 Chapter 4 of Unspoken Sermons, Series 1. It shall not be forgiven. And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him. But unto him that blasphemeth against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven. Luke Chapter 12, Verse 10. Whatever belonging to the region of thought and feeling is uttered in words, is of necessity uttered imperfectly. For thought and feeling are infinite, and human speech, although far-reaching in scope and marvellous in delicacy, can embody them, after all, but approximately and suggestively. Spirit and truth are like the Lady Euna and the Red Cross Knight. Such like the dwarf that lags behind with the Lady's Bag of Needments. Our Lord had no design of constructing a system of truths and intellectual forms. The truth of the moment, in its relation to him, the truth, was what he spoke. He spoke out of a region of realities which he knew could only be suggested, not represented in the forms of intellect and speech. With vivid flashes of life and truth, his words invade our darkness, rousing us with sharp stings of light, to will our awakening, to rise from the dead and cry for the light which he can give. Not in the lightening of words alone, but in indwelling presence and power. How then must the truth fare with those who, having neither glow nor insight, will build intellectual systems upon the words of our Lord or of his disciples? A little child would better understand Plato than they St. Paul. The meaning in those great hearts who knew our Lord is too great to enter theirs. The sense they find in the words must be a sense small enough to pass through their narrow doors. And if mere words, without the interpreting sympathy, may mean, as they may, almost anything to receive or will or can attribute to them, how shall the man, bent at best on the salvation of his own soul, understand, for instance, the meaning of that apostle who was ready to encounter banishment itself from the presence of Christ, that the beloved brethren of his nation might enter in? To men who are not simple, simple words are the most inexplicable of riddles. If we are bound to search after what our Lord means, and he speaks that we may understand, we are at least equally bound to refuse any interpretation which seems to us unlike him unworthy of him. He himself says, Why do ye not of your own selves judge what is right? In thus refusing, it may happen that from ignorance or misunderstanding we refuse the verbal form of its true interpretation. But we cannot thus refuse the spirit and the truth of it, for those we could not have seen without being in the condition to recognize them as the mind of Christ. Some misapprehension, I say, some obliquity or some slavish adherence to old prejudices may thus cause us to refuse the true interpretation. But we are nonetheless bound to refuse and wait for more light. To accept that as the will of our Lord, which to us is inconsistent with what we have learned to worship in him already, is to introduce discord into that harmony whose end is to unite our hearts and make them whole. Is it for us, says the objector who, by some slight of will, believes in the word apart from the meaning for which it stands, to judge of the character of our Lord? I answer, This very thing he requires of us. He requires of us that we should do him no injustice. We would come and dwell with us, if we would but open our chambers to receive him. How shall we receive him, if, avoiding judgment, we hold this or that dob of authority or tradition hanging upon our walls to be the real likeness of our Lord? Is it not possible, at least, that, judging unrighteous judgment by such, while we flatter ourselves that we are refusing to judge, we may close our doors against the master himself as an impostor, not finding him like the picture that hangs in our oratory? And if we do not judge, humbly and lovingly, who is to judge for us? Better to refuse even the truth for a time than by accepting into our intellectual creed that which our heart cannot receive, not seeing its real form, to introduce hesitation into our prayers, a jar into our praises and a misery into our love. If it be the truth, we so one day see it another thing than it appears now, and love it because we see it lovely, for all truth is lovely. Not to the ungenerated mind, but at least, I answer, to the mind which can love that man, Christ Jesus, and that part of us which loves him, let us follow, and in its judgments, let us trust, hoping beyond all things else, for its growth and enlightenment by the Lord who is that spirit. Better, I say again, to refuse the right form than by accepting it a misapprehension of what it really is, to refuse the spirit, the truth that dwells therein. Which of these, I pray, is likeer to the sin against the Holy Ghost? To mistake the meaning of the sin of man may well fill a man with sadness, but to care so little for him as to receive as his what the noblest part of our nature rejects as low and poor or selfish and wrong, that surely is more like the sin against the Holy Ghost that can never be forgiven, for it is a sin against the truth itself, not the embodiment of it in him. Words for their full meaning depend upon their source, the person who speaks them, and utterance may even seem commonplace, till you are told that thus spoke one whom you know to be always thinking, always feeling, always acting, recognizing the mind whence the words proceed, you know the skill by which they are to be understood. So the words of God cannot mean just the same as the words of man. Can we not then understand them? Yes, we can understand them. We can understand them more than the words of men. Whatever a good word means as used by a good man, it means just infinitely more as used by God. And the feeling or thought expressed by that word takes higher and higher forms in us as we become capable of understanding him, that is, as we become like him. I am far less anxious to show what the sin against the Holy Ghost means than to show what the non-forgiveness means, though I think we may arrive at some understanding of both. I cannot admit for a moment that there is anything in the Bible too mysterious to be looked into, for the Bible is a revelation and unveiling. True, and to many things uttered there I can see only a little way, but that little way is the way of life, for the depth of their mystery is God, and even setting aside the duty of the matter and seeking for justification as if the duty were doubtful. It is reason enough to inquire into such passages as this before me that they are often torture to human minds, chiefly those of holy women and children. I knew a child who believed that she had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost because she had, in her toilette, made an improper use of a pen. Dare not to rebuke me for adducing the disease to fancy of a child in a weighty matter of theology. Despise not, one of these little ones. Would the theologians were as near the truth in such matters as the children? Diseased fancy. The child knew, and was conscious that she knew, that she was doing wrong because she had been forbidden. There was rational ground for her fear. How would Jesus have received the confession of the darling? He would not have told her she was silly and never to mind. Child as she was, might he not have said to her, I do not condemn thee. Go and sin no more. To reach the first position necessary for the final attainment of our end, I will inquire what the divine forgiveness means. And in order to arrive at this naturally I will begin by asking what the human forgiveness means, for if there be any meaning in the incarnation it is through the human that we must climb up to the divine. I do not know that it is of much use to go back to the Greek or the English word for any primary idea of the act, the one meaning ascending away, the other a giving away. It will be enough if we look at the feelings associated with the exercise of what is called forgiveness. A man will say, I forgive, but I cannot forget. Let the fellow never come into my sight again. So what does such a forgiveness reach? To the remission or sending away of the penalties which the wronged believes he can claim from the wrongdoer. But there is no sending away of the wrong itself from between them. Again, a man will say, he has done a very mean action, but he has had the worst of it in himself and that he is capable of doing so. I despise him too much to desire revenge. I will take no notice of it. I forgive him. I don't care. Here, again, there is no sending away of the wrong from between them, no remission of sin. A third will say, I suppose I must forgive him, for if I do not forgive him God will not forgive me. This man is a little nearer the truth, in as much as a ground of sympathy, though only that of common sin, is recognized as between the offender and himself. One more will say, he has wronged me grievously. It is a dreadful thing to me, and more dreadful still to him that he should have done it. He has hurt me, but he has nearly killed himself. He shall have no more injury from it that I can save him. I cannot feel the same towards him yet, but I will try to make him acknowledge the wrong he has done me and so put it away from him. Then perhaps I shall be able to feel towards him as I used to feel. To this end I will show him all the kindness I can, not forcing it upon him but seizing every fit opportunity, not I hope from a wish to make myself great through bounty to him, but because I love him so much that I want to love him more and reconciling him to his true self. I would destroy this evil deed that has come between us. I send it away, and I would have him destroy it from between us too, by abjuring it utterly. This comes nearest to the divine idea of forgiveness, nearest though with the gulf between wherewith the heavens are higher than the earth, for the divine creates the human, has the creative power in excess of the human. It is the divine forgiveness that originating itself creates our forgiveness, and therefore can do so much more. It can take up all our wrongs, small and great, with their righteous attendance of griefs and sorrows, and carry them away from between our God and us. Christ is God's forgiveness. Before we approach a little nearer this great sight, let us consider the human forgiveness in a more definite embodiment as between a father and a son, for although God is so much more to us and comes so much nearer to us than a father can be or come, yet the fatherhood is the last height of the human stare, which our understandings can see him afar off, and where our hearts can first know that he is nigh, even in them. There are various kinds and degrees of wrongdoing, which need varying kinds and degrees of forgiveness. An outburst of anger in a child, for instance, scarcely wants forgiveness. The wrong in it may be so small that the parent has only to influence the child for self-restraint, and the rousing of the ill against the wrong. The father will not feel that such a fault has built up any wall between him and his child. But suppose that he discovers in him a habit of sly cruelty towards his younger brothers or the animals of the house. How differently would he feel? Could his forgiveness be the same as in the former case? Would not the different evil require a different form of forgiveness? I mean, would not the forgiveness have to take the form of that kind of punishment fittest for restraining in the hope of finally rooting out the wickedness? Could there be true love in any other form of forgiveness than this? A passing by of the offense might spring from a poor human kindness, but never from divine love. It would not be remission. Forgiveness can never be indifference. Forgiveness is love towards the unlovely. Let us look a little