 Chapter 1 of Unspoken Sermons, series 2. The way. If thou wouldst be perfect. St. Matthew, chapter 19, verse 21. For reasons many and profound, amongst the least because of the fragmentary nature of the records, he who would read them without the candle of the Lord, that is, the light of truth in his inward parts, must not merely fall into a thousand errors, a thing for such a one-of-less moment, but must fell utterly a perceiving and understanding the life therein struggling to reveal itself, the life, that is, of the Son of Man, the thought, the intent of the Lord himself, that by which he lived, that which is himself, that which he poured out for us. Yet the one thing he has to do with is this life of Jesus, his inner nature and being manifested through his outer life, according to the power of sight in the spiritual eye that looks thereupon. In contemplating the incident revealing that life of which I would now endeavour to unfold the truth, my readers, who do not study the Greek testament, must use the revised version. Had I not known and rejoiced in it long before the revision appeared, I should have owed the revisors endless gratitude, if for nothing more than the genuine reading of St. Matthew's report of the story of the youth who came to our Lord. Whoever does not welcome the change must fail to see its preciousness. Reading then from the revised version, we find in St. Matthew the commencement of the conversation between Jesus and the young man very different from that given in the Gospels of St. Mark and St. Luke. There is not for that the smallest necessity for rejecting either account. They blend perfectly, and it is to me a joy unspeakable to have both. Put together they give a completed conversation. Here it is as I read it. Let my fellow students look to the differing far from opposing reports and see how naturally they combine. "'Good master,' said the kneeling youth, and is interrupted by the master. Why callest thou me good?' he returns. None is good, save one, even God.' Daring no reply to this, the youth leaves it, and but takes himself to his object in addressing the Lord. "'What good thing shall I do?' he says, that I may have eternal life. But again the Lord takes hold of the word good. Why askest thou me concerning that which is good?' he rejoins. One there is who is good. But if thou wouldest enter into life, keep the commandments. Which? Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness, honour thy father and thy mother, and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. All these things have I observed. What lack I yet? If thou wouldest be perfect, go, sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come, follow me.' Let us regard the story. As Jesus went out of a house, see St. Mark chapter 10, verses 10 and 17, the young man came running to him, and kneeling down in the way addressed him as, Good Master. The words with which the Lord interrupts his address reveal the whole attitude of the Lord's being. At that moment, at every and each moment, just as much as when in the Garden of Gethsemane, or encountering any of those hours which men call crises of life, his whole thought, his whole delight was in the thought, in the will, in the being of his Father. The joy of the Lord's life, that which made it life to him, was the Father. Of him he was always thinking, to him he was always turning. I suppose most men have some thought of pleasure or satisfaction or strength, to which they turn when action pauses, life becomes for a moment, still, and the will sleeps on its own swiftness. With Jesus it needed no pause of action, no rush of renewed consciousness to send him home. His thought was ever and always his Father. To its home in the heart of the Father his heart ever turned. That was his treasure-house, the jewel of his mind, the mystery of his gladness, finding all degrees and shades of delight, from peace and calmest content to ecstasy. His life was hid in God. No vain show could enter at his eyes. Every truth and grandeur of life passed before him as it was. Neither ambition nor disappointment could distort them to his eternal childlike gaze. He beheld and loved them from the bosom of the Father. Here was not for himself he came to the world, not to establish his own power over the doings, his own influence over the hearts of men. He came that they might know the Father, who was his joy, his life. The sons of men were his Father's children, like himself, that the Father should have them all in his bosom, was the one thought of his heart. That should be his doing for his Father, cost him what it might. He came to do his will, and on the earth was the same he had been from the beginning, the eternal first. He was not interested in himself, but in his Father and his Father's children. He did not care to hear himself called good. It was not of consequence to him. He was there to let men see the goodness of the Father in whom he gloried. For that he entered the weary dream of the world in which the glory was so dulled and clouded. You call me good. You should know my Father. For the Lord's greatness consisted in his Father being greater than he, who calls into being is greater than who is called. The Father was always the Father, the Son always the Son. Yet the Son is not of himself, but by the Father. He does not live by his own power like the Father. If there were no Father, there would be no Son. All that is the Lord's is the Father's, and all that is the Father's he has given to the Son. The Lord's goodness is of the Father's goodness. Because the Father is good, the Son is good. When the word good enters the ears of the Son, his heart lifts it at once to his Father, the Father of all. His words contain no denial of goodness in himself. In his grand self-regard he was not the original of his goodness, neither did he care for his own goodness, except to be good. It was to him a matter of course. But for his Father's goodness he would spend life, suffering, labor, death to make that known. His other children must learn to give him his due, and love him as did the primal Son. The Father was all in all to the Son, and the Son no more thought of his own goodness than an honest man thinks of his honesty. When the good man sees goodness, he thinks of his own evil. Jesus had no evil to think of. But neither does he think of his goodness. He delights in his Father's. Why callest thou me good? None is good, save one. Even God. Checked thus the youth turns to the question which, working in his heart, had brought him running and made him kneel. What good thing shall he do that he may have eternal life? It is unnecessary to inquire precisely what he meant by eternal life. Whatever shape the thing took to him that shape represented a something he needed and had not got, a something which, it was clear to him, could be gained only in some path of good. What he thought to gain a thing by doing, when the very thing