in the
seed, and invisibly in the bodies of our flesh that spiritual body of
our glory may be forming itself even now, waiting for the sowing in the
ground which shall set it free to grow and lift itself out of the
bondage of the earth into the liberty of the sun.
They are changed. They are learning perhaps painfully to develop this
new body, from which the husk has fallen away. As yet they have not the
new vehicle, though they have lost the old, their spirit fumbles for its
manifestation in that Mediatory Kingdom where they wait. They are
prisoners, but they are prisoners of hope, for their new faculties and
powers are forming themselves in that unknown land. Once again, as it
were, they go through the processes of birth, as at the beginning of
their earthly life they went through them in their mother’s womb. A new
body is forming itself in the shelter of that land we call Purgatory,
where evil cannot seize upon the growing form as it seized upon that
which was cast off. For those who escape the bondage of the earth, the
Old Testament fierceness of natural law, the continual harrying and
preying of evil seeking to maintain its life parasitically through ours,
Purgatory even if viewed as a place of retribution as well as of
cleansing must also be a place of refreshing, light and peace.
For there only good wills move in an orderly growth, an evolution which
sin has not corrupted and debased. There the mists of earth can no
longer hide from us the stars which are the burning of spirits aflame
with the love of God, the angelic hierarchies that fill a universe in
which our earth and its humanity holds only a small space. The shelter
of the furrow is paradoxically the freedom of the sky. The prisoner of
hope is the freeman of love.
December
_Month of the Incarnation_
The earth has gone back to the beginning. Her secrets are locked up. The
year’s tale is told. She lies at the end of the months as she lay at the
beginning—still and frozen, wrapped in the swaddling clothes of frost
and snow. The beginning and the ending are the same.
There seems to be neither growth nor change nor life in the iron-hard
soil, powdered here and there with snow, in the bare hedges and the
barren woods, in the ponds that are black under their bondage of ice.
Even the sun in the heavens stands still at his winter solstice. The
glory and bravery of summer are almost unimaginable—it is hard to
remember the changes of the months—the kindling gleam of February, the
brightness of the April garden, the whiteness of the May-day hedgerow,
the calm, star-lit seas of August, the fruitful golden trees of
September. All have ended as they began in this darkness and stillness.
The year’s tale is told, and the beginning and the ending are the same.
* * * * *
The months end as they began—with the Child. In December we meet the
Child again, the Child of January, the Child who is Alpha and Omega, the
beginning and the ending, saith the Lord. In this Child the Christian
faith begins and ends. All the doctrines of Councils, all the learning
of doctors, all the disputations of scholars, all the splendour of
creeds, have their beginning and ending in the Child born of the Virgin
Mary. The Christian Gospel is simply the Gospel of the Incarnation—of
the New Life born of a Virgin into the world, redeeming man from his
bondage to the Law which was added because of transgressions—making him
a citizen of a new and heavenly kingdom and a partaker of a new and
heavenly nature—redeeming through him the rest of creation, of which he
was first appointed a mediator, so that there shall be in eternity not
only a new heaven but a new earth—an earth set free from the bondage of
sin that held her in time, her processes redeemed for mercy, her
creatures redeemed for joy.
It is this and nothing less than this that the New Life comes to
accomplish—the first life having been corrupted by the enemy, and
mankind having failed to fulfil his appointed purpose of restorer and
healer. By virtue of the Incarnation of the Son of God, there is now a
new power working in the world towards its at-onement with its maker.
The Divine Humanity of our Lord, both superseding and containing ours,
has already fulfilled the purposes of God for us, and through it we have
union with God and are accounted his obedient sons, with power to
co-operate in his eternal work.
The New Life works through the old. It uses matter in the way it was
originally intended—as the vehicle and manifestation of spirit. Through
Christ even the earth knows the glory of the Resurrection of her body.
As long ago water gave birth to life, so now water is made the vehicle
of the new birth and supernatural life—“Therefore do I hallow thee, O
thou gift of water,” says the Priest at the Blessing of the Font on Holy
Saturday, “by God the faithful, by God the holy, by God who in the
beginning by his word divided the land from thee, by whose Spirit the
waters were overshadowed.” As bread and wine have been the bodily food
of man, giving strength and joy to his flesh, preserving his body in
life, so now they are made his spiritual food, giving strength and joy
to his soul, preserving his body and soul unto everlasting life. By
natural modes they have been assimilated by man’s body and made a part
of his humanity, and now by spiritual modes they are assimilated by God
and made a part of his divine humanity. “Hear us, O merciful Father, we
most humbly beseech thee, and grant that we receiving these thy
creatures of bread and wine according to thy Son our Saviour Jesus
Christ’s holy institution ... may be partakers of his most blessed Body
and Blood.”
The Sacraments go down to the very roots of creation—they go further
down than our humanity, though our humanity is the means by which they
descend, thus restoring it to its original mediatory purpose. Water,
bread and wine—the elements and our own uses of the elements, inorganic
and organic nature—are made the vehicles of supernatural life. Thus we
are brought into a wonderful and mystical union between the earth and
ourselves and the divine. Instead of remaining a creation at issue and
enmity with itself and separated from God, we become a creation working
together in mutual love and co-operation in union with God. Thus is the
atonement wrought between God and man and the earth.
For our redemption is not only nearer but wider than we believed, and
includes not only humanity but the whole creation groaning and
travailing in pain together.... It is not only in poetry but in truth
that the Priest bids nature join in his thanksgiving after every Mass.
“Let us sing the song of the Three Children which they sang when they
blessed the Lord in the furnace of fire.” And the Song of the Three Holy
Children, redeemed from the furnace, is also the song of earth redeemed:
“O let the earth bless the Lord, yea let it praise him and magnify him
for ever.... O ye mountains and hills bless ye the Lord.... O all ye
green things upon the earth bless ye the Lord.... O ye wells bless ye
the Lord.... O ye seas and floods.... O all ye fowls of the air.... O
all ye beasts and cattle—join to-day with the angels and with the
priests of the Lord, with the servants of his sanctuary and the spirits
and souls of the righteous, with all holy and humble men of heart, in
singing the song of our redemption which we sing in the midst of the
furnace of fire, praising and magnifying him for ever.”
“The angel of the Lord came down into the oven and smote the flame of
the fire out of the oven; and made the midst of the furnace as it had
been a moist whistling wind. Then the three, as out of one mouth
praised, glorified and blessed God in the furnace, saying: Blessed art
thou, O Lord God of our fathers, and to be praised and exalted above all
for ever.”
The heart of the burning fiery furnace has become Joseph of Arimathea’s
garden—the garden of the new earth and of the new spring, the blessed
country where all the works of the Lord praise the Lord, the home of the
children of men, of the holy souls and of the angels, where the risen
Christ stands between the sun and moon, and greets the Church of his new
creation with “Peace be unto you.”
● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).