closer at the way a father might feel and express his feelings. One child, the moment the fault was committed, the father would clasp to his bosom, knowing that very love in its own natural manifestation would destroy the fault in him and that the next moment he would be weeping. The father's hatred of the sin would burst forth in his pitiful tenderness towards the child who was so wretched as to have done the sin and so destroy it. The fault of such a child would then cause no interruption of the interchange of sweet affections. The child is forgiven at once, but the treatment of another upon the same principle would be altogether different. If he had been guilty of baseness, meanness, selfishness, deceit, self-gratulation and the evil brought upon others, the father might say to himself, I cannot forgive him. This is beyond forgiveness. He might say so and keep saying so, while all the time he was striving to let forgiveness find its way that it might lift him from the gulf into which he had fallen. His love might grow yet greater because of the wandering and loss of his son. For love is divine and then most divine when it loves according to needs and not according to merits. But the forgiveness would be but in the process of making, as it were, or of drawing nigh to the sinner. Not till his opening heart received the divine flood of destroying affection, and his own affection burst forth to meet it and sweep the evil away, could it be said to be finished, to have arrived, could the son be said to be forgiven? God is forgiving us every day, sending from between him and us our sins and their fogs and darkness. The shining of his son, the falling of his reign, the filling of their hearts with food and gladness, that he loves him that loves him not. When some sin that we have committed has clouded all our horizon, hidden him from our eyes, he, forgiving us, ere we are, and that we may be forgiven, sweeps away a path for this his forgiveness to reach our hearts, that it may, by causing our repentance, destroy the wrong, and make us able even to forgive ourselves. For some are too proud to forgive themselves, till the forgiveness of God has had its way with them, has drowned their pride in the tears of repentance, and made their heart come again like the heart of a little child. But looking upon forgiveness then, as the perfecting of a work ever going on, as the contact of God's heart and ours, in spite and in destruction of the intervening wrong, we may say that God's love is ever in front of his forgiveness. God's love is the prime mover, ever seeking to perfect his forgiveness, which latter needs the human condition for its consummation. The love is perfect, working out the forgiveness. God loves where he cannot yet forgive, where forgiveness in the full sense is as yet simply impossible, because no contact of hearts is possible, because that which lies between has not even begun to yield to the besom of his holy destruction. Some things then, between the father and his children, as between a father and his child, may comparatively, and in a sense, be made light of. I do not mean made light of in themselves, a way they must go. In as much as evils or sins though they be, they yet leave room for the dwelling of God's spirit and the heart, forgiving and cleansing away the evil. When a man's evil is thus fading out of him, and he is growing better and better, that is the forgiveness coming into him more and more. Perfect in God's will. It is having its perfect work in the mind of the man. When the man hath, with his whole nature, cast away his sin, there is no room for forgiveness any more. For God dwells in him, and he in God. With the voice of Nathan, thou art the man. The forgiveness of God laid hold of David. The heart of the king was humbled to the dust. And when he thus awoke from the moral lethargy that had fallen upon him, he found that he was still with God. When I awake, he said, I am still with thee. But there are two sins, not of individual deed, but of spiritual condition, which cannot be forgiven. That is, as it seems to me, which cannot be excused, passed by, made little of, by the tenderness even of God, inasmuch as they will allow no forgiveness to come into the soul, they will permit no good influence to go on working alongside of them, they shut God out altogether. For the man guilty of these can never receive into himself the wholly renewing, saving influences of God's forgiveness. God is outside of him in every sense, save that which springs from his creating relation to him, by which, thanks be to God, he yet keeps a hold of him, although against the will of the man who will not be forgiven. The one of these sins is against man, the other against God. The former is unforgivingness to our neighbor, the shedding of him out from our mercies, from our love, so from the universe, as far as we are a portion of it, the murdering, therefore, of our neighbor. It may be an infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion. The latter is the heart's choice. It is spiritual murder, the worst, to hate, to brood over the feeling that excludes, that in our microcosm kills the image, the idea of the hated. We listen to the voice of our own hurt, pride, or hurt affection, only the latter, without the suggestion of the former, thinketh no evil, to the injury of the evil doer. In as far as we can, we quench the relations of life between us, we close up the passages of possible return. This is to shut out God, the life, the one. For how are we to receive the forgiving presence, while we shut out our brother from our portion of the universal forgiveness, the final restoration, thus refusing to let God be all in all? If God appeared to us, how could he say, I forgive you, while we remained unforgiving to our neighbor? Suppose it possible that he should say so. His forgiveness would be no good to us, while we were uncured of our unforgivingness. It would not touch us, it would not come near us, nay, it would hurt us, for we should thank ourselves safe and well, while the horror of disease was eating the heart out of us. One fold the forgiveness lies in the words, if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your heavenly Father forgive your trespasses. These words are kindness indeed. God holds the unforgiving man with his hand, but turns his face away from him. If in his desire to see the face of his Father, he turns his own towards his brother, then the face of God turns round and seeks his. For then the man may look upon God and not die. With our forgiveness to our neighbor, in flows the consciousness of God's forgiveness to us, or even with the effort we become capable of believing that God can forgive us. No man who will not forgive his neighbor, can believe that God is willing, yea, wanting to forgive him, can believe that the dove of God's peace is hovering over a chaotic heart, pain to a light, but finding no rest for the soul of its foot. For God to say to such a man, I cannot forgive you, is love as well as necessity. If God said, I forgive you, to a man who hated his brother, and if, as is impossible, that voice of forgiveness should reach the man, what would it mean to him? How would the man interpret it? Would it not mean to him, you may go on hating, I do not mind it, you have had great provocation and are justified in your hate. No doubt God takes what wrong there is and what provocation there is into the account, but the more provocation, the more excuse that can be urged for the hate, the more reason, if possible, that the hater should be delivered from the hell of his hate, that God's child should be made the loving child that he meant him to be. The man would think not that God loved the sinner, but that he forgave the sin, which God never does. Every sin meets with its due fate, an exorable expulsion from the paradise of God's humanity. He loves the sinner so much that he cannot forgive him in any other way than by banishing from his bosom the demon that possesses him, by lifting him out of that mire of his iniquity. No one, however, supposes for a moment that a man who has refused to forgive his brother shall therefore be condemned to endless unforgiveness and unforgivingness. What is meant is that while a man continues in such a mood, God cannot be with him as his friend. Not that he will not be his friend, but the friendship being all on one side that of God must take forms such as the man will not be able to recognize his friendship. Forgiveness, as I have said, is not love merely, but love conveyed as love to the airing, so establishing peace towards God and forgiveness towards our neighbor. To return then to our immediate text, is the refusal of forgiveness contained in it a condemnation to irrecoverable impenitence? Strange righteousness would be the decree that because a man has done wrong, let us say, has done wrong so often and so much that he is wrong, he shall forever remain wrong. Do not tell me the condemnation is only negative, a leaving of the man to the consequences of his own will, or at most with the drawing from him of the spirit which he has despised. God will not take shelter behind such a jugglery of logic or metaphysics. He is neither schoolman nor theologian but our father in heaven. He knows that that in him would be the same unforgivingness for which he refuses to forgive man. The only tenable ground for supporting such a doctrine is that God cannot do more, that Satan has overcome, and that Jesus amongst his own brothers and sisters in the image of God has been less strong than the adversary, the destroyer. What shall then I say of such a doctrine of devils as that, even if a man did repent, God would not or could not forgive him? Let us look at the unpardonable sin, as this mystery is commonly called, and see what we can find to understand about it. All sin is unpardonable. There is no compromise to be made with it. We shall not come out except clean, except having paid the uttermost farthing. But the special unpardonableness of those sins, the one of which I have spoken and that which we are now considering, lies in their shutting out God from his genial, his especially spiritual influences upon the man. Possibly in the case of the former sin I may have said this too strongly. Possibly the love of God may have some part even in the man who will not forgive his brother. So if he continues unforgiving, that part must decrease and die away. Possibly resentment against our brother might yet for a time leave room for some divine influences by its side, although the one or the other must speedily yield. But the man who denies truth, who consciously resists duty, who says there is no truth or that the truth he sees is not true, who says that which is good is of Satan or that which is bad is of God, supposing him to know that it is good or is bad, denies the spirit, shuts out the spirit, and therefore cannot be forgiven. For without the spirit no forgiveness can enter the man to cast out the Satan. Without the spirit to witness with his spirit, no man can know himself forgiven, even if God appeared to him and said so. The full forgiveness is, as I have said, when a man fills that God is forgiving him, and this cannot be while he opposes himself to the very essence of God's will. As far as we can see, the men of whom this was spoken were men who resisted the truth with some amount of perception that it was the truth. Men led neither astray by passion nor altogether blinded by their abounding prejudice. Men who were not excited to condemn one form of truth by the love which they bore to another form of it. But men so set, from selflessness and love of influence, against one whom they saw to be a good man, that they denied the goodness of what they knew to be good, in order to put down the man whom they knew to be