desired, was a being. He would have that as a possession which must possess him. The Lord cared neither for isolated truth nor for orphaned deed. It was truth in the inward parts. It was the good heart, the mother of good deeds, he cherished. It was the live, active, knowing, breathing good he came to further. He cared for no speculation in morals or religion. It was good men he cared about, not notions of good things, or even good actions, save as the outcome of life, save as the bodies in which the primary live actions of love and will in the soul took shape and came forth. Could he by one word have said at rest all the questionings of philosophy as to the supreme good and the absolute truth? I venture to say that word he would not have uttered. But he would die to make men good and true. His whole heart would respond to the cry of the sad publican or despairing Pharisee. How am I to be good? When the Lord says, Why askest thou me concerning that which is good? We must not put the emphasis on the me, as if the Lord refused the question as he had declined the epithet. He was the proper person to ask. Only the question was not the right one. The good thing was a small matter. The good being was all in all. FUT NOTE As it stands, it is difficult to read the passage without putting emphasis on the me, which spoils the sense. I think it would be better. Why dost thou ask me concerning—etc. FUT NOTE CLOSED Why ask me about the good thing? There is one living good in whom the good thing and all good is alive and ever-operant. Ask me not about the good thing, but the good person, the good being, the origin of all good. Who, because he is, can make good. He is the one, live, good. Be with his life to communicate living good, the power of being, and so doing good, for he makes good itself to exist. It is not with this good thing and that good thing we have to do, but with that power whence comes our power even to speak the word good. We have to do with him to whom no one can look without the need of being good waking up in his heart. To think about him is to begin to be good. To do a good thing is to do a good thing. To know God is to be good. It is not to make us do all things right, he cares, but to make us hunger and thirst after a righteousness possessing which we shall never need to think of what is or is not good, but shall refuse the evil and choose the good by a motion of the will which is at once necessity and choice. You see again he refers him immediately as before to his father. But I am anxious my reader should not mistake. Observe the question in the young man's mind is not about the doing or not doing of something he knows to be right. Had such been the case the Lord would have permitted no question at all. The one thing he insists upon is the doing of the thing we know we ought to do. In the instance present the youth looking out for some unknown good thing to do he sends him back to the doing of what he knows and that in answer to his question concerning the way to eternal life. A man must have something to do in the matter and may well ask such a question of any teacher. The Lord does not for a moment turn away from it and only declines the form of it to help the youth to what he really needs. He has in truth already more than hinted where the answer lies namely in God himself. But that the youth is not yet capable of receiving. He must begin with him further back. If thou wouldst enter into life keep the commandments. For verily if the commandments have nothing to do with entering into life why were they ever given to men? This is his task. He must keep the commandments. Then the road to eternal life is the keeping of the commandments. Had the Lord not said so what man of common moral sense would ever dare say otherwise? What else can be the way into life but the doing of what the Lord of life tells the creatures he has made and whom he would have lived forever that they must do? It is the beginning of the way. If a man had kept all those commandments yet would he not therefore have in him the life eternal? Nevertheless without the keeping of the commandments there is no entering into life. The keeping of them is the path to the gate of life. It is not life but it is the way so much of the way to it. Nay the keeping of the commandments consciously or unconsciously has its closest and essential relation to eternal life. The Lord says nothing about the first table of the law. Why does he not tell this youth as he did the lawyer that to love God is everything? He had given him a glimpse of the essence of his own life, had pointed the youth to the heart of all for him to think of afterwards. He was not ready for it yet. He wanted eternal life. To love God with all our heart and soul and strength and mind is to know God and to know him is eternal life. That is the end of the whole saving matter. It is no human beginning. It is the grand end and eternal beginning of all things. But the youth was not capable of it. To begin with that would be a sensible as to say to one asking how to reach the top of some mountain. Set your foot on that shining snow clad peak high there in the blue and you will at once be where you wish to go. Love God with all your heart and eternal life is yours. It would have been to mock him. Why he could not yet see or believe that that was eternal life. He was not yet capable of looking upon life even from afar. How many Christians are? How many know that they are not? How many care that they are not? The Lord answers his question directly. Tells him what to do, a thing he can do, to enter into life. He must keep the commandments and when he asks which specifies only those that have to do with his neighbor ending with the highest and most difficult of them. But no man can perfectly keep a single commandment of the second table any more than of the first. Surely not. Else why should they have been given? But is there no meaning in the word keep or observe except to be qualified by perfectly? Is there no keeping but a perfect keeping? None that God cares for. There I think you utterly wrong. No keeping but a perfect one will satisfy God, I hold with all my heart and strength, but that there is none else he cares for is one of the lies of the enemy. What father is not pleased with the first tottering attempt of his little one to walk? What father would be satisfied with anything but the manly step of the full grown son? When the Lord has definitely mentioned the commandments he means, the youth returns at once that he has observed those from his youth up. Are we to take his word for it? The Lord at least takes his word for it. He looked on him and loved him. Was the Lord deceived in him? Did he tell an untruth or did the master believe he had kept the commandments perfectly? There must be a keeping of the commandments which although anything but perfect is yet acceptable to the heart of him from whom nothing is hid. In that way