 Chapter 4 of Unspoken Sermons, series 2. The Word of Jesus on Prayer by George MacDonald. They ought always to pray. The impossibility of doing what we would, as we would, drives us to look for help. And this brings us to a new point of departure. Everything difficult indicates something more than our theory of life yet embraces. Check some tendency to abandon the straight path, leaving open only the way ahead. Yet there is a reality of being in which all things are easy and plain, oneness that is with the Lord of life. To pray for this is the first thing, and to the point of this prayer every difficulty hedges and directs us. But if I try to set forth something of the reasonableness of all prayer, I beg my readers to remember that it is for the sake of action and not speculation. If prayer be anything at all, it is a thing to be done. What matter whether you agree with me or not, if you do not pray? I would not spend my labor for that. I desire it to serve for help to pray, not to understand how a man might pray and yet be a reasonable soul. First a few words about the parable itself. It is an instance, by no means solitary, of the Lord's use of a tell about a very common or bad person to persuade, reasoning off or shiori, of the way of the all righteous. Note the points. Did the unrighteous judge, to save himself from annoyance, punish one with whom he was not offended for the sake of a woman he cared nothing about? And shall not the living justice avenge his praying friends over whose injuries he has to exercise a long-suffering patience towards their enemies? For so I would interpret the phrase as correctly translated in the revision. And he is long-suffering over them. I say unto you that he will avenge them speedily. Albeit when the Son of Man cometh. Shall he find faith on the earth? Here then is a word of the Lord about prayer. It is a comfort that he recognizes difficulty in the matter, sees that we need encouragement to go on praying, that it looks as if we were not heard, that it is no wonder we should be ready to faint and leave off. He tells a parable in which the supplient has to go often, and often to the man who can help her, gaining her end only at the long last. Actual delay on the part of God, we know from what follows, he does not allow. The more plain is it that he recognizes how the thing must look to those whom he would have go on praying. Here as elsewhere he teaches us that we must not go by the look of things, but by the reality behind the look. A truth, a necessity of God's own willed nature, is enough to set up against a whole army of appearances. It looks as if he did not hear you. Never mind, he does. It must be that he does. Go on as the woman did. You too will be heard. She is heard at last, and in virtue of her much going. God hears at once, and will avenge speedily. The unrighteous judge cared nothing for the woman. Those who cry to God are his own chosen, plain in the fact that they cry to him. He has made and appointed them to cry. They do cry. Will he not hear them? They exist that they may pray. He has chosen them that they may choose him. He has called them that they may call him. That there may be such communion, such interchange as belongs to their being, and the being of their father. The gulf of indifference lay between the poor woman and the unjust judge. And those who seek his help are closer than two hands clasped hard in love. He will avenge them speedily. It is a bold assertion in the face of what seems great to delay, an appearance acknowledged in the very groundwork of the parable. Having made it, why does he seem to check himself with a sigh adding, How be it when the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth? After all he had said and had yet to say, after all he had done and was going on to do, when he came again after time given for the Holy Leaven to work, would he find men trusting the Father? Would he find them even then beyond the tyranny of appearances believing in spite of them? Could they be children enough towards God to know he was hearing them and working for them, though they could not hear him or see him work? To believe the ways of God so wide that even on the breadth of his track was room for their understanding to lose its way, what they saw so small a part of what he was doing that it could give them but little clue to his end? That it was because the goal God had in view for them was so high and afar that they could detect no movement of approach there too? The sigh, the exclamation never meant that God might be doing something more than he was doing, but that the Father would have a dreary time to wait ere his children would know, that is, trust in him. The utterance recognizes the part of man, his slowly yielded part in faith, and his blame in troubling God by not trusting in him, if men would but make haste and stir themselves up to take hold on God. They were so slow of heart to believe, they could, but would not help it and do better. He seems here to refer to his second coming concerning the time of which he refused information. Concerning the mode of which, he said it would be unexpected, but concerning the duty of which, he insisted it was to be ready. We must be faithful and at our work. Do those who say, low here or low there are the signs of his coming, think to be too keen for him and spy his approach? When he tells them to watch, lest he find them neglecting their work, they stare this way and that, and watch lest he should succeed in coming like a thief. So throughout, if, instead of speculation, we gave ourselves to obedience, what a difference would soon be seen in the world? O, the multitude of so-called religious questions which the Lord would answer with, strive to enter in at the straight gate. Many eat and drink and talk and teach in his presence, few do the things he says to them. Obedience is the one key of life. I would meet difficulties, not answer objections. I would remove stumbling blocks from the path of him who would pray. I would help him to pray. If seeing we live not by our own will, we live by another will, then is there reason, and then only can there be reason in prayer. To him who refuses that other will, I have nothing to say. The hour may come when he will wish there were someone to pray to. Now he is not of those whom I can help. If there be a God, and I am his creature, there may be, there should be, there must be some communication between him and me. If anyone allow a God, but one scarce good enough to care about his creatures, I will yield him that it were foolish to pray to such a God. But the notion that, with all the good impulses in us, we are the offspring of a cold-hearted devil, it is so horrible in its inconsistency that I would ask that man what hideous and cold-hearted disregard to the truth makes him capable of the supposition. To such a one, God's terrors, or if not his terrors, then God's sorrows yet will speak. The divine something in him will love, and the love will be left moaning. If I find my position, my consciousness, that of one from home, nay, that of one in some sort of prison, if I find that I can neither rule the world in which I live, nor my own thoughts or desires, that I cannot quiet my passions, order my likings, determine my ends, will my growth, forget what I would, or recall what I forget, that I cannot love where I would, or hate where I would, that I am no king over myself, that I cannot supply my own needs, do not even know always which of my seeming needs are to be supplied and which treated as imposters. If in a word my own being is every way too much for me, if I can neither understand it, be satisfied with it, nor better it, may its not well give me pause, the pause that ends in prayer. When my own scale seems too large for my management, when I reflect that I cannot account for my existence, have had no poorest hand in it, neither, should I not like it, can do anything towards causing it to cease. When I think that I can do nothing to make up to those I love, any more than to those I hate, for evils I have done them, and sorrows I have caused them, that in my worst moments I disbelieve in my best, in my best loathe my worst, that there is in me no wholeness, no unity, that life is not too good to me, for I scorn myself. When I think all or any such things, can it be strange that I think also that surely there ought to be somewhere a being to account for me, one to account for himself and make the round of my existence just, one whose very being accounts and is necessary to account for mine, whose presence in my being is imperative, not merely to supplement it, but to make to myself my existence a good? For if not rounded in itself, but dependent on that which it knows not and cannot know, it cannot be to itself a good known as a good, a thing of reason and well-being. It will be a life longing for a Logos to be the interpretive soul of its cosmos, a Logos it cannot have, to know God present, to have the consciousness of God where he is the essential life, must be absolutely necessary to that life. Me that is made in the image of God must know him or be desolate. The child must have the Father. Witness the dissatisfaction, yea, desolation of my soul. Wretched, alone, unfinished without him, it cannot act from itself save in God. Acting from what seems itself without God is no action at all. It is a mere yielding to impulse. All within is disorder and spasm. There is a cry behind me, and a voice before. Instincts of betterment tell me I must rise above my present self, perhaps even above all my possible self. I see not how to obey, how to carry them out. I am shut up in a world of consciousness, an unknown eye in an unknown world. Only this world of my unwilled, unchosen, compelled