good. Because he had spoken against them and was ruining their influence and authority with the people by declaring them to be no better than they knew themselves to be. Is not this to be Satan? To be in hell? To be corruption? To be that which is damned? Was not this their condition unpardonable? How, through all this massive falsehood, could the pardon of God reach the essential humanity within it? Crying as it was for God's forgiveness, these men had almost separated their humanity from themselves, had taken their part with the powers of darkness. Forgiveness while they were such was an impossibility. No, out of that they must come, else there was no word of God for them. But the very words that told them of the unpardonable state in which they were was just the one form the voice of mercy could take in calling on them to repent. They must hear and be afraid. I dare not. Cannot think that they refused the truth, knowing all that it was. But I think they refused the truth, knowing that it was true. Not carried away, as I have said, by wild passion, but by cold self-love, and envy, and avarice, and ambition. Not merely doing wrong knowingly, but setting their whole natures knowingly against the light. This nature must the sin against the Holy Ghost surely be. This is the condemnation. Not the sins that men have committed, but the condition of mind in which they choose to remain. That light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. In this sin against the Holy Ghost I see no single act alone, although it must find expression in many acts, but a willful condition of mind, as far removed from God and light of heaven, as from the center thrice to the utmost pole. For this there could be no such excuse made as that even a little light might work beside it. For their light could find no entrance and no room. Light was just what such a mind was set against, almost because it was what it was. The condition was utterly bad. Yet can a man really fall into such a condition of spiritual depravity? That is my chief difficulty, but I think it may be. And wiser people than I have thought so. I have difficulty in believing it, I say, yet I think it must be so. But I do not believe that it is a fixed, a final condition. I do not see why it should be such any more than that of the man who does not forgive his neighbor. If you say it is a worse offense, I say, is it too bad for the forgiveness of God? But is God able to do anything more with the man? Or how is the man ever to get out of this condition? If the spirit of God is shut out from his heart, how is he to become better? The spirit of God is the spirit whose influence is known by its witnessing with our spirit. But may there not be other powers and means of the spirit preparatory to this its highest office within man? God who has made us can never be far from any man who draws the breath of life. Nay, must be in him. Not necessarily in his heart, as we say, but still in him. May not then, one day, some terrible convulsion from the center of his being, some fearful earthquake from the hidden gulfs of his nature, shake such a man so that through all the deafness of his death the voice of the spirit may be faintly heard, the still small voice that comes after the tempest and the earthquake. May there not be a fire that even such can feel? Who shall set bounds to the consuming of the fire of our God and the purifying that dwells therein? The only argument that I can think of, which would with me have any weight against this conclusion, is that the revulsion of feeling in anyone who had thus sinned against the truth, when once brought to the acknowledgment of his sin, would be so terrible that life would never more be endurable, and the kindest thing God could do would be to put such a man out of his being, because it had been a better thing for him never to have been born. But he who could make such a man repent, could make him so sorrowful and lowly and so glad that he had repented, that he would wish to live forever, that he might ever repent and ever worship the glory he now beheld. When a man gives up self, his past sins will no longer oppress him. It is enough for the good of life that God lives, that the all-perfect exist and that we can behold him. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do, said the Divine, making excuse for his murderers, not after it was all over, but at the very moment when he was dying by their hands. Then Jesus had forgiven them already. His prayer the Father must have heard, for he and the Son are one. When the Father succeeded in answering his prayer, then his forgiveness in the hearts of the murderers broke out in sorrow, repentance and faith. Here was a sin dreadful enough surely, but easy for our Lord to forgive. All that excuse for the misled populace. Lord Christ, be thanked for that. That was like thee. But must we believe that Judas, who repented even to Agony, who repented so that his high-priced life, self, soul, might become worthless in his eyes and met with no mercy at his own hand? Must we believe that he could find no mercy in such a God? I think when Judas fled from his hanged and fallen body, he fled to the tender help of Jesus, and found it. I say not how. He was in a more hopeful condition now than during any moment of his past life, for he had never repented before. But I believe that Jesus loved Judas even when he was kissing him with the traitor's kiss, and I believe that he was his savior still. And if any man reminds me of his words, it had been good for that man if he had not been born. I had not forgotten them, though I know that I now offer nothing beyond a conjectural explanation of them when I say Judas had got none of the good of the world into which he had been born. He had not inherited the earth. He had lived an evil life out of harmony with the world and its God. Its love had been lost upon him. He had been brought to the very Son of God, and had lived with him as his own familiar friend. And he had not loved him more, but less than himself. Therefore it had been all useless. It had been good for that man that he had not been born. For it was all to try over again, in some other way, inferior perhaps, in some other world, in a lower school. He had to be sent down the scale of creation which is ever ascending towards its maker. But I will not cannot believe, O my Lord, that thou wouldst not forgive thy enemy, even when he repented and did thee right. Nor will I believe that thy holy death was powerless to save thy foe, that it could not reach to Judas. Have we not heard of those, thine own, taught of thee, who could easily forgive their betrayers in thy name? And if thou forgivest, will not thy forgiveness find its way at last in redemption and purification? Look for a moment at the clause preceding my text. He that denieth me before men shall be denied before the angels of God. What does it mean? Does it mean, ah, you are mine, but not of my sort. You denied me away to the outer darkness. Not so. I shall be forgiven to him that speaketh against the son of man. For he may be but the truth revealed without him. Only he must have shame before the universe of the loving God, and may need the fire that burneth and consumeeth not. But for him that speaketh against the spirit of truth, against the son of God revealed within him, he is beyond the teaching of that spirit now. For how shall he be forgiven? The forgiveness would touch him no more than a wall of stone. Let him know what it is to be without the God he hath denied, away with him to the outer darkness. Perhaps that will make him repent. My friends, I offer this as only a contribution towards the understanding of our Lord's words. But if we ask him, he will lead us into all truth, and let us not be afraid to thank, for he will not take it ill. But what I have said must be at least a part of the truth. No amount of discovery in his words can tell us more than we have discovered, more than we have seen and known to be true, for all the help the best of his disciples can give us is only to discover to see for ourselves. And beyond all our discoveries in his words and being there lie depths within depths of truth that we cannot understand, and yet shall be ever going on to understand. Yea, even now sometimes we seem to have dim glimpses into regions from which we receive no word to bring away. The fact that some things have become to us so much more simple than they were, and that great truths have come out of what once looked common, is ground enough for hope that such will go on to be our experience through the ages to come. Our advance from our former ignorance can measure but a small portion of the distance that lies, and must ever lie, between our childishness and his manhood, between our love and his love, between our dimness and his mighty vision. To him ere long may we all come, all children, still children, more children than ever, to receive from his hand the white stone. And in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saying he that receiveth it. CHAPTER V. THE NEW NAME. To him that over cometh I will give a white stone. And in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saying he that receiveth it. REVELATION CHAPTER II. V. SEVENTEEN. Whether the book of Revelation be written by the same man who wrote the Gospel according to St. John or not, there is, at least, one element common to the two, the mysticism. I use the word mysticism as representing a certain mode of embodying truth, common in various degrees, to almost all, if not all, the writers of the New Testament. The attempt to define it thoroughly would require an essay. I will hazard but one suggestion towards it. A mystical mind is one which, having perceived that the highest expression of which the truth admits, lies in the symbolism of nature and the human customs that result from human necessities, prosecutes thought about truth so embodied by dealing with the symbols themselves after logical forms. This is the highest mode of conveying the deepest truth. And the Lord himself often employed it, as, for instance, in the whole passage ending with the words, if therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is the darkness. The mysticism in the Gospel of St. John is of the simplest and, therefore, noblest nature. No dweller in this planet can imagine a method of embodying truth that shall be purer, loftier, truer to the truth embodied. There may be higher forms in other worlds, or there may not, I cannot tell, but of all our modes these forms are best illustrations of the highest. Apparently the mysticism of St. John's own nature enabled him to remember and report with sufficient accuracy the words of our Lord, always, it seems to me, of a recognizable different kind from those of any of the writers of the New Testament. Chiefly, perhaps, in the simplicity of their poetical mysticism. But the mysticism in the book of the Revelation is more complicated, more gorgeous, less poetic, and occasionally, I think, perhaps arbitrary or approaching the arbitrary, reminding one in a word of the mysticism of Swedenborg. Putting aside both historical and literary criticism, in neither of which, with regard to the authorship of these two books, have I a right even to an opinion, I would venture to suggest that possibly their difference in tone is just what one might expect when the historian of a mystical teacher and the recorder of his mystical sayings proceeds to embody his own thoughts, feelings, and inspirations. That is, when the revelation flows no longer from the lips of the master, but through the disciples' own heart, soul, and brain. For surely not the most idolatrous of our Bible worshiping brothers and sisters will venture to assert that the spirit of God could speak as freely by the lips of the windswayed, reed-like, rebukeable