the youth had kept the commandments. He had for years been putting forth something of his life energy to keep them. Nor however he had felt of perfection had he missed the end for which they were given him to keep. For the immediate end of the commandments never was that men should succeed in obeying them, but that finding they could not do that which yet must be done, finding the more they tried the more was required of them. They should be driven to the source of life and law, of their life and his law, to seek from him such reinforcement of life as should make the fulfillment of the law as possible, yea, as natural, as necessary. This result had been wrought in the youth. His observance had given him no satisfaction. He was not at rest. He desired eternal life, of which there was no word in the law. The keeping of the law had served to develop a hunger which no law or its keeping could fill. Must not the imperfection of his keeping of the commandments, even in the lower sense in which he read them, have helped to reveal how far they were beyond any keeping of his? How their implicit demands rose into the infinitude of God's perfection? When kept the commandments, the youth needed and was ready for a further lesson. The Lord would not leave him where he was. He had come to seek and to save. He saw him in sore need of perfection, the thing the commonplace Christian thinks he can best do without, the thing the elect hungers after with an eternal hunger. Perfection, the perfection of the Father, is eternal life. If thou wouldest be perfect, said the Lord, what an honour for the youth to be by him supposed desirous of perfection, and what an enormous demand does he, upon the supposition, make of him? To gain the perfection he desired, the one thing lacking was that he should sell all that he had, give it to the poor, and follow the Lord. Would this be all that lay between him and entering into life? God only knows what the victory of such an obedience might once have wrought in him. Much, much more would be necessary before perfection was reached. But certainly the next step, to sell and follow, would have been the step into life. Had he taken it, in the very act would have been born in him that whose essence and vitality is eternal life, needing but process to develop it into the glorious consciousness of oneness with the life. There was nothing like this in the law. Was it not hard, hard to let earth go and take heaven instead, for eternal life to let dead things drop, to turn his back on mammon and follow Jesus, lose his rich friends and be of the master's household? Let him say it was hard who does not know the Lord, who has never thirsted after righteousness, for longed for the life eternal. The youth had got on so far, was so pleasing in the eyes of the master, that he would show him the highest favor he could. He would take him to be with him, to walk with him and rest with him, and go from him only to do for him what he did for his father in heaven, to plead with men, be a mediator between God and men. He would set him free at once, a child of the kingdom and heir of the life eternal. I do not suppose that the youth was one of whom ordinary people would call a lover of money. I do not believe he was covetous, or desired even the large increase of his possessions. I imagine he was just like most good men of property. He valued his possessions, looked on them as a good. I suspect that in the case of another he would have regarded such possessions almost as a merit, a dessert, would value a man more who had means, value a man less who had none, like most of my readers. They have not a notion of how entirely they will one day have to alter their judgment, or have it altered for them, in this respect well for them if they alter it for themselves. In this false way of thinking, and all the folly and unreality that accompany it, the Lord would deliver the young man. As the thing was, he was a slave, for a man is in bondage to whatever he cannot part with that is less than himself. He could have taken his possessions from him by an exercise of his own will, but there would have been little good in that. He wished to do it by the exercise of the young man's will. What would be a victory indeed for both? So would he enter into freedom and life, delivered from the bondage of mammon by the lovely will of the Lord in him, one with his own. By the putting forth of the divine energy in him he would escape the corruption that is in the world through lust, that is, the desire or pleasure of having. The young man would not. Was the Lord then premature in his demand on the youth? Was he not ready for it? Was it meant for a test, and not as an actual word of deliverance? Did he show the child a next step on the stair too high for him to set his foot upon? I do not believe it. He gave him the very next lesson in the divine education for which he was ready. It was possible for him to respond, to give birth by obedience to the redeemed and redeeming will, and so be free. It was time that a man should be made upon him. Do you say? But he would not respond. He would not obey. Then it was time, I answer, that he should refuse, that he should know what manner of spirit he was of, and meet the confusions of the soul, the sad searchings of heart that must follow. A time comes to every man when he must obey, or make such a refusal, and know it. Shall I then be supposed to mean that the refusal of the young man was of necessity and final, that he was therefore lost, that because he declined to enter into life the door of life was closed against him? Verily, I have not so learned Christ, and that the lesson was not lost, I see in this, that he went away sorrowful, was such sorrow in the mind of an earnest youth likely to grow less, or to grow more. Was all he had gone through in the way of obedience to be of no good to him? Could the nature of one who had kept the commandments be so slight that, after having sought and talked with Jesus, held communion with him who is the life, he would care less about eternal life than before? Many alas, have looked upon his face, yet have never seen him, and have turned back. Some have kept company with him for years, and denied him. But their weakness is not the measure of the patience or the resources of God. Perhaps this youth was never one of the lords so long as he was on the earth. But perhaps when he saw that the master himself cared nothing for the wealth he had told him to cast away, that instead of ascending the throne of his fathers he let the people do with him what they would, and left the world the poor man he had lived in it by its meanest door. Perhaps then he became one of those who sowed all they had, and came, and laid the money at the apostles feet. In the meantime he had that in his soul which made it heavy. By the gravity of his riches the world held him, and would not let him rise. He counted his weight, his strength, and