existence cannot be shut out from him, cannot be unknown to him, cannot be impenetrable, impermeable, un-present to him from whom I am. Nay, is it not his thinking in which I think? Is it not by his consciousness that I am conscious? Whatever passes in me must be as naturally known to him as to me, and more thoroughly even to infinite degrees. My thought must lie open to him. If he makes me think, how can I allude him in thinking? If I should spread my wings toward the dawn and sojourn at the last of the sea, even there thy hand would lead me, and thy right hand would hold me. If he has determined the being, how shall any mode of that being be hidden from him? If I speak to him, if I utter words ever so low, if I but think words to him, nay, if I only think to him, surely he, my original, in whose life and will and no otherwise I now think concerning him, hears and knows and acknowledges, then shall I not think to him? Shall I not tell him my troubles, how he, even he, has troubled me by making me? How unfit I am to be that which I am, that my being is not to me a good thing yet, that I need a law that shall account to me for it in righteousness, reveal to me how I am to make it a good, how I am to be a good and not an evil? Shall I not tell him that I need him to comfort me, his breath to move upon the face of the waters of the chaos he has made? Shall I not cry to him, to be in me rest and strength, to quiet this uneasy motion called life and make me live indeed, to deliver me from my sins and make me clean and glad? Such a cry is of the child to the father. If there be a father, verily he will hear and let the child know that he hears. Every need of God lifting up the heart is a seeking of God, is a begging for himself, is profoundest prayer and the root and inspirer of all other prayer. If it be reasonable for me to cry thus, if I cannot but cry, it is reasonable that God should hear, he cannot but hear, a being that could not hear or would not answer prayer, could not be God. But I ask, all this admit it, is what you call a necessary truth and existent fact? You say it must be so, I say, what if there is no God? Convince me that prayer is heard and I shall know. Why should the question admit of doubt? Why should it require to be reasoned about? We know that the wind blows, why should we not know that God answers prayer? I reply, what if God does not care to have you know it at second hand? What if there would be no good in that? There is some testimony on record, and perhaps there might be much were it not that having to do with things so immediately personal and generally so delicate. Answers to prayer would naturally not often be talked about, but no testimony concerning the thing can well be conclusive, for, like a reported miracle, there is always some way to daff it. And besides, the conviction to be God to that way is of little value, it avails nothing to know the thing by the best of evidence. As to the evidence itself, adduction of proof is scarce possible in respect of inward experience, and to this class belongs to the better part of the evidence. The testimony may be truthful, yet the testifier utterly self-deceived. How am I to know the thing as he says he knows it? How am I to judge of it? There is King David, poetry, old poetry, and in the most indefinite language in the world. Doubtless he is little versed in the utterance of the human soul, who does not recognize in many of the Psalms a cry as true as ever came from depth of pain or height of deliverance. But it may all have been but now the jarring, and now the rhythmical movement of the ways of the psychical ether. I lay nothing upon testimony for my purpose now, knowing the things that can be said, and also not valuing the bare assent of the intellect, the sole assurance worth a man's having, even if the most incontestable evidence were opened to him from a thousand other quarters, is that to be gained only from personal experience, that assurance in himself which he can least readily receive from another, and which is least capable of being transmuted into evidence for another. The evidence of Jesus Christ could not take the place of that. A truth is of enormous import in relation to the life, that is, the heart, and conscience, and will. It is of little consequence merely as a fact, having relation to the understanding. God may hear all prayers that were ever offered to him, and a man may believe that he does, nor be one wit the better for it. So long as God has no prayers of his to hear, he has no answers to receive from God. Nothing in this quarter will ever be gained by investigation. Reader, if you are in trouble, try whether God will not help you. If you are in no need, why should you ask questions about prayer? True, he knows little of himself, who does not know that he is wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked. But until he begins at least to suspect a need, how can he pray? And for one who does not want to pray, I would not lift a straw to defeat such a one in the argument whether God hears or does not hear prayer. For me, let him think what he will. It matters nothing in heaven or in earth, whether in hell I do not know. As to the so-called scientific challenge to prove the efficacy of prayer by the result of simultaneous petition, I am almost ashamed to allude to it. There should be light enough in science itself to show the proposal absurd. A God capable of being so moved in one direction or another is a God not worth believing in, could not be the God believed in by Jesus Christ, and he said he knew. A God that should fail to hear, receive, attend to one single prayer, the feeblest or worst. I cannot believe in, but a God that would grant every request of every man or every company of men would be an evil God, that is no God but a demon. That God should hang in the thought atmosphere like a windmill, waiting till men enough should combine and send out prayer in sufficient force to turn his outspread arms. It is an idea too absurd. God waits to be gracious, not to be tempted. A man capable of proposing such a test could have in his mind no worthy representative idea of a God, and might well disbelieve in any. It is better to disbelieve than believe in a God unworthy. But I want to believe in God. I want to know that there is a God that answers prayer that I may believe in him. There was a time that I believed in him. I prayed to him in great and sore trouble of heart and mind, and he did not hear me. I have not prayed sense. How do you know that he did not hear you? He did not give me what I asked, though the wheel of my soul hung on it. In your judgment, perhaps he knew better. I am the worst for his refusal. I would have believed in him if he had heard me. While the next desire came which he would not grant, and then you would have turned your God away, a desirable believer you would have made, a worthy brother to him who thought nothing fit to give the Father less than his all, you would accept of him no decision against your desire, that ungranted there was no God, or not a good one. I think I will not argue with you more. This only I will say. God has not to consider his children only at the moment of their prayer. Should he be willing to give a man the thing he knows he would afterwards wish he had not given him? If he be not ready to be treated with love severity, if a man be not fit to be refused, what he wishes may perhaps be given him in order that he may wish it had not been given him. Yet barely to give a man what he wants because he wants it, and without further purpose of his good, would be to let a poor ignorant child take his fate into his own hands, the cruelty of a devil, yet is every prayer heard, and the real soul of the prayer may require for its real answer, that it should not be granted in the form in which it is requested. To have a thing in another shape might be equivalent to not having it at all. If you knew God, you would leave that to him. He is not mocked, and he will not mock, but he knows you better than you know yourself, and would keep you from fooling yourself. He will not deal with you as the child of a day, but as the child of eternal ages. You shall be satisfied if you will but let him have his way with the creature he has made. The question is between your will and the will of God. He is not one of those who give readyest what they prize least. He does not care to give anything but his best, or that which will prepare for it. Not many years may pass before you confess. Thou art a God who hears prayer, and gives a better answer. You may come to see that the desire of your deepest heart would have been frustrated by having what seemed its embodiment then, that God should, as a loving Father, listen, hear, consider, and deal with the request after the perfect tenderness of his heart is to me enough. It is little that I should go without what I pray for. If it be granted that any answer which did not come of love, and was not for the final satisfaction of him who prayed, would be unworthy of God, that it is the part of love and knowledge to watch over the wayward ignorant child, then the trouble of seemingly unanswered prayers begins to abate, and a lovely hope and comfort takes its place in the childlike soul. To hear is not necessarily to grant, God forbid. But to hear is necessarily to attend to, sometimes as necessarily to refuse. Concerning this, says St. Paul, I besought to the Lord thrice that it might depart from me, and he hath said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee, power is made perfect in weakness. God had a better thing for Paul than granting his prayer and removing his complaint. He would make him strong. The power of Christ should descend and remain upon him. He would make him