Peter, or of the Thomas who could believe his own eyes, but neither the word of his brethren, nor the nature of his master, as by the lips of him who was blind and deaf to everything but the will of him that sent him. Truth is truth, whether from the lips of Jesus or Balaam, but in its deepest sense, the truth is a condition of heart, soul, mind, and strength towards God and towards our fellow, not an utterance, not even a right form of words, and therefore such truth coming forth in words is, in a sense, the person that speaks. And many of the utterances of truth and the revelation, commonly called of St. John, are not merely lofty in form, but carry with them the conviction that the writer was no mere trumpet of a prophecy, but spoke that he did know, and testified that he had seen. In this passage about the gift of the white stone, I think we find the essence of religion. What the notion in the mind of the writer with regard to the white stone was, is, I think, of comparatively little moment. I take the stone to belong more to the arbitrary and fanciful than to the true mystical imagery. Although for the bringing out of the mystical thought in which it is concerned, it is of high and honorable dignity, for fancy itself will serve the true imagination of the mystic, and so be glorified. I doubt if the writer himself associated any essential meaning with it. Certainly I will not allow that he had such a poor notion in it as that of a voting pebble, white because the man who receives it is accepted or chosen. The word is used likewise for a precious stone set as a jewel, and the writer thought of it mystically, a mode far more likely to involve a reference to nature than to a political custom. What his mystic meaning may be must be taken differently by different minds. I think he sees in its whiteness, purity, and in its substance, indestructibility, but I care chiefly to regard the stone as the vehicle of the name, as the form whereby the name is represented as passing from God to the man, and what is involved in this communication is what I wish to show. If my reader will not acknowledge my representation as Saint John's meaning, I yet hope so to set it forth that he shall see the representation to be true in itself, and then I shall willingly leave the interpretation to its fate. I say in brief, the giving of the white stone with the new name is the communication of what God thinks about the man to the man. It is the divine judgment, the solemn holy doom of the righteous man, the come thou blessed spoken to the individual. In order to see this, we must first understand what is the idea of a name, that is, what is the perfect notion of a name. For seeing the mystical energy of a holy mind here speaks of God as giving something, we must understand that the essential thing, and not any of its accidents or imitations, is intended. A name of the ordinary kind in this world has nothing essential in it. It is but a label by which one man and a scrap of his external history may be known from another man and a scrap of his history. The only names which have significance are those which the popular judgment or prejudice or humor bestows, either for ridicule or honor, upon a few out of the many. Each of these is founded upon some external characteristic of the man, upon some predominant peculiarity of temper, some excellence or the reverse of character, or something which he does or has done well or ill enough, or at least singularly enough, to render him in the eyes of the people worthy of such distinction from other men. As far as they go, these are real names, for in some poor measure they express individuality. The true name is one which expresses the character, the nature, the being, the meaning of the person who bears it. It is the man's own symbol, his soul's picture, in a word, the sign which belongs to him and to no one else. Who can give a man this, his own name? God alone. For no one, but God sees what the man is, or even seeing what he is, could express in a name word the sum and harmony of what he sees. To whom is this name given? To him that overcometh. When is it given? When he has overcome. Does God then not know what a man is going to become? As surely as he sees the oak which he put there lying in the heart of the acorn. Why then does he wait to the man has become by overcoming ere he settles what his name shall be? He does not wait. He knows his name from the first. But as although repentance comes because God pardons, yet the man becomes aware of the pardon only in the repentance. So it is only when the man has become his name that God gives him the stone with the name upon it. For then first he can understand what his name signifies. It is the blossom, the perfection, the completion that determines the name, and God foresees that from the first because he made it so. But the tree of the soul before its blossom comes cannot understand what blossom it is to bear and could not know what the word meant, which in representing its own unarrived completeness named itself. Such a name cannot be given until the man is the name. God's name foreman must then be the expression in a mystical word, a word of that language which all who have overcome understand, of his own idea of the man, that being whom he had in his thought when he began to make the child, and whom he kept in his thought through the long process of creation that went to realize the idea. To tell the name is to seal the success, to say, in the also I am well pleased. But we are still in the region of symbol. For supposing that such a form were actually observed between God and him that overcomeeth, it would be no less a symbol, only an acted one. We must therefore look deeper still for the fullness of its meaning. Up to this point little has been said to justify our expectations of discovery in the text. Let us, I say, look deeper. We shall not look long before we find that the mystic symbol has for its center of significance the fact of the personal individual relation of every man to his God. That every man has affairs, and those his first affairs with God, stands to reason of every man who associates any meaning or feeling with the words maker, father, God. Were we but children of a day, with the understanding that someone had given us that one holiday, there would be something to be thought, to be felt, to be done because we knew it. For then our nature would be according to our fate and we could worship and die. But it would be only the praise of the dead, not the praise of the living. For death would be the deepest, the lasting, the overcoming. We should have come out of nothingness, not out of God. He could only be our maker, not our father, not our origin. But now we know that God cannot be the God of the dead, must be the God of the living, in as much as to know that we died would freeze the heart of worship and we could not say our God or feel him worthy of such worship as we could render. To him who offers unto this God of the living his own self of sacrifice, to him that overcomeeth, him who has brought his individual life back to its source, who knows that he is one of God's children, this one of God's making, he giveth the white stone. To him who climbs on the stair of all his God-born efforts and God-given victories, up to the height of his being, that of looking face to face upon his ideal self in the bosom of the Father, God's him, realized in him through the Father's love in the eternal Brother's devotion. To him God gives the new name written. But I leave this because that which follows embraces and intensifies this individuality of relation in a fuller development of the truth, for the name is one which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it. Not only then has each man his individual relation to God, but each man has his peculiar relation to God. He is to God a peculiar being made after his own fashion and that of no one else. For when he is perfected he shall receive the new name which no one else can understand. Hence he can worship God as no man else can worship him, can understand God as no man else can understand him. This or that man may understand God more, may understand God better than he. But no other man can understand God as he understands him. God give me grace to be humble before thee, my brother, that I drag not my simulacrum of thee before the judgment seat of the unjust judge. But look up to thyself for what revelation of God thou and no one else canst give. As the fir tree lifts up itself with a far different need from the need of the palm tree, so does each man stand before God and lift up a different humanity to the common father. And for each God has a different response. With every man he has a secret, the secret of the new name. In every man there is a loneliness, an inner chamber of peculiar life into which God only can enter. I say not it is the innermost chamber, but a chamber into which no brother, nay, no sister can come. From this it follows that there is a chamber also. Oh God, humble and accepts my speech. A chamber in God himself into which none can enter but the one, the individual, the peculiar man, out of which chamber that man has to bring revelation and strength for his brethren. This is that for which he was made to reveal the secret things of the father. By his creation then, each man is isolated with God. Each in respect of his peculiar making can say, my God. Each can come to him alone and speak with him face to face as a man speaketh with his friend. There is no massing of men with God. When he speaks of gathered men it is as a spiritual body, not a mass. For in a body every smallest portion is individual and therefore capable of forming a part of the body. See now what a significance the symbolism of our text assumes. Each of us is a distinct flower or tree in the spiritual garden of God. Precious each for his own sake in the eyes of him who is even now making us. Each of us watered and shown upon and filled with life for the sake of his flower, his completed being, which will blossom out of him at last to the glory and pleasure of the great gardener. For each has within him a secret of the divinity. Each is growing towards the revelation of that secret to himself and so to the full reception according to his measure of the divine. Every moment that he is true to his true self some new shine of the white stone breaks on his inward eye. Some fresh channel is opened upward for the coming glory of the flower, the conscious offering of his whole being in beauty to the maker. Each man then is in God's sight worth. Life and action, thought and intent are sacred and what an end lies before us to have a consciousness of our own ideal being flashed into us from the thought of God. Surely for this may well give way all our paltry self-consciousnesses, our self-admirations, and self-worships. Surely to know what he thinks about us will pail out of our souls all our thoughts about ourselves and we may well hold them loosely now and be ready to let them go. Towards this result Saint Paul had already drawn near when he who had begun the race with a bitter cry for deliverance from the body of his death was able to say that he judged his own self no longer. But is there not the worst of all dangers involved in such teaching the danger of spiritual pride? If there be, are we to refuse the spirit for fear of the pride? Or is there any other deliverance from pride except the spirit? Pride springs from supposed success in the high aim. With attainment itself comes humility. But here there is no room for ambition. Ambition is the desire to be above one's neighbor and here there is no possibility of comparison with one's neighbor. No one knows what the white stone contains except the man who receives it. Here is room for endless aspiration