it was his weakness. Moneyless in God's upper air he would have had power indeed. Money is the power of this world, a power for defeat and failure to him who holds it, a weakness to be overcome ere a man can be strong. Yet many decent people fancy it a power of the world to come. It is indeed a little power, as food and drink, as bodily strength, as the winds and the waves are powers. But it is no mighty thing for the redemption of men, yea to the redemption of those who have it it is the saddest obstruction. To make this youth capable of eternal life, clearly, and the more clearly that he went away sorrowful, the first thing was to make a poor man of him. He would doubtless have gladly devoted his wealth to the service of the master, yea and gone with him, as a rich man, to spend it for him. But part with it to free him for his service? That he could not, yet. And how now would he go on with his keeping of the commandments? Would he not begin to see more plainly his shortcomings, the larger scope of their requirements? Might he not fill the keeping of them more imperative than ever, yet impossible without something he had not? The commandments can never be kept while there is strife to keep them. The man is overwhelmed in the weight of their broken pieces. It needs a clean heart to have pure hands. All the power of a live soul to keep the law. A power of life, not of struggle. The strength of love, not the effort of duty. One day the truth of his conduct must dawn upon him with absolute clearness. Bitter must be the discovery. He had refused the life eternal, had turned his back upon the life, in deepest humility and shame. Yet with the profound consolation of repentance he would return to the master and bemoan his unteachableness. There are who, like St. Paul can say, I did wrong, but I did a denigrance. My heart was not right, and I did not know it. The remorse of such must be very different from that of one who, brought to the point of being capable of embracing the truth, turned from it and refused to be set free. To him the time will come. God only knows its hour, when he will see the nature of his deed, with the knowledge that he was dimly seeing it so even when he did it. The alternative had been put before him. And all those months, or days, or hours, or moments, he might have been following the master, hearing the words he spoke, through the windows of his eyes looking into the very gulfs of Godhead. The sum of the matter in regard to the youth is this. He had begun early to climb the eternal stair. He had kept the commandments, and by every keeping had climbed. But because he was well to do, a phrase of unconscious ironing, he felt well to be. Quite, but for that lack of eternal life. His possessions gave him a standing in the world, a position of consequence, of value in his eyes. He knew himself looked up to. He liked to be looked up to. He looked up to himself because of his means, forgetting that means are but tools, and poor tools too. Work with his wealth would be to sink to the level of his inferiors. Why should he not keep it? Why not use it in the service of the master? What wisdom could there be in throwing away such a grand advantage? He could devote it. But he could not cast it from him. He could devote it. But he could not devote himself. He could not make himself naked as a little child and let his father take him. To him it was not the word of wisdom that the good master spoke. How could precious money be a hindrance to entering into life? How could a rich man believe he would be of more value without his money? That the casting of it away would make him one of God's anachemes? That the battle of God could be better fought without its impediment? But his work refused as an obstruction the aid of wealth. But the master had repudiated money that he might do the will of his father, and the disciple must be as his master. Had he done as the master told him he would soon have come to understand. Obedience is the opener of eyes. There is this danger to every good youth in keeping the commandments, that he will probably think of himself more highly than he ought to think. He may be correct enough as to the facts, and in his deductions and consequent self-regard be anything but fair. He may think himself a fine fellow, when he is but an ordinarily reasonable youth trying to do but the first thing necessary to the name or honor of a man. Doubtless such a youth is exceptional among youths. With the number of fools not yet acknowledging the first condition of manhood, no wise alters the fact that he who has begun to recognize a duty and acknowledge the facts of his being is but a tottering child on the path of life. He is on the path. He is as wise at the time he can be. The father's arms are stretched out to receive him, but he is not therefore a wonderful being, not therefore a model of wisdom, not at all the admirable creature his largely remaining folly would in his worst moments, that is when he feels best, persuade him to think himself. He is just one of God's poor creatures. What share this besetting sin of the good young man may have had in the miserable failure of this one we need not inquire. But it may well be that he thought the master undervalued his work as well as his wealth, and was less than fair to him. To return to the summing up of the matter. The youth, climbing the stair of eternal life, had come to a landing place where not a step more was visible. On the cloud-swath platform he stands looking in vain for further ascent. What he thought with himself he wanted, I cannot tell. His idea of eternal life I do not know. I can hardly think it was but the poor idea of living forever, all that commonplace minds grasp at for eternal life, its mere concomitant shadow, in itself not worth thinking about, not for a moment to be disputed, and taken for granted by all devout Jews. When a man has eternal life, that is, when he is one with the father, what should he do but live forever? Not oneness with God, the continuance of existence would be to me the all but unsurpassable curse, the unsurpassable itself being a God other than the God I see in Jesus. But whatever his idea it must have held in it, though perhaps only in solution, all such notions as he had concerning God and man and a common righteousness. While thus he stands then, alone and helpless, behold the form of the Son of Man. It is God himself come to meet the climbing youth, to take him by the hand and lead him up his own stair, the only stair by which ascent can be made. He shows him the first step of it through the mist. His feet are heavy. They have golden shoes. To go up that stair he must throw aside his shoes. He must walk barefooted into life eternal. Rather than so, rather than stride free-limbed up the everlasting stair to the bosom of the father, he would keep his precious shoes. It is better to drag them about on the earth than part with them for a