stronger than his suffering, make him a sharer in the energy of God. Verily, if we have God, we can do without the answer to any prayer. But if God is so good as you represent him, and if he knows all that we need and better far than we do ourselves, why should it be necessary to ask him for anything? I answer, what if he knows prayer to be the thing we need first and most? What if the main object in God's idea of prayer be the supplying of our great, our endless need, the need of himself? What if the good of all our smaller and lower needs lies in this, that they help to drive us to God? Hunger may drive the Runaway child home, and he may or may not be fed at once, but he needs his mother more than his dinner. Communion with God is the one need of the soul beyond all other need. Prayer is the beginning of that communion. And some need is the motive of that prayer. Our wants are for the sake of our coming into communion with God, our eternal need. If gratitude and love immediately followed the supply of our needs, if God our savior was the one thought of our hearts, then it might be unnecessary that we should ask for anything we need. But seeing we take our supplies as a matter of course, feeling as if they came out of nothing, or from the earth, or our own thoughts, instead of out of a heart of love and a will which alone is force, it is needful that we should be made to feel some at least of our wants, that we may seek him who alone supplies all of them, and find his every gift a window to his heart of truth. Show begins a communion, a talking with God, a coming to one with him, which is the sole end of prayer, yea, of existence itself in its infinite phases. We must ask that we may receive, but that we should receive what we ask in respect of our lower needs is not God's end in making us pray, for he could give us everything without that. To bring his child to his knee, God withholds that man may ask. In regard, however, to the high necessities of our nature, it is in order that he may be able to give that God requires us to ask, requires by driving us to it, by shedding us up to prayer. For how can he give into the soul of a man what it needs while that soul cannot receive it? The ripeness for receiving is the asking. The blossom cup of the soul to be filled with the heavenly dues is its prayer. When the soul is hungry for the light, for the truth, when its hunger has waked its higher energies, thoroughly roused the will, and brought the soul into its highest condition, that of action, its only fitness for receiving the things of God, that action is prayer. Then God can give. Then he can be as he would towards the man, for the glory of God is to give himself. We thank thee, Lord Christ, for by thy pain alone do we rise towards the knowledge of this glory of thy Father and our Father. And even in regard to lower things, what it may be altogether unfit to do for a man who does not recognize the source of his life, it may be in the highest sense fit to grant him when he comes to that source to ask for it. Even in the case of some individual desire of one who in the main recognizes the Father, it may be well to give him asking, whom not asking, it would not benefit. For the real good of every gift it is essential first that the giver be in the gift, as God always is, for he is love, and next that the receiver know and receive the giver in the gift. Every gift of God is but a harbinger of his greatest and only sufficing gift, that of himself. No gift unrecognized as coming from God is at its own best, therefore many things that God would gladly give us, things even that we need because we are, must wait until we ask for them that we may know whence they come. When in all gifts we find him, then in him we shall find all things. This to one praying will come the feeling rather than question. Were it not better to abstain? If this thing be good, will he not give it to me? Would he not be better pleased if I left it all together to him? It comes, I think, of a lack of faith and child likeness. Taking form, perhaps, in a fear lest, asking what was not good, the prayer should be granted. Such a thought has no place with St. Paul. He says, casting all your care upon him, for he careeth for you, in everything making your request known unto him. It may even come of ambition after spiritual distinction. In every request, heart and soul and mind ought to supply the low accompaniment. Thy will be done. But the making of any request brings us near to him and to communion with our life. Does it not also help us to think of him in all our affairs and learn in everything to give thanks, anything large enough for a wish to light upon is large enough to hang a prayer upon? The thought of him to whom that prayer goes will purify and correct the desire. To say, Father, I should like this or that, would be enough at once if the wish were bad to make us know it and turn from it. Such prayer about things must of necessity help to bring the mind into true and simple relation with him, to make us remember his will, even when we do not see what that will is. Surely it is better and more trusting to tell him all without fear or anxiety. Was it not thus the Lord carried himself towards his Father when he said, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me? But there was something he cared for more than his own fear. His Father's will. Nevertheless not my will, but thine be done. There is no apprehension that God might be displeased with him for saying what he would like and not leaving it all to his Father. Neither did he regard his Father's plans as necessarily so fixed that they could not be altered to his prayer. The true sun-faith is that which comes with boldness, fearless of the Father doing anything but what is right, fatherly, patient and full of loving-kindness. We must not think to please him by any asceticism even of the spirit. We must speak straight out to him. The true child will not fear, but lay bare his wishes to the perfect Father. The Father may will otherwise, but his grace will be enough for the child. There could be no riches but for need. God himself is made rich by man's necessity. By that he is rich to give. Through that we are rich by receiving. As to any notion of prevailing by entreaty over an unwilling God, that is heathenish, and belongs to such as think him a hard master, or one like the unjust judge. But so quenching the prayer as the notion of unwillingness in the ear that hears. And when prayer is dull, what makes it flow like the thought that God is waiting to give, wants to give us everything? Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need. We shall be refused our prayer, if that be better. But what is good our Father will give us with divine good will. The Lord spoke his parable to the end that they ought always to pray and not to faint. Chapter 5 of Unspoken Sermons How should any design of the all-wise be altered in response to prayer of ours? How are we to believe such a thing? By reflecting that he is the all-wise who sees before him and will not block his path. Such objection springs from poorest idea of God in relation to us. It supposes him to have cares and plans and intentions concerning our part of creation, irrespective of us. What is the whole system of thanks for but our education? Does God care for suns and planets and satellites, for divine mathematics and ordered harmonies, more than for his children? I venture to say he cares more for oxen than for those. He lays no plans irrespective of his children, and his design being that they shall be free, active, live things, he sees that space be kept for them. They need room to struggle out of their chrysalis, to undergo the change that comes with the waking will and to enter upon the divine sports and labors of children in the house and domain of their father. Surely he may keep his plans in a measure unfixed, waiting the free desire of the individual soul. Is not the design of the first course of his children's education just to bring them to the point where they shall pray? And shall his system appointed to that end be then found hard and fast, tooth-fitted and inelastic, as if informed of no live-causing soul but an unself-knowing force so that he cannot answer the prayer because of the system which has its existence for the sake of the prayer? True, and many cases, the prayer, far more than the opportunity of answering it, is God's end. But how will the further end of the prayer be reached, which is oneness between the heart of the child and of the father? How will the child go on to pray if he knows the father cannot answer him? It will not, maybe for love, but how with a self-imposed cannot? How could he be father who, creating, would not make provision, would not keep room for the babbled prayers of his children? Is his perfection a mechanical one? Has he himself no room for choice, therefore, can give none? There must be a God-like region of choice as there is a human, however little we may be able to conceive it. It were a glory in such a system that its sons themselves wavered and throbbed at the pulse of a new child's life. What perfection in a dwelling would it be that its furniture and the paths between were fitted as the trays and pigeon holes of a cabinet? What stupidity of perfection would that be which left no room about God's work, no room for change of plan upon change of fact? Yea, even the mighty change that beholds now at length his child is praying. See the freedom of God in his sunsets, never a second like one of the foregone, in his moons and skies, in the ever-changing solid earth, all moving by no-dead's law, but in the harmony of the vital law of liberty, God's creative perfection, all ordered from within. A divine perfection that were indeed