towards the unseen ideal. None for ambition. Ambition would only be higher than others. Aspiration would be high. Relative worth is not only unknown. To the children of the kingdom it is unknowable. Each esteems the other better than himself. How shall the rose, the glowing heart of the summer heats, rejoice against the snow drop, risen with hanging head from the white bosom of the snow? Both are God's thoughts. Both are dear to him. Both are needful to the completeness of his nature and the revelation of himself. God has cared to make me for himself, says the victor with the white stone, and has called me that which I like best. For my own name must be what I would have it, seeing it is myself. What matter whether I be called a grass of the field or an eagle of the air, a stone to build into his temple or a bow energies to wield his thunder? I am his, his idea, his making, perfect in my kind, yea, perfect in his sight, full of him, revealing him, alone with him. Let him call me what he will. The name shall be precious as my life. I seek no more. Gone then will be all anxiety as to what his neighbor may think about him. It is enough that God thinks about him. To be something to God is not that praise enough? To be a thing that God cares for and would have complete for himself, because it is worth caring for, is not that life enough? Neither will he thus be isolated from his fellows. For that we say of one, we say of all. It is as one that the man has claims amongst his fellows. Each will fill the sacredness and awe of his neighbor's dark and silent speech with his God. Each will regard the other as a prophet and look to him for what the Lord hath spoken. Each, as a high priest returning from his holy of holies, will bring from his communion some glad tidings, some gospel of truth, which, when spoken, his neighbors shall receive and understand. Each will behold in the other a marvel of revelation, a present son or daughter of the most high, come forth from him to reveal him afresh. In God each will draw nigh to each. Yes, there will be danger, danger is everywhere, but he giveth more grace. And if the man who has striven up the heights should yet fall from them into the deeps, is there not that fire of God, the consuming fire which burneth and destroyeth not, to no one who has not already had some speech with God, or who has not at least felt some aspiration towards the fount of his being, can all this appear other than foolishness? So be it. But Lord, help them and us and make our being grow into thy likeness. If through ages of strife and ages of growth, yet let us at last see thy face and receive the white stone from thy hand, that thus we may grow, give us day by day our daily bread. Fill us with the words that proceed out of thy mouth. Help us to lay up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt. Chapter 6 of Unspoken Sermons One Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Matthew Chapter 6, Verses 19-21 To understand the words of our Lord is the business of life, for it is the main road to the understanding of the word himself. And to receive him is to receive the Father, and so to have life in ourselves. And life, the higher, the deeper, the simpler, the original, is the business of life. The word is that by which we live, namely Jesus himself. And his words represent, in part, in shadow, in suggestion, himself. Any utterance worthy of being called a truth is human food. How much more the word, presenting no abstract laws of our being, but the vital relation of soul and body, heart and will, strength and rejoicing, beauty and light, to him who first gave birth to them all. The sun came forth to be, before our eyes and in our hearts, that which he had made us for, that we might behold the truth in him, and cry out for the living God, who, in the highest sense of all, is the truth. Not as understood, but as understanding, living and being, doing and creating the truth. I am the truth, said our Lord. And by those who are in some measure like him in being the truth, the word can be understood. Let us try to understand him. Sometimes, no doubt, the Saviour would have spoken after a different fashion of speech, if he had come to English men instead of to Jews. But the lessons he gave would have been the same, for even when questioned about a matter for its passing import, his reply contained the annunciation of the great human principle which lay in it, and that lies changeless in every variation of changeful circumstance. With the light of added ages of Christian experience, it ought to be easier for us to understand his words than it was for those who heard him. What, I ask now, is here the power of his word? For, for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. The meaning of the reason thus added is not obvious upon its surface, and it has to be sought for because of its depth at once and its simplicity. But it is so complete, so imaginatively comprehensive, so immediately operative on the conscience through its poetic suggestiveness, that when it is once understood, there is nothing more to be said, but everything to be done. Why not lay up for ourselves treasures upon earth? Because they're the moth and rust, and the thief come. And so we should lose those treasures. Yes, by the moth and the rust and the thief. Does the Lord then mean that the reason for not laying up such treasures is their transitory and corruptible nature? No, for he adds a four. Four, where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Of course the heart will be where the treasure is, but what has that to do with the argument? This, that what is with the treasure must fare as the treasure, that the heart, which haunts the treasure-house where the moth and rust corrupt, will be exposed to the same ravages as the treasure, will itself be rusted and moth-eaten. Many a man, many a woman, fair and flourishing to see, is going about with a rusty moth-eaten heart within that form of strength or beauty. But this is only a figure. True, but is the reality intended, less or more than the figure? Does not the rust and the moth mean more than disease? And does not the heart mean more than the heart? Does it not mean a deeper heart, the heart of your own self, not of your body? Of the self that suffers not pain, but misery? Of the self whose end is not comfort or enjoyment, but blessedness, yea, ecstasy? A heart which is the endmost chamber wherein springs the divine fountain of your being, a heart which God regards, though you may never have known its existence, not even when its writhings under the gnawing of the moth and the slow fire of the rust have communicated a dull pain to that outer heart which sends the blood to its appointed course through your body. If God sees that heart corroded with the rust of cares riddled into caverns and films by the worms of ambition and greed, then your heart is as God sees it, for God sees things as they are. And one day you will be compelled to see, nay, to feel your heart as God sees it, and to know that the kinkered thing which you have within you, a prey to the vilest of diseases, is indeed the center of your being, your very heart. Nor does the lesson apply to those only who worship mammon, who give their lives their best energies to the accumulation of wealth. It applies to those equally who, in any way, worship the transitory, who seek the praise of men more than the praise of God, who would make a show to the world by wealth, by taste, by intellect, by power, by art, by genius of any kind, and so would gather golden opinions to be treasured in a storehouse of earth. Nor to sets only, but surely to those as well whose pleasures are of a more evidently transitory nature still, such as the pleasures of the senses in every direction, whether lawfully or unlawfully indulged. If the joy of being is centered in them, do these words bear terrible warning? For the hurt lies not in this, that these pleasures are false like the deceptions of magic, for such they are not, pleasures they are. Nor yet in this, that they pass away and leave a fierce disappointment behind, that is only so much the better. But the hurt lies in this. That the immortal, the infinite, created in the image of the everlasting God, is housed with the fading and the corrupting, and clings to them as its good, clings to them till it is infected and interpenetrated with their proper diseases, which assume in it a form more terrible in proportion to the superiority of its kind, that which is mere decay in the one becomes moral vileness in the other. That which fits the one for the dung hill, cast the other into the outer darkness, creeps that it may share with them into a burrow in the earth, where its but its wings wither and damp and drop away from its shoulders, instead of haunting the open plains and the high uplifted table-lands, spreading forth its young pinions to the sun and the air, and strengthening them in further and further flights, till its last, they should become strong to bear the God born into the presence of its father in heaven. Therein lies the hurt. He whose heart is sound, because it haunts the treasure-house of heaven, may be tempted of the devil, but will be first led up of the spirit into the wilderness. End of Chapter 6, Series 1 Chapter 7 of Unspoken Sermons, Series 1 This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by David Baldwin. Unspoken Sermons by George MacDonald. The Temptation in the Wilderness Then was Jesus led up of the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. When he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward and hungered. And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread. But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and said of him on a pinnacle of the temple and saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down. For it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee, and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against the stone. Jesus saith unto him, It is written again, Thou shall not tempt the Lord thy God. Again the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and so with him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, and saith unto him, All these will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence Satan, For it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. Then the devil leaveeth him, and behold angels came and ministered unto him. Matthew chapter 4 verses 1 through 11 This narrative must have one of two origins. Either it is an invention such as many tales told of our Lord in the earlier periods of Christianity, or it came from our Lord himself, for according to the story, except the wild beast, of earthly presence there was none at his temptation. As to the former of the two origins, the story bears upon it no sign of human invention. The man who could see such things, as our here embodied, dared not invent such an embodiment for them. To one in doubt about the matter, it will be helpful, I think, to compare this story with the best of those for which one or other of the apocryphal gospels is our only authority. Say, the grand account of the descent into hell and the gospel according to Nicodemus. If it have not to this origin, there is but the other that it can have, our Lord himself. To this I will return presently. And now let us approach the subject from another side. With this in view, I ask you to think how much God must know of which we know nothing. Think what an abyss of truth was our Lord, out of whose divine darkness, through that revealing countenance, that uplifting voice, those hands whose tenderness has made us great, broke all holy radiations of human significance. Think of his understanding, imagination, heart, in which lay the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Must