world where they are useless. But how miserable his precious things, his golden vessels, his embroidered garments, his stately house, must have seemed when he went back to them from the face of the Lord. Surely it cannot have been long before in shame and misery he cast all from him, even as Judas cast from him the thirty pieces of silver in the agony of every one who wakes to the fact that he has preferred money to the Master. For although never can man be saved without being freed from his possessions, it is yet only hard, not impossible, for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. I suspect there is scarcely a young man rich and thoughtful who is not ready to fill our Lord's treatment of this young man hard. He is apt to ask, why should it be difficult for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven? He is ready to look upon the natural fact as an arbitrary decree, arising, shall I say, from some prejudice in the divine mind, or at least from some objection to the joys of well-being, as regarded from the creature's side. Why should the rich fare differently from other people in respect of the world to come? They do not perceive that the law is they shall fare like other people, whereas they want to fare as rich people. A condition of things in which it would be easy for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven is to me inconceivable. There is no kingdom of this world into which a rich man may not easily enter, in which if he be but rich enough, he may not be the first. A kingdom into which it would be easy for a rich man to enter could be no kingdom of heaven. The rich man does not by any necessity of things belong to the kingdom of Satan, but into that kingdom he is especially welcome, whereas into the kingdom of heaven he will be just as welcome as another man. I suspect also that many a rich man turns from the record of this incident with the resentful feeling that there lies in a declaim upon his whole having, while there are many, and those by no means only of the rich, who cannot believe the Lord really meant to take the poor fellow's money from him. To the man born to riches they seem not merely unnatural, but an essential condition of well-being, and the man who has made his money feels adheres by the labor of his soul the travail of the day and the care of the night. Each feels a right to have and to hold the things he possesses, and if there is a necessity for his entering into the kingdom of heaven, it is hard indeed that right and necessity should confront each other and constitute all but a bare impossibility. Why should he not make the best of both worlds? He would compromise, if he might. He would serve Mammon a little and God much. He would not have such a best of both worlds as comes of putting the lower and utter subservience to the higher, of casting away the treasure of this world and taking the treasure of heaven instead. He would gain as little as may be of heaven, but something with the loss of as little as possible of the world. That which he desires of heaven is not its best. That which he would not yield of the world is its most worthless. I can well imagine an honest youth educated in Christian forms, thus reasoning with himself. Is the story of general relation? Is this demand made upon me? If I make up my mind to be a Christian, shall I be required to part with all I possess? It must have been comparatively easy in those times to give up the kind of things they had. If I had been he, I am sure I should have done it, at the demand of the Savior in person. Things are very different now. Wealth did not then imply the same social relations as now. I should be giving up so much more. Neither do I love money as he was in danger of doing. In all times the Jews have been Mammon worshippers. I try to do good with my money. Besides, am I not a Christian already? Why should the same thing be required of me as of a young Jew? If everyone who, like me, has a conscious about money and cares to use it well, had to give up all, the power would at once be in the hands of the irreligious. They would have no opposition and the world would go to the devil. We read often in the Bible of rich men, but never of any other who was desired to part with all that he had. When Ananias was struck dead, it was not because he did not give up all his money, but because he pretended to have done so. St. Peter expressly says, while it remained was it not thine own, and after it was sold was it not in thine own power? How would the Lord have been buried but for the rich Joseph? Besides, the Lord said, if thou wouldst be perfect, go and sell that thou hast. I cannot be perfect. It is hopeless, and he does not expect it. It would be more honest if he said, I do not want to be perfect. I am content to be saved. Such as he do not care for being perfect as their father in heaven is perfect, but for being what they call saved. They little think that without perfection there is no salvation, that perfection is salvation. They are one. And again he adds in conclusion triumphant. The text says, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God? I do not trust in my riches. I know they can do nothing to save me. I will suppose myself in immediate communication with such a youth. I should care little to set forth anything called truth, instant siege for surrender to the law of liberty. If I cannot persuade, I would be silent. Nor would I labor to instruct the keenest intellect. I would rather learn for myself. To persuade the heart, the will, the action, is alone worth the full energy of a man. His strength is first for his own, then for his neighbor's manhood. He must first pluck out the beam out of his own eye, then the moat out of his brother's, if indeed the moat in his brother's be more than the projection of the beam in his own. To make a man happy as a lark might be to do him grievous wrong. To make a man wake, rise, look up, turn, is worth the life and death of the son of the eternal. I say then to the youth, have you kept? Have you been keeping the commandments? I will not dare to say that. I suppose him to answer. I ought to know better than that youth how much is implied in the keeping of the commandments. But, I ask insisting, does your answer imply that, counting the Lord a hard master, you have taken the less pains to do as he would have you, or that, bending your energies to the absolute perfection he requires, you have the more perceived the impossibility of fulfilling the law. Can you have fell to note that it is the youth who has been for years observing the commandments on whom the further and to you startling command is laid, to part with all that he has? Surely not. Are you then one on whom, because of correspondent condition, the same command could be laid? Have you, in any sense, like that in which the youth answered the question, kept the commandments? Have you unsatisfied with the result of what