where was no liberty, where there could be but one way of a thing. I may move my arm as I please. Shall God be unable so to move his? If but for himself God might well desire no change, but he is God for the sake of his growing creatures. All his making and doing is for them, and change is the necessity of their very existence. They need a mighty law of liberty into which shall never intrude one atom of chance. Is the one idea of creation the begetting of a free, grand, divine will in us? And shall that will, praying with the will of the Father, find itself cramped, fettered, manacled by foregone laws? Will it not rather be a new-born law itself working new things? No man is tied by divine law that he can know wise modify his work. Shall God not modify his? Law is but mode of life action. Is it of his perfection that he should have no scope, no freedom? Is he but the prisoned steam in the engine, pushing, escaping, stopped, his way ordered by valve and piston? Or is he an indwelling, willing, ordering power? Law is the slave of life. Is not a man's soul, as it dwells in his body, a dim, shadowing type of God in and throughout his universe? If you say he has made things to go, set them going and left them. Then I say, if his machine interfered with his answering the prayer of a single child, he would sweep it from him, not to bring back chaos, but to make room for his child. But order is divine, and cannot be obstructive to its own higher ends. It must subserve them. Order, free order, neither chaos, nor law unpossessed and senseless, is the home of thought. If you say there can be but one perfect way, I answer, yet the perfect way to bring a thing so far to a certain crisis can ill be the perfect way to carry it on after that crisis. The plan will have to change then. And as this crisis depends on a will, all cannot be an exact, though in live preparation for it. We must remember that God is not occupied with a grand toy of worlds and suns and planets, of attractions and repulsions, of agglomerations and crystallizations of forces and waves, but these but constitute a portion of his workshops and tools for the briny out of righteous men and women to fill his house of love with all. Would he have let his son die for a law of nature, as we call it? These doubtless are the outcome of Will's laws for his own being, but they take their relations in matter only for the sake of the birth of sons and daughters, that they may yet again be born from above and into the higher region once these things issue. And many a modification of the ideal, rendering it less than complete, must be given to those whose ability to grow or perish implies their utter inability to lay hold of the perfect. The best means cannot be the ideal best. The embodiment of uplifting truth for the low cannot be equal to that for the higher. Else it will fell and prove for its objects not good. But as the low ascend, their revelation will ascend also. That God cannot interfere to modify his plans, interfere without the change of a single law of this world, is to me absurd. If we can change, God can change. Else is he less free than we. His plans, I say, not principles, not ends. God himself forbid. Change them after divine fashion, above our fashions as the heavens are higher than the earth. And as in all his miracles, Jesus did only in miniature what his father does ever in the great, in far wider, more elaborate and beautiful ways. I will adduce from them an instance of answer to prayer that has in it a point bearing, it seems to me, most importantly on the thing I am now trying to set forth. Poor indeed was the making of the wine and the earth and pots of stone, compared with its making and the lovely growth of the vine with its clusters of swirling grapes, the live roots gathering from the earth, the water that had to be born in pictures and poured into the great vases. But it is precious as the interpreter of the same, even in its being the outcome of our Lord's sympathy with ordinary human rejoicing. There is, however, an element in its origin that makes it yet more precious to me, the regard of our Lord to the wish of his mother. Alas, how differently is the tell often received, how misunderstood. His mother had suggested to him that here was an opportunity for appearing in his own greatness, the potent purveyor of wine for the failing feast. It was not in his plan, as we gather from his words, for the Lord never pretended to anything, whether to his enemy or his mother, he is the true. He lets her know that he and she have different outlooks, different notions of his work. What to me and thee, woman, he said, my hour is not yet come. But there was that in his look and tone whence she knew that her desire, scarce half-fashioned in the request, was granted. What am I then to conclude, worthy of the son of God and the son of Mary, but that at the prayer of his mother, he made room in his plans for the thing she desired? It was not his wish then to work a miracle, but if his mother wished it, he would. He did for his mother what for his own part, he would rather have let alone. Not always did he do as his mother would have him, but this was a case in which he could do so, for it would interfere no wise with the will of his father. Was the perfect son for being perfect, he must be perfect in every way, to be the only son of man who needed to do nothing to please his mother? Nothing but what fell in with his plan for the hour. Not so could he be the root, the living heart of the great response of the children to the father of all. Not so could the idea of the grand family ever be made a reality. Alas for the son who would not willingly for his mother do something which in itself he would rather not do. If it would have hurt his mother, if it had been in any way turning from the will of his father in heaven, he would not have done it. That would have been to answer her prayer against her. His yielding makes the story doubly precious to my heart. The son then could change his intent and spoil nothing. So I say can the father, for the son does nothing but what he sees the father do. Finding it possible to understand, however, that God may answer prayers to those who pray for themselves, what are we to thank concerning prayer for others? One may well say it would surely be very selfish to pray only for ourselves. But the question is of the use, not of the character of the action. If there be any good in it, let us pray for all for whom we feel we can pray. But is there to be found in regard to prayer for others any such satisfaction as in regard to prayer for ourselves? The ground is changed if the fitness of answering prayer lies in the praying of him who prays. The attitude necessary to reception does not belong to those for whom prayer is made, but to him by whom it is made. What fitness then can there be in praying for others? Will God give to another for our asking what he would not give without it? Would he not, if it could be done without the person's self, do it without a second person? If God were a tyrant, one whose heart might be softened by the sight of anxious love, or if he were one who might be informed, enlightened, reasoned with, or one in whom a setting forth of character, need or claim might awake interest, then would there be plain reason in prayer for another? Which yet, however disinterested and loving must be degrading as offered to one unworthy of prayer. But if we believe that God is the one unselfish, the one good being in the universe, and that his one design with his children is to make them perfect as he is perfect, if we believe that he not only would once give, but is always giving himself to us for our life, if we believe which once I heard a bishop decline to acknowledge that God does his best for every man, if also we believe that God knows every man's needs and will for love's sake, not spare one paying that may serve to purify the soul of one of his children, if we believe all this, how can we think he will in any sort alter his way with one because another prays for him? The prayer would arise from nothing and the person prayed for, why should it initiate a change in God's dealing with him? The argument I know not how to answer, I can only in the face of it and feeling all the difficulty say and say again, yet I believe I may pray for my friend, for my enemy, for anybody, yet and yet there is, there must be some genuine essential good and power in the prayer of one man for another to the maker of both and that just because their maker is perfect, not less than very God. I shall not bring authority to bear, for authority can at best, but make us believe reason there, it cannot make us see it. The difficulty remains the same, even when we hear the Lord himself pray to his father for those the father loves because they have received his son, loves therefore with a special love as the foremost in faith, the elect of the world, loves not merely because they must die if he did not love them, but loves them from the deeps of divine approval. Those who believe in Jesus will be satisfied in the face of the incomprehensible that in what he does reason and right must lie, but not therefore do we understand. At the same time, though I cannot explain, I can show some ground upon which, even had he not been taught to do so, but left alone with his heart, a man might yet, I think, pray for another. If God has made us to love like himself and like himself long to help, if there are for whom we, like him, would give our lives to lift them from the evil gulf of their ungodliness, if the love in us would, for the very easing of the love he kindled, gift another, like himself who chooses and cherishes even the love that pains him, if in the midst of a sore need to bless, to