he not have known, felt, imagined, rejoiced in things that would not be told in human words, could not be understood by human hearts? Was he not always bringing forth out of the light inaccessible? Was not his very human form avail hung over the face of the truth that, even in part by dimming the effulgence of the glory, it might reveal? What could be conveyed must be thus conveyed, and infinite more must lie behind. And even of those things that might be partially revealed to men, could he talk to his Father and talk to his disciples in altogether the same forms, in altogether the same words? Would what he said to God on the mountaintops, in the dim twilight or the gray dawn, never be such that his disciples could have understood it no more than the people, when the voice of God spoke to him from heaven, could distinguish that voice from the inarticulate thunderings of the element? There is no attempt made to convey to us even the substance of the battle of those 40 days. Such a conflict of spirit as for 40 days absorbed all the human necessities of the man and the cares of the Godhead could not be rendered into forms intelligible to us, or rather could not be in itself intelligible to us, and therefore could not take any form of which we could lay hold. It is not till the end of those 40 days that the divine event begins to dawn out from the sacred depths of the eternal thought, becomes human enough to be made to appear, admits of utterance, becomes capable of being spoken in human forms to the ears of men, though yet only in a dark saying, which he that hath ears to hear may hear, and he that hath a heart to understand may understand. For the mystery is not left behind, nor can the speech be yet clear unto men. At the same moment when the approaching event comes within human kin, may from afar be dimly described by the God of held intelligence, the same humanity seizes on the master, and he is unhungered. The first sign that he has come back to us, that the strife is approaching its human result, is his hunger. And what to see of endless life do we float? Are our poorest necessities sustained, not the poorest of them disassociated from the divine? Emerging from the storms of the ocean of divine thought and feeling, into the shallower waters that lave the human shore, bearing with him the treasures won in the strife, our Lord is straightway and hungered. And from this moment the temptation is human, and can be in some measure understood by us. But could it even then have been conveyed to the human mind in merely intellectual forms? Or, granting that it might, could it be so conveyed to those who were only beginning to have the vaguest most error mingled and confused notions about our Lord and what he came to do? No, the inward experiences of our Lord, such as could be conveyed to them at all, could be conveyed to them only in a parable. For far plainer things than these our Lord chose this form. The form of the parable is the first in which truth will admit of being embodied. Nor is this all, it is likewise the fullest. And to the parable will the teacher of the truth ever return? Is he who asserts that the passage contains a simple narrative of actual events, prepared to believe, as the story so interpreted indubitably gives us to understand, that a visible demon came to our Lord and, himself the Prince of Worldly Wisdom, thought by quoting scripture after the manner of the priests to persuade a good man to tempt God, thought by the promise of power to prevail upon him to cast aside every claim he had upon the human race and falling down and worshiping one whom he knew to be the adversary of truth, of humanity, of God? How could Satan be so foolish? Or if Satan might be so foolish, wherein could such temptation so presented have tempted our Lord, and wherein would a victory over such be a victory for the race? Told as a parable, it is as full of meaning as it would be bare if received as a narrative. Our Lord spake then this parable unto them, and so conveyed more of the truth with regard to his temptation in the wilderness, than could have been conveyed by any other form in which the truth he wanted to give them might have been embodied. Still, I do not think it follows that we have it exactly as he told it to his disciples. A man will hear but what he can hear, will see but what he can see, and telling the story again, can tell but what he laid hold of, what he seemed to himself to understand. His effort to reproduce the impression made upon his mind will, as well as the impression itself, be liable to numberless altering, modifying, even in the measure, decomposing influences. But it does not therefore follow that the reproduction is false. The mighty host of life bearing worlds, requiring for the freedom of their courses, and the glory of their changes, such awful abysses of space, dwindle in the human eye to seeds of light sewn upon a blue plane. How faint in the ears of man is the voice of their sphere-born thunder of adoration. Yet are they lovely indeed, uttering speech and teaching knowledge. So this story may not be just as the Lord told it, and yet may contain in its mirror as much of the truth as we are able to receive, and as will afford a sufficient scope for a life's discovery. The modifying influences of the human channels may be essential to God's revealing mode. It is only by seeing them first from afar that we learn the laws of the heavens. And now arises the question upon the right answer to which depends the whole elucidation of the story. How could the Son of God be tempted? If anyone say that he was not moved by these temptations, he must be told then that they were no temptations to him, and he was not tempted. Nor was his victory of more significance than that of the man who, tempted to bear false witness against his neighbor, abstains from robbing him of his goods. For human need, struggle, and hope, it bears no meaning, and we must reject the whole as a fantastic folly of crude invention, a mere stage show, a lie for the poor sake of the fancy to truth, a doing of evil that good might come, and with how many fragments so ever of truth its mud may be filled, not in any way to be received as a divine message. But asserting that these were real temptations, if the story is to be received at all, am I not involving myself in a greater difficulty still? For how could the Son of God be tempted with evil, with that which must to him appear in its true colors of discord, its true shapes of deformity? Or how could he then be the Son of his Father, who cannot be tempted with evil? In the answer to this lies the center, the essential germ of the whole interpretation. He was not tempted with evil, but with good, with inferior forms of good, that is, pressing in upon him while the higher forms of good held themselves aloof, biding their time, that is, God's time. I do not believe that the Son of God could be tempted with evil, but I do believe that he could be tempted with good, to yield to which temptation would have been evil in him, ruined to the universe. But does not all evil come from good? Yes, but it has come from it. It is no longer good. A good corrupted is no longer a good. Such could not tempt our Lord. Revenge may originate in a sense of justice, but it is revenge, not justice, an evil thing, for it would be fearfully unjust. Evil is evil, whatever it may have come from. The Lord could not have felt tempted to take vengeance upon its enemies, but he might have felt tempted to destroy the wicked from the face of the earth, to destroy them from the face of the earth, I say, not to destroy them forever. To that, I do not think he could have felt tempted. But we shall find illustration enough of what I mean in the matter itself. Let us look at the individual temptations represented in the parable. The informing idea which led to St. Matthew's arrangement seems to me superior to that showing itself in St. Luke's. In the two accounts, the closes, while each is profoundly significant, are remarkably different. Now let us follow St. Matthew's record, and we shall see how the devil tempted him to evil, but not with evil. First, he was hungry, and the devil said, Make bread of this stone. The Lord had been fasting for forty days, a fast impossible except during intense mental absorption. Let no one think to glorify this fast by calling it miraculous. Wonderful such fast are on record on the part of holy men, and inasmuch as the Lord was more of a man than his brethren, in so much might he be farther withdrawn in the depths of his spiritual humanity from the outer region of his physical nature. So much slower would be the goings on of that nature, and fasting in his case might thus be extended to beyond the utmost limits of similar fasts and others. This, I believe, was all, and this all infinite in its relations. This is the grandest, simplest, and most significant and therefore the divinous way of regarding his fast. Hence, at the end of the forty days, it was not hunger alone that made food tempting to him, but that exhaustion of the whole system, wasting itself all the time it was forgotten, which reacting on the mind when the mind was already worn out with its own tension, must have deadened it, so that speaking after the experience of his brethren, which alone will explain his, it could for the time see or feel nothing of the spiritual, and could only believe in the unfelt, the unseen. What a temptation was here. There is no sin in wishing to eat, no sin in procuring food honestly that one may eat, but it rises even into an awful duty when a man knows that to eat will restore the lost vision of the eternal will operating on the brain and, hence on the mind, render the man capable of hope as well as of faith, of gladness as well as of confidence, of praise as well as of patience. Why then should he not eat? Why should he not put forth the power that was in him that he might eat? Because such power was his not to take care of himself, but to work the work of him that sent him. Such power was his not even to honor his father, save as his father chose to be honored, who is far more honored in the ordinary way of common wonders than in the extraordinary way of miracles. Because it was God's business to take care of him, his to do what the father told him to do. To make that stone bread would be to take the care out of the father's hands and turn the divinest thing in the universe into the merest commonplace of self-preservation. And in nothing was he to be beyond his brethren, save in faith. No refuge for him any more than for them, save in the love and care of the father. Other refuge, let it be miraculous power or what you will, would be but hell to him. God is refuge. God is life. Was he not to eat when it came in his way? And did not the bread come in his way when his power met that which could be changed into it? Regard that word changed. The whole matter lies in that. Changed from what? From what God had made it. Changed into what? Into what he did not make it. Why changed? Because the son was hungry and the father would not feed him with food convenient for him. The father did not give him a stone when he asked for bread. It was Satan that brought the stone and told him to provide for himself. The father said, that is a stone. The son would not say, that is a loaf. No one creative fiat shall contradict another. The father and the son are of one mind. The Lord could hunger, could starve, but would not change into another thing what his father had made one thing. There was no such change in the feeding of the multitudes. The fish and the bread were fish and bread before. I think this is significant as regards the true nature of a miracle and its relation to the ordinary ways of God. There was in these miracles, and I think in all, only a hastening of appearances, the doing of that in a day which may ordinarily take a thousand years, for with God time is not what it is with us. He makes it. And the hastening of a process does not interfere in the least with cause and effect in the process, nor does it render the process one-wit more miraculous. Indeed, the wonder of the growing corn is to me greater than the wonder of the feeding of the thousands. It is easier to understand the creative power going forth at once immediately than through the countless, the lovely, the seemingly forsaken wonders of the cornfield. To the merely scientific man, all this is pure nonsense, or at best belongs to the region of the fancy. The time will come, I think, when he will see that there is more in it, namely a higher reason, a loftier science, how incorrectly so ever herein indicated. If we regard the answer he gave the devil, we shall see the root of the matter at once. Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. Yea, even by the word which made that stone, that stone, everything is all right. It is life indeed for him to leave that to stone, which the Father had made a stone. It would be death to him to alter one word that he had spoken. Man shall not live by bread alone. There are other ways of living besides that which comes by bread. A man will live by the word of God, by what God says to him, by what God means between him and him, by the truths of being which the Father alone can reveal to his child, by the communion of love between them. Without the bread he will die, as men say. But he will not find that he dies. He will only find that the tent which hid the stars from him is gone, and that he can see the heavens. Or rather, the earthly house will melt away from around him, and he will find that he has a palace home about him, another and loftier word of God clothing upon him. So the man lives by the word of God even in refusing the bread which God does not give him, for, instead of dying because he does not eat, he rises into a higher life even of the same kind. For I have been speaking of the consciousness of existence, and not of that higher spiritual life on which all other life depends. That, of course, can for no one moment exist, save from the heart of God. When a man tries to live by bread and not by that word that comes out of the heart of God, he may think he lives, but he begins to die or is dead. Our Lord says, I can do without the life that comes of bread. Without the life that comes of the word of my Father, I die indeed. Therefore, he does not think twice about the matter, that God's will be done is all his care. That done, all will be right, and all right with him, whether he thinks about himself or not. For the Father does not forget the child who is so busy trusting in him that he cares not even to pray for himself. In the higher aspect of this first temptation, arising from the fact that a man cannot feel the things he believes except under certain conditions of physical well-being depended upon food, the answer is the same. A man does not live by his feelings any more than by bread, but by the truth that is the word, the will, the uttered being of God. I am even ashamed to yield here to the necessity of writing what is but as milk for babes, when I would gladly utter, if I might, only that which would be as bread for men and women. What I must say is this, that by the word of God, I do not understand the Bible. The Bible is a word of God, the chief of his written words, because it tells us of the word, the Christ. But everything God has done and given men to know is a word of his, a will of his, and in as much as it is a will of his, it is a necessity to man without which he cannot live. The reception of it is man's life. For in as much as God's utterances are a whole, every smallest is essential. He speaks no foolishness. There are with him no vain repetitions. But by the word of God and not maker only, who is God just because he speaks to men, I must understand in the deepest sense, every revelation of himself in the heart and consciousness of man, so that the man knows that God is there, nay, rather that he is here. Even Christ himself is not the word of God in the deepest sense to a man, until he is this revelation of God to the man, until the spirit that is the meaning in the word has come to him, until the speech is not a sound as a thunder, but the voice of words. For a word is more than an utterance, it is a sound to be understood. No word, I say, is fully a word of God until it is a word to man, until the man therein recognizes God. This is that for which the word is spoken. The words of God are in the sands and the stars. They cannot be numbered, but the end of all and each is this, to reveal God. Nor moreover can the man know that any one of them is the word of God, save as it comes thus to him, is a revelation of God in him. It is to him that it may be in him, but till it is in him he cannot know that it was to him. God must be God in man before man can know that he is God, or that he has received a right, and for that for which it was spoken, any one of his words. Footnote. No doubt the humble spirit will receive the testimony of every one whom he reveres, and look in the direction indicated for a word from the Father, but till he thus receives it in his heart, he cannot know what the word spoken of is. Footnote closed. If by any will of God, that is any truth in him, we live, we live by it tenfold when that will has become a word to us. When we receive it, his will becomes our will, and so we live by God. But the word of God, once understood, a man must live by the faith of what God is, and not by his own feelings, even in regard to God. It is the truth itself, that which God is, known by what goeth out of his mouth that man lives by. And when he can no longer feel the truth, he shall not therefore die. He lives because God is true, and he is able to know that he lives because he knows, having once understood the word, that God is truth. He believes in the God of former vision, lives by that word therefore, when all is dark and there is no vision. We now come to the second attempt of the enemy. Then if God is to be trusted, try him. Fain would I see the result. Show thyself his darling. Here is the word itself for it. He shall give his angels charge concerning thee, not a stone shall hurt thee. Take him at his word. Throw thyself down, and strike the conviction into me that thou art the Son of God, for thou knowest thou dost not look like what thou sayest thou art. Again with a written word in return, the Lord meets him. And he does not quote the scripture for logical purposes to convute Satan intellectually, but is giving even Satan the reason of his conduct. Satan quotes scripture as a verbal authority. Our Lord meets him with the scripture by the truth in which he regulates his conduct. If we examine it, we shall find that this answer contains the same principle as the former, namely this, that to the Son of God, the will of God is life. It was a temptation to show the powers of the world that he was the Son of God, that to him the elements were subject, that he was above the laws of nature because he was the eternal Son, and thus stopped the raging of the heathen and the vain imaginations of the people. It would be but to show them the truth. But he was the Son of God. What was his Father's will? Such was not the divine way of convincing the world of sin of righteousness of judgment. If the Father told him to cast himself down, that moment the pinnacle pointed naked to the sky. If the devil threw him down, let God send his angels. Or, if better, allow him to be dashed to pieces in the valley below. But never will he forestall the divine will. The Father shall order what comes next. The Son will obey. In the path of his work, he will turn aside for no stone. There let his angels bear him in their hands if need be. But he will not choose the path because there is a stone in it. He will not choose at all. He will go where the Spirit leads him. I think this will throw some light upon the words of our Lord. If ye have faith and doubt not, if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast unto the sea, it shall be done. Good people, amongst them John Bunyan, have been tempted to tempt the Lord their God upon the strength of the Sang. Just as Satan sought to tempt our Lord on the strength of the pasity quoted from the Psalms, happily for such, the assurance to which they would give the name of faith generally fails them in time. Faith is that which, knowing the Lord's will, goes and does it. Or, not knowing it, stands and waits. Content and ignorant as in knowledge because God wills. Neither pressing into the hidden future, nor careless of the knowledge which opens the path of action. It is its noblest exercise to act with uncertainty of the result when the duty itself is certain, or even when a course seems with strong probability to be duty. Footnote. In the latter case, a man may be mistaken, and his work will be burned, but by that very fire he will be saved. Nothing saves a man more than the burning of his work, except the doing of work that can stand the fire. Footnote closed. But to put God to the question in any other way than by saying, What will thou have me to do? Is an attempt to compel God to declare himself or to hasten his work? This probably was the sin of Judas. It is presumption of a kind similar to the making of a stone into bread. It is, as it were, either a forcing of God to act where he has created no need for action, or the making of a case wherein he shall seem to have forfeited his word if he does not act. The man is there in disassociating himself from God so far that, instead of acting by the divine will from within, he acts in God's face, as it were, to see what he will do. Man's first business is, What does God want me to do? Not, What will God do if I do so and so? To tempt a parent after the flesh in such a manner would be impertinent. To tempt God so is the same vice in its highest form, a natural result of that condition of mind which is worse than all the so-called cardinal sins, namely spiritual pride, which attributes the tenderness and love of God not to man's being and man's need, but to some distinguishing excellence in the individual himself which causes the Father to love him better than his fellows and so pass by his faults with a smile. Not thus did the Son of God regard his relation to his Father. The faith which will remove mountains is that confidence in God which comes from seeking nothing but his will. A man who is thus faithful would die of hunger sooner than say to the stone, Be bread. Would meet the scoffs of the unbelieving without reply and with apparent defeat sooner than say to the mountain, Be thou cast into the sea, even if he knew that it would be torn from its foundation at the word, except he knew first that God would have it so. And thus I am naturally brought to consider more fully how this should be a real temptation to the Son of Man. It would be good to confound his adversaries, to force conviction upon him that he was the God-supported messenger he declared himself. Why should he have adversaries a moment longer to interfere between him and the willing hearts which would believe if they could? To answer to all of this was plain to our Lord and is plain to us now. It was not the way of the Father's will. It would not fall in with the gradual development of life and history by which the Father works and which must be the way to breed free God-loving wills. It would be violent, theatrical, therefore poor in nature and in result, not God-like in any way. Everything in God's doing comes harmoniously with and from all the rest. Son of Man, his history shall be man's history, shall be thee man's history. So that began with