keeping you have given them, and filled with the desire to be perfect, gone kneeling to the master to learn more of the way to eternal life? Or are you so well satisfied with what you are, that you have never sought eternal life, never hungered and thirsted after the righteousness of God, the perfection of your being? If this latter be your condition, then be comforted. The master does not require of you to sell what you have and give to the poor. You follow him. You go with him to preach good tidings, you who care not for righteousness. You are not one whose company is desirable to the master. Be comforted, I say. He does not want you. He will not ask you to open your purse for him. You may give, or withhold, it is nothing to him. What? Is he to be obliged to one outside his kingdom to the untrue, the ignoble, for money? Bring him a true heart, an obedient hand. He has given his life blood for that. But your money? He neither needs it nor cares for it. Pray, do not deal harshly with me. I confess I have not been what I ought, but I want to repent and would feign enter into life. Do not think, because I am not prepared, without the certainty that it is required of me, to cast from me all that I have, that I have no regard for higher things. Once more, then, go and keep the commandments. It is not come to your money, yet. The commandments are enough for you. You are not yet a child in the kingdom. You do not care for the arms of your father. You value only the shelter of his roof. As to your money, let the commandments direct you how to use it. It is in you but pitiable presumption to wonder whether it is required of you to sell all that you have. When in keeping the commandments you have found the great reward of loving righteousness, the further reward of discovering that, with all the energy you can put forth, you are but an unprofitable servant. When you have come to know that the law can be kept only by such as need no law, when you have come to feel that you would rather pass out of being than live on such a poor, miserable, selfish life as alone you can call yours, when you are aware of a something beyond all that your mind can think, yet not beyond what your heart can desire, a something that is not yours seems as if it never could be yours, which yet your life is worthless without. When you have come therefore to the master with the cry, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life? It may be he will then say to you, sell all that you have, and give to the poor, and come follow me. If he do, then you will be of men most honorable if you obey, of men most pitiable if you refuse. Till then you would be no comfort to him, no pleasure to his friends, for the young man who have sold all and followed him would have been to accept God's pattern of peerage. To you it is not offered. Were one of the disobedient, in the hope of the honour, to part with every straw he possessed, he would but be sent back to keep the commandments in the new and easier circumstances of his poverty. Does this comfort you? And alas for you, a thousand times alas. Your relief is to know that the Lord has no need of you, does not require you to part with your money, does not offer you himself instead. You do not indeed sell him for thirty pieces of silver, but you are glad not to buy him with all that you have. Where in do you differ from the youth of the story? In this, that he was invited to do more, to do everything, to partake of the divine nature. You have not had it in your power to refuse. You are not fit to be invited, such as you can never enter the kingdom. You would not even know you were in heaven if you were in it. You would not see it around you if you set on the very footstool of the throne. But I do not trust in my riches. I trust in the merits of my Lord and Savior. I trust in His finished work. I trust in the sacrifice He has offered. Yes, yes, you will trust in anything but the man himself who tells you it is hard to be saved. Not all the merits of God and His Christ can give you eternal life. Only God and His Christ can. And they cannot, would not if they could, without your keeping the commandments. The knowledge of the living God is eternal life. What have you to do with His merits? You have to know His being, Himself. And as to trusting in your riches, who ever imagined He could have eternal life by His riches? No man with half a conscience, half a head and no heart at all could suppose that any man trusting in his riches to get him in could enter the kingdom. That would be too absurd. The money-confident Jew might hope that, as his riches were a sign of the favor of God, that favor would not fell him at the last, or their possession might so enlarge his self-satisfaction that he could not entertain the idea of being lost. But trust in his riches? No. It is the last refuge of the richest lover, the richest worshiper, the man to whom their possession is essential for his peace, to say he does not trust in them to take him into life. Doubtless the man who thinks of nothing so much, trusting them in a very fearful sense. But hundreds who do so will yet say, I do not trust in my riches, I trust in, this or that, stop phrase. You forget yourself. You are criticizing the Lord's own words. He said, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of heaven? I do not forget myself. To this I have been leading you. Our Lord, I believe, never said those words. The reading of both the Sinaiatic and the Vatican manuscript, the oldest who we have, that preferred I am glad to see, by both Westcott and Tischendorf, though not by Tregelli's or the Reviser's, is, children, how hard is it to enter into the kingdom of God? These words I take to be those of the Lord. Some copyist, with the mind at least of a rich man, dissatisfied with the Lord's way of regarding money, and like yourself anxious to compromise, must forsooth affix his marginal gloss to the effect that it is not the possessing of riches, but the trusting in them that makes it difficult to enter into the kingdom. Difficult? Why it is eternally impossible for the man who trusts in his riches to enter into the kingdom. It is for the man who has riches it is difficult. Is the Lord supposed to teach that for a man who trusts in his riches it is possible to enter the kingdom? That though impossible with men, this is possible with God? God take the mammon worshipper into his glory? No, the Lord never said it. The annotation of Mr. Facing Both Ways crept into the text and stands in the English version. Our Lord was not in the habit of explaining away his hard words. He let them stand in all the glory of the burning fire wherewith they would purges. Where their simplicity finds corresponding simplicity they are understood. The twofold heart must mistake. It is hard for a rich man, just because he is a rich man, to enter into the kingdom of heaven. Some no doubt comfort themselves with the thought that if