give, to help, we are aware of an utter impotence, if the fire burns and cannot out, and if all our hope for ourselves lies in God, what is there for us? What can we think of? What do but go to God? What but go to him with this our own difficulty and need? And where is the natural refuge? There must be help. There can be no need for which he has no supply. The best argument that he has help is that we have need. If I can be helped through my friend, I think God will take the thing up and do what I cannot. Help my friend that I may be helped, perhaps help me to help him. You see, in praying for another, we pray for ourselves, for the relief of the needs of our love. It is not prayer for another alone, and thus it comes under the former kind. Would God give us love, the root of power in us, and leave that love whereby he himself creates, altogether helpless in us? May he not at least expedite something for our prayers, where he could not alter, he could perhaps expedite, and view of some help we might then be able to give. If he desires that we should work with him, that work surely helps him. There are some things for which the very possibility of supposing them are an argument, but I think I can go a little farther here, and imagine at least the where, if not the how, the divine conditions in which the help for another in answer to prayer is born, the divine region in which its possibility must dwell. God is ever seeking to lift us up into the sharing of his divine nature. God's kings, such men, namely, as with Jesus have born witness to the truth, share his glory even on the throne of the Father. See the grandeur of the creative love of the Holy. Nothing less will serve it than to have his children through his and their suffering share the throne of his glory. If such be the perfection of the infinite, should that perfection bring him under bonds and difficulties and not rather set him freer to do the thing he would in the midst of opposing forces? If his glory be in giving himself and we must share therein, giving ourselves, why should we not begin here and now? If he would have his children fellow workers with him, if he has desired and willed that not only by the help of his eternal son, but by the help also of the children who through him have been born from above, other and still other children shall be brought to his knee, to his fireside, to the plenty of his house, why should he not have kept some margin of room wherein? Their prayers may work for those whom they have to help who are of the same life as they. I cannot tell how, but may not those prayers in some way increase God's opportunity for working his best and highest will? Dealing with his children, the good ones may add to his power with the not yet good, add to his means of helping them. One way is clear. The prayer will react upon the mind that prays. Its light will grow, will shine the brighter and draw and enlighten the more. But there must be more in the thing. Prayer in its perfect idea being arising up into the will of the eternal may not the help of the Father become one with the prayer of the child and for the prayer of him he holds in his arms go forth for him who wills not yet to be lifted to his embrace. To his bosom God himself cannot bring his children at once and not at all except through his own suffering and theirs. But will not any good parent find some way of granting the prayer of the child who comes to him saying, Papa, this is my brother's birthday. I have nothing to give him and I do love him so. Could you give me something to give him? Or give him something for me? Still, could not God have given the gift without the prayer? And why should the good of any one depend on the prayer of another? I can only answer with the return question. Why should my love be powerless to help another? But we must not tie God to our measures of time or think he has forgotten that prayer even which apparently unanswered we have forgotten. Death is not an impervious wall. Through it, beyond it, go the prayers. It is possible we may have some to help in the next world because we have prayed for them in this. Will it not be a boon to them to have an old friend to their service? I but speculate and suggest what I see and venture to say is this. If in God we live and move and have our being, if the very possibility of loving lies in this that we exist in and by the live air of love, namely God himself, we must in this very fact be nearer to each other than by any bodily proximity or interchange of help. And if prayer is like a pulse that sets this atmosphere in motion, we must then, by prayer, come closer to each other than are the parts of our body by their complex nerve telegraphy. Surely in the eternal hearts are never parted. Surely through the eternal, a heart that loves and seeks the good of another must hold that other within reach. Surely the system of things would not be complete in relation to the best thing in it, love itself, if love had no help in prayer. If I love and cannot help, does not my heart move me to ask him to help who loves and can? Him without whom life would be to me nothing, without whom I should neither love nor care to pray? Will he answer, child, do not trouble me. I am already doing all I can. If such answer came, who that loved would not be content to be nowhere in the matter? But how if the eternal limitless love, the unspeakable self-forgetting God devotion which demanding all gives all should say, child, I have been doing all I could. But now you are come, I shall be able to do more. Here is a corner for you, my little one. Push at this thing to get it out of the way. How if he should answer, pray on my child, I am hearing you. It goes through me and help to him. We are of one mind about it. I help and you help. I shall have you all safe at home with me, by and by. There is no fear. Only we must work and not lose heart. Go and let your light so shine before men that they may see your good things, and glorify me by knowing that I am light and no darkness. What then? Oh, that lovely picture by Michelangelo, with the young ones and the little ones come to help God to make Adam. But it may be that the answer to prayer will come in a shape that seems a refusal. It may come even in an increase of that from which we seek deliverance. I know of one who prayed to love better. A sore division came between, out of which at length rose a dawn of tenderness. Our vision is so circumscribed. Our theories are so small, the garment of them not large enough to wrap us in. Our faith so continually fashions itself to the fit of our dwarf intellect that there is endless room for rebellion against ourselves. We must not let our poor knowledge limit our not so poor intellect. Our intellect limit our faith. Our faith limit our divine hope. Reason must humbly watch overall. Reason, the candle of the Lord. There are some who would argue for prayer not on the ground of any possible answer to be looked for, but because of the good to be gained in the spiritual attitude of the mind in praying. There are those even who not believing in any ear to hear any heart to answer will yet pray. They say it does them good. They pray to nothing at all, but they get spiritual benefit. I will not contradict their testimony. So needful is prayer to the soul that the mere attitude of it may encourage a good mood. Verily to pray to that which is not is in logic a folly. Yet the good that they say comes of it may rebuke the worst folly of their unbelief, for it indicates the prayer is natural. And how could it be natural if inconsistent with the very mode of their being? There's is a better way than that of those who believing there is a God, but not believing that he will give any answer to their prayers yet pray to him. That is more foolish and more immoral than praying to the no God. Whatever the God be to whom they pray, their prayer is a mockery of him, of themselves, of the truth. On the other hand, let God give no assent to the individual prayer. Let the prayer even be for something no wise good enough to be a gift of God. Yet the soul that prays will get good of its prayer if only in being thereby brought a little closer to the Father and making way for coming again. Prayer does react in good upon the praying soul, irrespective of answer, but to pray for the sake of the prayer and without regard to there being no one to hear would to me indicate a nature not merely illogical, but morally false. Did I not suspect a vague undetected apprehension of a something diffused through the all of existence and some sort of shadowy as communion therewith? There are moods of such satisfaction in God that a man may feel as if nothing were left to pray for as if he had but to wait with patience for what the Lord would work. There are moods of such hungering desire that petition is crushed into an inarticulate crying and there is a communion with God that ask for nothing yet ask for everything. This last is the very essence of prayer, though not petition. It is possible for a man not indeed to believe in God but to believe that there is a God and yet not desire to enter into communion with him. But he that prays and does not faint will come to recognize that to talk with God is more than to have all prayers granted, that it is the end of all prayer granted or refused. And he who seeks the Father more than anything he can give is likely to have what he asks for he is not likely to ask a miss. Even such as ask a miss may sometimes have their prayers answered. The Father will never give the child a stone that ask for bread, but I am not sure that he will never give the child a stone that ask for a stone. If the Father say, my child, that a stone, it is no bread, and the child answer, I am sure it is bread, I