an exception. Yet it might well be a temptation to him who longed to do all he could for men. He was the Son of God. Why should not the sons of God know it? But as this temptation in the wilderness was an epitome and type of the temptations to come, against which for forty days he had been making himself strong, revolving truth beyond our reach, and whose light every commonest duty was awful and divine, a vision fit almost to oppress a God in his humiliation, so shall we understand the whole better if we look at his life in relation to it. As he refused to make stones bread, so throughout that life he never wrought a miracle to help himself. As he refused to cast himself from the temple to convince Satan or glorify visibly in his sonship, so he steadily refused to give the sign which the human Satan's demanded, notwithstanding the offer of conviction which they held forth to bribe him to the grant. How easy it seems to have confounded to them and strengthened his followers. But such conviction would stand in the way of a better conviction in his disciples and would do his adversaries only harm. For neither could, in any true sense, be convinced by such a show. It could but prove his power. It might prove so far the presence of a God, but would it prove that God? Would it bring him nearer to them who could not see him in the face of his son? To say thou art God, without knowing what the thou means, of what use is it. God is a name only, except we know God. Our Lord did not care to be so acknowledged. On the same principle, the very miracles which from their character did partially reveal his character to those who already had faith in him, he would not do where unbelief predominated. He often avoided cities and crowds and declined mighty works because of unbelief, except for the loving help they gave the distressed, revealing them to their hearts as the Redeemer of Evil. I doubt he would have wrought a single miracle. I do not think he cared much about them. Certainly as regarded the onlookers, he did not expect much to result from those mighty deeds. A mere marvel is practically soon forgotten, and long before it is forgotten, many minds have begun to doubt the senses, their own even which communicated it. Inward sight alone can convince of truth, signs and wonders, never. No number of signs can do more than convey a probability that he who shows them knows that of which he speaks. They cannot convey the truth. But the vision of the truth itself and the knowledge of itself, a something altogether beyond the region of signs and wonders, is the power of God, is salvation. This vision was in the Lord's face and formed to the pure and hard who were able to see God, but not to signs and wonders to those who sought after such. Yet it is easy to see how the temptation might for a moment work upon a mind that longed to enter upon its labors with the credentials of its truth. How the true heart longs to be received by its brethren to be known in its truth. But no, the truth must show itself in God's time, in and by the labor. The kingdom must come in God's holy human way. Not by a stroke of grandeur, but by years of love, yea by centuries of seeming bafflement, by eons of labor must he grow into the hearts of the sons and daughters of his father in heaven. The Lord himself will be bound by the changeless laws which are the harmony of the father's being and utterance. He will be, not seen. He will be, and thereby, not therefore, seen. Yet once more, even on him, the idea of asserting the truth in holy power such as he could have put forth, must have dawned in grandeur. The thought was good. To have yielded to it would have been the loss of the world. Nay, far worse, inconceivable to the human mind, the God of obedience had fallen from his throne, and all is blackness. But let us not forget that the whole is a faint parable, faint I mean in relation to the grandeur of the reality, as the ring and the shoes are poor types, yet how dear, of the absolute love of the father to his prodigal children. We shall now look at the third temptation. The first was to help himself in his need. The second, perhaps, to assert the father. The third, to deliver his brethren. To deliver them, that is, after the fashion of men from the outside still. Indeed, the whole temptation may be regarded as the contest of the seen and the unseen, of the outer and inner, of the likely and the true, of the show and the reality. And, as in the others, the evil in this last lay in that it was a temptation to save his brethren, instead of doing the will of his father. Could it be other than a temptation to think that he might, if he would, lay a righteous grasp upon the reins of government, leap into the chariot of power, and ride forth conquering and to conquer? Glad visions arose before him, of the prisoner breaking jubilant from the cell of injustice, of the widow lifting up the bowed head before the devouring Pharisee, of weeping children bursting into shouts at the sound of the wheels of the chariot before which oppression and wrong shrunk and withered, behind which sprung the fir tree instead of the thorn, and the myrtle instead of the brier. What glowing visions of holy vengeance, what rosy dreams of human blessedness, and all from his hand would crown such a brain as his. Not like the castles in the air of the aspiring youth, for he builds at random because he knows that he cannot realize, but consistent and harmonious, as well as grand, because he knew them within his reach. Could he not mold the people at his will? Could he not, transfigured in his snowy garments, call aloud in the streets of Jerusalem, Behold your king? And the fierce warriors of his nation would start at the sound. The plowshare would be beaten into the sword and the pruning hook into the spear, and the nation rushing to his call learned war yet again indeed. A grand, holy war, a crusade. No, we should not have had that word, but a war against the tyrants of the race, the best as they called themselves, who trod upon their brethren, and would not suffer them even to look to the heavens. Ah, but when were his garments white as snow? When, through them, glorifying them as it passed, did the light stream from his glorified body? Not when he looked to such a conquest, but when, on a mount like this, he spake of the decease that he should accomplish at Jerusalem. Why should this be the sad end of the war? Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. Not even thine own visions of love and truth, O Savior of the world, shall be thy guides to thy goal, but the will of thy Father in heaven. But how would he, thus conquering, be a servant of Satan? Wherein would this be a falling down and worshipping of him, that is, an acknowledging of the worth of him, who was the Lord of misrule and its pain? I will not inquire whether such an enterprise could be accomplished without the worship of Satan, whether men could be managed for such an end without more or less of the trickery practiced by every ambitious leader, every self-serving conqueror, without double-dealing, tact, flattery, finesse. I will not inquire into this, because on the most distant supposition of our Lord being the leader of his country's armies, these things drop out of sight as impossibilities. If these were necessary, such a career for him refuses to be for a moment imagined. But I will ask whether to know better and do not so well is not a serving of Satan. Whether to lead men on in the name of God as towards the best when the end is not the best is not a serving of Satan. Whether to flatter their pride by making them conquerors of the enemies of their nation instead of their own evils is not a serving of Satan. In a word, whether to desert the mission of God, who knew that men could not be set free in that way, and sent him to be a man, a true man, the one man among them, that his life might become their life, and that so they might be as free in prison or on the cross as upon a hillside or on a throne. Whether so deserting the truth to give men over to the lie of believing other than spirit and truth to be the worship of the Father, other than love the fulfilling of the law, other than the offering of their best selves, the serving of God, other than obedient harmony with the primal love and truth and law, freedom, whether to desert God thus and give men over thus would not have been to fall down and worship the devil. Not all the sovereignty of God, as the theologians call it, delegated to the Son and administered by the wisdom of the Spirit that was given to him without a measure could have wrought the kingdom of heaven in one corner of our earth, nothing but the obedience of the Son, the obedience unto death, the absolute doing of the will of God, because it was the truth could redeem the prisoner, the widow, the orphan. But it would redeem them by redeeming the conquest-ridden conqueror too, the stripe-giving jailer, the unjust judge, the devouring Pharisee himself with the insatiable moth-eaten heart. The earth should be free because love was stronger than death, therefore should fierceness and wrong and hypocrisy and God-service play out their weary play. He would not pluck the spreading branches of the tree, he would lay the axe to its root. It would take time, but the tree would be dead at last, dead and cast into the lake of fire. It would take time, but his father had time enough and to spare. It would take courage and strength and self-denial and endurance, but his father could give him all. It would cause pain of body and mind, yea, agony and torture, but those he was ready to take on himself. It would cost him the vision of many sad and, to all but him, hopeless sights. He must see tears without wiping them, hear sighs without changing them into laughter. See the dead lie and let them lie. See Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted. He must look on his brothers and sisters crying as children over their broken toys and must not mend them. He must go on to the grave and they not know that thus he was setting all things right for them. His work must be one with and completing God's creation in God's history. The disappointment and sorrow and fear he could, he would bear. The will of God should be done. Man should be free. Not merely man as he thinks of himself, but man as God thinks of him. The divine idea shall be free in the divine bosom. The man on earth shall see his angel face to face. He shall grow into the likeness of the divine thought, free, not in his own fancy, but in absolute divine fact of being, as in God's idea. The great and beautiful and perfect will of God must be done. Get thee hence, Satan, for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. It was when Peter would have withstood him as he set his face steadfastly to meet this death at Jerusalem that he gave him the same kind of answer that he now gives to Satan, calling him Satan too. Then the devil leaveeth him, and behold, angels came and ministered unto him. So sayeth St. Matthew. They brought him the food he had waited for walking in the strength of the word. He would have died if it had not come now. And when the devil had ended all the temptation, he departed from him for a season. So sayeth St. Luke. Then Satan ventured once more. When? Was it then, when, at the last moment, in the agony of the last faint, the Lord cried out, Why has thou forsaken me? When, having done the great work, having laid it aside clean and pure as the linen cloth that was ready now to enfold him, another cloud than that on the mount overshadowed his soul, and out of it came a voiceless persuasion that, after all was done, God did not care for his work or for him. Even in those words the adversary was foiled, and forever. For when he seemed to be forsaken, his cry was still, My God! My God!