it be so hard the fact will be taken into account. It is but another shape of the fancy that the rich man must be differently treated from his fellows, that as he has had his good things here so he must have them there too. Certain as life they will have absolute justice, that is, fairness. But what will that avail if they enter not into the kingdom? It is life they must have. There is no enduring of existence without life. They think they can do without eternal life if only they may live forever. Those who know what eternal life means counted the one terror to have to live on without it. Take them the Lord's words thus. Children, how hard is it to enter into the kingdom of God? It is quite like his way of putting things, calling them first to reflect on the original difficulty for every man of entering into the kingdom of God. He reasserts and yet stronger phrase the difficulty of the rich man. It is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. It always was, always will be, hard to enter into the kingdom of heaven. It is hard even to believe that one must be born from above, must pass into a new and unknown consciousness. The law of faithful Jew, the ceremonial Christian, shrinks from the self-annihilation, the life of grace and truth, the upper air of heavenly delight, the all-embracing love that fills the law full and sets it aside. They cannot accept a condition of being as in itself eternal life, and hard to believe in this life, this kingdom of God, this simplicity of absolute existence, is hard to enter. How hard? As hard as the master of salvation could find words to express the hardness, if any man cometh unto me, and hath not his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. And the rich man must find it harder than another to hate his own life. There is so much associated with it to swell out the self of his consciousness that the difficulty of casting it from him as the mere ugly shadow of the self God made is vastly increased. None can know how difficult it is to enter into the kingdom of heaven, but those who have tried, tried hard, and have not ceased to try. I care not to be told that one may pass it once into all possible sweetness of assurance. It is not assurance I desire, but the thing itself, not the certainty of eternal life, but eternal life. I care not what other preachers may say, while I know that in Saint Paul the spirit and the flesh were in frequent strife. They only, I repeat, know how hard it is to enter into life, who are in conflict every day, are growing to have this conflict every hour, nay, begin to see that no moment is life without the presence that maketh strong. Let any tell me of peace and content, yea, joy unspeakable as the instant result of the new birth. I deny no such statement, refuse no such testimony. All I care to say is that if by salvation they mean less than absolute oneness with God, I count it no salvation, neither would be content with it if it included every joy in the heaven of their best imagining. If they are not righteous, even as he is righteous, they are not saved, whatever be their gladness or their content, they are but on the way to be saved. If they do not love their neighbor, not as themselves, that is a phrase ill to understand, and not of Christ, but as Christ loves him. I cannot count them entered into life, though life may have begun to enter into them. Those whose idea of life is simply an eternal one best know how hard it is to enter into life. The Lord said, children, how hard is it to enter into the kingdom? The disciples little knew what was required of them. Demands unknown before are continually made upon the Christian. It is the ever-fresh rousing and calling, asking and sending of the spirit that worketh in the children of obedience. When he thinks he has attained, then is he in danger. When he finds the mountain he has so long been climbing, show suddenly a distant peak, radiant in eternal whiteness, and all but lost in heavenly places, a peak whose glory crowned apex it seems as if no human foot can ever reach. Then is there hope for him, proof there is then that he has been climbing, for he beholds the yet unclimbed. He sees what he could not see before. If he knows little of what he is, he knows something of what he is not. He learns ever afresh that he is not in the world as Jesus was in the world, but the very wind that breathes courage as he climbs is the hope that one day he shall be like him, seeing him as he is. Things are things, and things in general, save as a thwarting matter of conquest and means of spiritual annexation, are very ready to prove inimical to the better life. The man who for consciousness of well-being depends upon anything but life, the life essential, is a slave. He hangs on what is less than himself. He is not perfect who, deprived of every thing, would not sit down calmly, content, aware of a well-being untouched, for nonetheless would he be possessor of all things, the child of the eternal. Things are given us, this body first of things, that through them we may be trained both to independence and true possession of them. We must possess them. They must not possess us. Their use is to mediate, as shapes and manifestations in lower kind of the things that are unseen, that is in themselves unseeable, the things that belong not to the world of speech, but the world of silence, not to the world of showing, but the world of being, the world that cannot be shaken and must remain. These things unseen take form in the things of time and space, not that they may exist, for they exist in and from eternal Godhead, but that their being may be known to those in training for the eternal. These things unseen, the sons and daughters of God must possess, but instead of reaching out after them, they grasp at their forms, reward the things seen as the things to be possessed, fall in love with the bodies instead of the souls of them. There are good people who can hardly believe that if the young man had consented to give up his wealth, the Lord would not have told him to keep it. They too seem to think the treasure in heaven insufficient as a substitute. They cannot believe he would have been better off without his wealth. It's not wealth power, they ask. It is indeed power. And so is a wolf hidden in the robe. It is power, but as of a brute machine of which the owner ill knows the handles and cranks, valves and governor. The multitude of those who read the tale are of the same mind as the youth himself in his worst moment, as he turned and went, with one vast difference, that they are not sorrowful. Things can never be really possessed by the man who cannot do without them, who would not be absolutely divinely content in the consciousness that the cause of his being is within it and with him. I would not be misunderstood. No man can have the consciousness of God with him and not be content. I mean that no man who has not the father so as