want it. May it not be well he should try his bread? But now for another point in the parable where I think I can give some help. I mean the Lord's apparent recognition of delay in the answering of prayer. In the very structure of the parable he seems to take delay for granted and says notwithstanding he will avenge them speedily. The reconciling conclusion is that God loses no time though the answer may not be immediate. He may delay because it would not be safe to give us at once what we ask. We are not ready for it. To give air we could truly receive would be to destroy the very heart and hope of prayer deceased to be our Father. The delay itself may work to bring us nearer to our help to increase the desire, perfect the prayer and ripen the receptive condition. Again, not from any straightening in God but either from our own condition and capacity are those of the friend for whom we pray. Time may be necessary to the working out of the answer. God is limited by regard for our best. Our best implies education and this we must ourselves have a large share. This share being human involves time and perhaps indeed the better the gift we pray for the more time is necessary to its arrival. To give us the spiritual gift we desire God may have to begin far back in our spirit in regions unknown to us and do much work that we can be aware of only in the results. For our consciousness is to the extent of our being but as the flame of the volcano to the world golf when it issues. In the Gulf of our unknown being God works behind our consciousness. With his holy influence, with his own presence the one thing for which most earnestly we cry he may be approaching our consciousness from behind coming forward through regions of our darkness into our light. Long before we begin to be aware that he is answering our request has answered it and is visiting his child. To avenge speedily must mean to make no delay beyond what is absolutely necessary to begin the moment it is possible to begin. Because the Son of Man did not appear for thousands of years after men begin to cry out for a savior shall we imagine he did not come the first moment it was well he should come? Can we doubt that to come a moment sooner would have been to delay not to expedite his kingdom for anything that needs a process to begin to act at once is to be speedy. God does not put off like the unrighteous judge he does not delay until irritated by the prayers of the needy he will hear while they are yet speaking yay before they call he will answer. The Lord uses words without anxiety as to the misuse of them by such as do not search after his will in them and the word avenge may be simply retained from the parable without its special meaning therein yet it suggests a remark or two. Of course, no prayer for any revenge that would gratify the selfishness of our nature a thing to be burned out of us by the fire of God needs thing to be heard. Be sure when the Lord prayed his father to forgive those who crucified him he uttered his own wish and his father's will at once. God will never punish according to the abstract abomination of sin as if men knew what they were doing. Vengeance is mine, he says. With the right understanding of it we might as well pray for God's vengeance as for his forgiveness. That vengeance is to destroy the sin to make the sinner abjure and hate it nor is there any satisfaction in the vengeance that seeks or affects less the man himself must turn against himself and so be for himself. If nothing else will do then hellfire. If less will do whatever brings repentance and self-repudiation is God's repayment. Friends, if any prayers are offered against us if the vengeance of God be cried out for because of some wrong you or I have done God grant us his vengeance. Let us not think that we shall get off but perhaps the Lord was here thinking not of persecution or any form of human wrong but of the troubles that most troubled his true disciple. And the suggestion is comforting to those whose foes are within them for if so then he recognizes the evils of self against which we fight not as parts of ourselves but as our foes on which he will avenge the true self that is at strife with them and certainly no evil is or ever could be of the essential being and nature of the creature God made. The thing that is not good however associated with our being is against that being not of it is its enemy on which we need to be avenged. When we fight he will avenge. Till we fight evil shall have dominion over us a dominion to make us miserable other than miserable can no one be under the yoke of a nature contrary to his own. Comfort thyself then who findest thine own heart and soul or rather the things that move there in too much for thee. God will avenge his own elect. He is not delaying he is at work for thee. Only thou must pray and not faint ask ask it shall be given to you seek most the best things to ask for the best things is to have them the seed of them is in you or you could not ask for them but from whatever quarter come our troubles whether from the world outside or the world inside still let us pray. In his own right way the only way they could satisfy us for we are of his kind God will answer our prayers with help he will avenge us of our adversaries and that speedily. Only let us take heed that we be adversaries to no man but fountains of love and forgiving tenderness to all and from no adversary either on the way with us or haunting the secret chambers of our hearts let us hope to be delivered to we have paid the last farthing. End of chapter five, series two. Chapter six of unspoken sermons, series two. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by David Baldwin. Unspoken sermons by George McDonald. The last farthing. Verily I say unto thee thou shalt by no means come out fence till thou have paid the last farthing. Saint Matthew chapter five, verse 26. There is a thing wonderful and admirable in the parables not readily grasped but specially indicated by the Lord himself there an intelligibility to the mere intellect. They are addressed to the conscience and not to the intellect, to the will and not to the imagination. They are strong and direct but not definite. They are not meant to explain anything but to rouse a man to the feeling. I am not what I ought to be. I do not the thing I ought to do. Many monitoring interpretations may be given by the wise with plentiful loss of labor while the child who uses them for the necessity of walking in the one path will constantly receive light from them. The greatest obscuration of the words of the Lord as of all true teachers comes from those who give themselves to interpret rather than do them. Theologians have done more to hide the gospel of Christ than any of its adversaries. It was not for our understanding but our will that Christ came. He who does that which he sees shall understand. He who is set upon understanding rather than doing shall go on stumbling and mistaking and speaking foolishness. He has not that in him which can understand that kind. The gospel itself and in it the parables of the truth are to be understood only by those who walk by what they find. It is he that runneth that shall read and no other. It is not intended by the speaker of the parables that any other should know intellectually what known but intellectually would be for his injury. What knowing intellectually he would imagine he had grasped perhaps even appropriated. When the pilgrim of the truth comes on his journey to the region of the parable he finds its interpretation. It is not a fruit or a jewel to be stored but a well springing by the wayside. Let us try to understand what the Lord himself said about his parables. It will be better to take the reading of Saint Matthew chapter eight verses 14 and 15 as it is plainer and the quotation from Isaiah chapter six verses nine and 10 is given in full after the Septuagint and much clearer than in our version from the Hebrew. In its light should be read the corresponding passages in the other gospels. In Saint Mark's it is so compressed as to be capable of quite a different and false meaning. In Saint John's reference the blinding of the heart seems attributed directly to the devil. The purport is that those who by insincerity and falsehood close their deeper eyes shall not be capable of using in the matter the more superficial eyes of their understanding. Whether this follows as a psychical or metaphysical necessity or be regarded as a special punishment it is equally the will of God and comes from him who is the live truth. They shall not see what is not for such as they. It is the punishment of the true love and is continually illustrated and fulfilled. If I know anything of the truth of God then the objectors to Christianity so far as I am acquainted with them do not. Their arguments not in themselves false have nothing to do with the matter. They see the thing they are talking against but they do not see the thing they think they are talking against. This will help to remove the difficulty that the parables are plainly for the teaching of the truth and yet the Lord speaks of them as for the concealing of it. They are for the understanding of that man only who is practical, who does the thing he knows who seeks to understand vitally. They reveal to the live conscience otherwise not to the keenest intellect though at the same time they may help to rouse the conscience with glimpses of the truth where the man is on the borders of waking. Ignorance may be at once a punishment and a kindness. All punishment is kindness and the best of which the man at the time is capable. Because you will not to do, you shall not see but it would be worse for you if you did see not being of the disposition to do. Such are punished in having the way closed before them. They punish themselves, their own doing results as it cannot but result on them. To say to them certain things so that they could understand them would but harden them more because they would not do them. They should have but parables, lanterns of the truth, clear to those who will walk in their light, dark to those who will not. The former are content to have the light cast upon their way. The latter will have it in their eyes and cannot. If they had it would but blind them. For them to know more would be their worst condemnation. They are not fit to know more. More shall not be given them yet. It is their punishment that they are in the wrong and shall keep in the wrong until they come out of it. You choose the dark. You shall stay in the dark till the terrors that dwell in the dark affray you and cause you to cry out. God puts a seal upon the will of man. That seal is either his great punishment or his mighty favour. Ye love the darkness. Abide in the darkness. O woman, great is thy faith. Be it done unto thee, even as thou wilt. What special meaning may be read in the different parts of magistrate, judge, and officer beyond the general suggestion, perhaps of the tentative approach of the final, I do not know. But I think I do know what is meant by agree on the way and the uttermost farthing. The parable is an appeal to the common sense of those that hear it in regard to every affair of righteousness. Arrange what claim lies against you. Compulsion waits behind it. Do it once what you must do one day. As there is no escape from payment, escape at least the prison that will enforce it. Do not drive justice to extremities. Duty is imperative. It must be done. It is useless to think to escape the eternal law of things. Yield of yourself, nor compel God to compel you. To the honest man, to the man who would fain be honest, the word is of right gracious import. To the untrue, it is a terrible threat. To him who is of the truth, it is sweet as most loving promise. He who is of God's mind and things rejoices to hear the word of the changeless truth. The voice of the right fills the heavens and the earth and makes his soul glad. It is his salvation. If God were not inexorably just, there would be no stay for the soul of the feeblest lover of right. Thou art true, O Lord, one day I also shall be true. Thou shalt render the right cost you what it may. Is a dread sound in the ears of those whose life is a falsehood. What but the last farthing would those who love righteousness more than life pay? It is a joy profound as peace to know that God is determined upon such payment, is determined to have his children clean, clear, pure as very snow, is determined that not only shall they with his help make up for whatever wrong they have done, but at length be incapable by eternal choice of good under any temptation of doing the thing that is not divine, the thing God would not do. There has been much cherishing of the evil fancy, often without its taking formal shape, that there is some way of getting out of the region of strict justice, some mode of managing to escape doing all that is required of us. But there is no such escape. A way to avoid any demand of righteousness would be an infinitely worse way than the road to the everlasting fire, for its end would be eternal death. No, there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it, no plan to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather. Neither shall thou think to be delivered from the necessity of being good by being made good. God is the God of the animals in a far lovelier way, I suspect, than many of us dare to think, but he will not be the God of a man by making a good beast of him. Thou must be good. Neither death nor any admittance into good company will make thee good, though doubtless if thou be willing and try, these and all other best helps will be given thee. There is no clothing in a robe of imputed righteousness that porous of legal cobwebs spun by spiritual spiders. To me it seems like an invention of well-meaning dullness to soothe insanity, and indeed it has proved to be a door of escape out of worse imaginations. It is apparently an old doctrine, for St. John seems to point at it where he says, Little children, let no man lead you astray. He that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as he is righteous. Christ is our righteousness, not that we should escape punishment, still lest escape being righteous, but as the live potent creator of righteousness in us, so that we, with our wills receiving his spirit, shall like him resist unto blood, striving against sin, shall know in ourselves as he knows what a lovely thing is righteousness, what a mean, ugly, unnatural thing is unrighteousness. He is our righteousness, and that righteousness is no fiction, no pretense, no imputation. One thing that tends to keep men from seeing righteousness and unrighteousness as they are, is that they have been told many things are righteous and unrighteous, which are neither the one nor the other. Righteousness is just fairness, from God to man, from man to God and to man. It is giving everyone his due, his large, mighty due. He is righteous, and no one else who does this. And any system which tends to persuade men that there is any salvation but to that of becoming righteous, even as Jesus is righteous, that a man can be made good as a good dog is good without his own will to share in the making, that a man is saved by having his sins hidden under a robe of imputed righteousness, that system, so far as this tendency, is of the devil and not of God. Think, God, not even error shall injure the true of heart. It is not wickedness. They grow in the truth, and as love cast out fear, so truth cast out falsehood. I read then, in this parable, that a man had better make up his mind to be righteous, to be fair, to do what he can, to pay what he owes, in any and all relations of life, all the matters in a word, where in one man may demand of another or complain that he has not received, fair, play. Arrange your matters with those who have anything against you, while you are yet together and things have not gone too far to be arranged, you shall have to do it, and that under less easy circumstances than now. Putting off is of no use. You must. The thing has to be done. There are means of compelling you. In this affair, however, I am in the right. If so, very well, for this affair. But I have reason to doubt whether you are capable of judging righteously in your own cause. Do you hate the man? No, I don't hate him. Do you dislike him? I can't say I like him. Do you love him as yourself? Oh, come, come, no one does that. Then no one is to be trusted when he thinks, however firmly, that he is all right and his neighbor all wrong in any matter between them. But I don't say I am all right and he is all wrong. There may be something to urge on his side. What I say is that I am more in the right than he. This is not fundamentally a question of things. It is a question of condition, of spiritual relation, and action towards your neighbor. If in yourself you were all right towards him, you could do him no wrong. Let it be with the individual dispute as it may. You owe him something that you do not pay him, as certainly as you think he owes you something, he will not pay you. He would take immediate advantage of me if I owned that. So much the worse for him. Until you are fair to him, it does not matter to you whether he is unfair to you or not. I beg your pardon. It is just what does matter. I want nothing but my rights. What can matter to me more than my rights? Your duties, your debts, you are all wrong about the thing. It is a very small matter to you, whether the man give you your rights or not. It is life or death to you whether or not you give him his. Whether he pay you what you count his debt or no, you will be compelled to pay him all you owe him. If you owe him a pound and he you a million, you must pay the pound whether he pay you the million or not. There is no business parallel here. If owing you love, he gives you hate. You owing him love yet have to pay it. A love unpaid you. A justice undone you. A praise withheld from you. A judgment passed on you without judgment will not absolve you of the debt of love unpaid. A justice not done. A praise withheld. A false judgment passed. These utter most far things. Not to speak of such debts as the world itself counts grievous wrongs. You must pay him whether he pay you or not. We have a good while given us to pay. But a crisis will come, come soon after all. Comes always sooner than those expected who are not ready for it. A crisis when the demand unyielded will be followed by prison. The same holds with every demand of God. By refusing to pay, the man makes an adversary who will compel him and that for the man's own sake. If you or your life say, I will not, then he will see to it. There is a prison. And the one thing we know about that prison is that its doors do not open until entire satisfaction is rendered. The last farthing paid. The main debts whose payment God demands are those which lie at the root of all right. Those we owe in mind. And soul and being. Whatever in us can be or make an adversary, whatever could prevent us from doing the will of God or from agreeing with our fellow, all must be yielded. Our every relation, both to God and our fellow, must be acknowledged heartily, met as a reality. Smaller debts, if any debt can be small, follow as a matter of course. If the man acknowledged and would pay if he could, but cannot, the universe will be taxed to help him rather than he should continue unable. If the man accepts the will of God, he is the child of the Father. The whole power and wealth of the Father is for him, and the uttermost farthing will easily be paid. If the man denies the debt or acknowledging does nothing towards paying it, then at last the prison. God in the dark can make a man thirst for the light who never in the light sought but the dark. The cells of the prison may differ in degree of darkness, but they are all alike in this, that not a door opens but to payment. There is no day but the will of God, and he who is of the night cannot be forever allowed to roam the day. Unfelt, unprized, the light must be taken from him, that he may know what the darkness is. When the darkness is perfect, when he is totally without the light he has spent the light in slaying, then will he know darkness. I think I have seen from afar something of the final prison of all, the innermost cell of the debtor of the universe. I will endeavour to convey what I think it may be. It is the vast outside. The ghastly dark beyond the gates of the city of which God is the light, where the evil dogs go ranging silent as the dark, for there is no sound any more than sight. The time of signs is over. Every sense has its signs, and they were all misused. There is no sense, no sign more, nothing now by means of which to believe. The man wakes from the final struggle of death in absolute loneliness, such a loneliness as in the most miserable moment of deserted childhood he never knew. Not a hint, not a shadow of anything outside his consciousness reaches him. All is dark, dark and dumb. No motion, not the breath of a wind, never a dream of change, not a scent from far off field, nothing to suggest being or thing besides the man himself, no sign of God anywhere. God has so far withdrawn from the man that he is conscious only of that from which he has withdrawn. In the midst of the live world he cared for nothing but himself. Now in the dead world he is in God's prison, his own separated self. He would not believe in God because he never saw God. Now he doubts if there be such a thing as the face of a man, doubts if he ever really saw one, ever anything more than dreamed of such a thing. He never came near enough to human being to know what human being really was, so may really doubt if human beings ever were, if ever he was one of them. Next after doubt comes reasoning on the doubt. The only one must be God. I know no one but myself. I must myself be God, none else. Poor, helpless, dumb devil, his own glorious Lord God. Yea, he will imagine himself that same resistless force which without his will, without his knowledge, is the law by which the sun burns and the stars keep their courses, the strength that drives all the engines of the world. His fancy will give birth to a thousand fancies, which will run riot like the mice in a house but just desert it. He will call it creation and his. Having no reality to set them by, nothing to correct them by, the measured ordered harmonious relations and sweet graces of God's world nowhere for him, what he thinks will be, for lack of what God thinks, the man's realities. What other can he have? Soon misery will beget on imagination a thousand shapes of woe, which he will not be able to rule, direct or even distinguish from real presences, a whole world of miserable contradictions and cold fevered dreams. But no liveliest human imagination could supply adequate representation of what it would be to be left without a shadow of the presence of God. If God gave it, man could not understand it. He knows neither God nor himself in the way of understanding, for not he who cares least about God was in this world ever left as God could leave him. I doubt if any man could continue following his wickedness from whom God had withdrawn. The most frightful idea of what could, to his own consciousness, befall a man, is that he should have to lead an existence with which God had nothing to do. The thing could not be, for being that is caused, the causation ceasing, must of necessity, cease. It is always in and never out of God that we can live and do. But I suppose the man so left that he seems to himself utterly alone, yet alas with himself. Smallest interchange of thought, feeblest contact of existence, dullest reflection from other being impossible. In such case I believe the man would be glad to come in contact with the worst loathed insect. It would be a shape of life, something beyond and besides his own huge void formless being. I imagine some such feeling in the prayer of the devils for leave to go into the swine. His worst enemy, could he but be aware of him, he would be ready to worship, for the misery would be not merely the absence of all being other than his own self, but the fearful, endless, unavoidable presence of that self. Without the correction, the reflection, the support of other presences, being is not merely unsafe. It is a horror for anyone but God, who is his own being. For him whose idea is God's and the image of God, his own being is far too fragmentary and imperfect to be anything like good company. It is the lovely creatures God has made all around us in them giving us himself, that until we know him, save us from the frenzy of aloneness, for that aloneness is self, self, self. The man who minds only himself must at last go mad if God did not interfere. Can there be any way out of the misery? Will the soul that could not believe in God with all his lovely world around testifying of him, believe when shut in the prison of its own lonely, weary all and nothing? It would for a time try to believe that it was indeed nothing, a mere glow of the setting sun on a cloud of dust, a paltry dream that dreamed itself then, ah, if only the dream might dream that it was no more, that would be the one thing to hope for. Self loathing, and that for no sin, from no repentance, from no vision of better would begin and grow and grow, and to what it might not come no soul can tell of essential original misery uncompromising self-disgust. Only then, if a being be capable of self-disgust, is there not some room for hope, as much as a pinch of earth in the cleft of a rock might yield for the growth of a pine? Nay, there must be hope while there is existence, for where there is existence there must be God, and God is forever good, nor can be other than good. But alas, the distance from the light, such a soul is at the farthest verge of life's negation. No, not the farthest. A man is nearer heaven when in deepest hell than just air he begins to reap the rewards of his doings, for he is in a condition to receive the smallest show of the life that is as a boon unspeakable. All his years in the world he received the endless gifts of sun and air, earth and sea, and human face divine, as things that came to him because that was their way, and there was no one to prevent them. Now the poorest thinning of the darkness he would hail as men of old the glow of a descending angel. It would be as a messenger from God, not that he would think of God. It takes long to think of God. But hope, not yet seeming hope, would begin to dawn in his bosom, and the thinner darkness would be as a cave of light to him, a refuge from the horrid self of which he used to be so proud. A man may well imagine it impossible ever to think so unpleasantly of himself, but he has only to let things go, and he will make it the real, right, natural way to think of himself. True, all I have been saying is imaginary, but our imagination is made to mirror truth. All the things that appear in it are more or less after the model of things that are. I suspect it is the region which issues prophecy, and when we are true it will mirror nothing but truth. I deal here with the same light and darkness the Lord dealt with, the same Saint Paul and Saint John and Saint Peter and Saint Jude dealt with. Ask yourself whether the faintest dawn of even physical light would not be welcomed as such a soul as some refuge from the dark of the justly hated self, and the light would grow and grow across the awful gulf between the soul and its haven. It's repentance. For repentance is the first pressure of the bosom of God, and in the twilight struggling in faint the man would feel faint as the twilight, another thought beside his, another thinking something nigh his dreary self. Perhaps the man he had most wronged, most hated, most despised, and would be glad that someone, whoever, was near him. That man he had most injured, and was most ashamed to meet, would be a refuge from himself. Oh, how welcome! So might I imagine a thousand steps up from the darkness, each a little less dark, a little nearer the light. But ah, the weary way. He cannot come out until he have paid the utter most farthing. Repentance once begun, however, may grow more and more rapid. If God once get a willing hold, if with but one finger he touch the man's self, swift as possibility will he draw him from the darkness into the light. For that for which the forlorn self-ruined wretch was made, was to be a child of God, a partaker of the divine nature, an heir of God and joint heir with Christ. Out of the abyss into which he cast himself, refusing to be the heir of God, he must rise and be raised. To the heart of God, the one and only goal of the human race, the refuge and home of all and each, he must set out and go. Or the last glimmer of humanity will die from him. Whoever will live must cease to be a slave and become a child of God. There is no halfway house of rest where ungodliness may be dallied with, nor prove quite fatal. Be they few or many cast into such prison as I have endeavored to imagine, there can be no deliverance for human soul, whether in that prison or out of it, but in paying the last farthing, in becoming lowly, penitent, self-refusing, so receiving the sonship and learning to cry, Father.