to be eternally content in him alone can possess a sunset or a field of grass or a mine of gold or the love of a fellow creature according to its nature, as God would have him possess it in the eternal way of inheriting, having, and holding. He who has God has all things after the fashion in which he who made them has them. To man, woman, and child, I say, if you are not content, it is because God is not with you as you need him, not with you as he would be with you, as you must have him, for you need him as your body never needed food or air, need him as your soul never hungered after joy or peace or pleasure. It is imperative on us to get rid of the tyranny of things. See how imperative. Let the young man cling with every fiber to his wealth. What God can do, he will do. This child shall not be left in the hell of possession. Comes the angel of death. And where are the things that haunted the poor soul with such manifold hindrance and obstruction? The world, and all that is in the world, drops and slips from his feet, from his hands, carrying with it his body, his eyes, his ears, every pouch, every coffer that could delude him with the fancy of possession. Is the man so freed from the dominion of things? Does death so serve him, so ransom him? Why then hasten the hour? So not the youth abide the stroke of time's clock, await the inevitable on its path to free him? Not so, for then first, I presume, does the man of things become aware of their tyranny? When a man begins to abstain, then first he recognizes the strength of his passion. It may be, when a man has not a thing left, he will begin to know what a necessity he had made of things, and if then he begin to contend with them, to cast out of his soul what death has torn from his hands, then first will he know the full passion of possession, the slavery of prizing the worthless part of the precious. Therein, then, lies the service of death. He takes the sting but leaves the poison. In this it is not the fetters that gall, but the fetters that soothe which eat into the soul. When the fetters of gold are gone, on which the man delighted to gaze, though they held him fast to his dungeon wall, buried from air and sunshine, then first will he fill them in the soreness of their lack, in the weary indifference with which he looks on earth and sea, on space and stars. When the truth begins to dawn upon him, that those fetters were a horror and a disgrace, then will the good of saving death appear, and the man begin to understand that having never was, never could be well-being, that it is not by possessing we live, but by life we possess. In this way is the loss of things he thought he had, hardly towards yet in favor of deliverance. It may seem to the man the first of his slavery when it is in truth the beginning of his freedom. Never soul was set free without being made to fill its slavery. Nothing but itself can enslave a soul. Nothing without itself free it. When the drunkard, free of his body, but retaining his desire unable to indulge it, has time at length to think, in the lack of the means of destroying thought. Surely there dawns for him then at last a fearful hope. Not until, by the power of God and his own obedient effort, he is raised into such a condition that, be the temptation what it might, he would not yield for an immortality of unrequited drunkenness. All its delights and not one of its penalties is he saved. Thus death may give a new opportunity, with some hope for the multitude counting themselves Christians, who are possessed by things as by a legion of devils, who stand well in their church, whose lives are regarded as stainless, who are kind, friendly, give largely, believe in the redemption of Jesus, talk of the world and the church, yet whose care all the time is to heap up, to make much into more, to add house to house and fill to fill, bearing themselves deeper and deeper in the ash heap of things. But it is not the rich man only who is under the dominion of things. They too are slaves who, having no money, are unhappy from the lack of it. The man who is ever digging his grave is little better than he who already lies moldering in it. The money the one has, the money the other would have, is in each the cause of an eternal stupidity. To the one as to the other comes the word. How is it that he do not understand? Unspoken Sermons by George McDonald. The cause of spiritual stupidity. How is it that he do not understand? Saint Mark, Chapter 8, Verse 21. After feeding the 4,000 with seven loaves and a few small fishes on the east side of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus, having crossed the lake, was met on the other side by certain Pharisees, whose attitude towards him was such that he would took himself again to the boat and recross the lake. On the way the disciples bethought them that they had in the boat but a single loaf. Probably while the Lord was occupied with the Pharisees, one of them had gone and bought it, little thinking they were about to start again so soon. Jesus, still occupied with the antagonism of the leaders of the people, and desirous of destroying their influence on his disciples, began to warn them against them. In so doing he made use of a figure they had heard him use before, that of Levin as representing a hidden but potent and pervading energy. The kingdom of heaven, he had told them, was like Levin hidden meal, gradually leavening the whole of it. He now tells them to beware of the Levin of the Pharisees. The disciples, whose minds were occupied with their lack of provisions, the moment they heard the word Levin, thought of bread, concluded it must be because of its absence that he spoke of Levin, and imagined perhaps a warning against some danger of defilement from Phariseical cookery. It is because we have taken no bread. Levin like that of the Pharisees was even then at work in their hearts. For the sign the Pharisees sought in the mockery of unbelief they had had a few hours before, and had already, in respect of all that made it of value, forgotten. It is to the man who is trying to live, to the man who is obedient to the word of the master, that the word of the master unfolds itself. When we understand the outside of things, we think we have them. The Lord puts His things in subdefined, suggestive shapes, yielding no satisfactory meaning to the mere intellect, but unfolding themselves to the conscience and heart, to the man himself in the process of life-effort. Being as the new creation, that of reality, advances in him, the man becomes able to understand the words, the symbols, the parables of the Lord. For life, that is, action, is alone the human condition into which the light of the living can penetrate. Life alone can assimilate life, can change food into growth. See how the disciples here fooled themselves. See how the Lord calls them to their senses. He does not tell them in so many words where they are wrong. He attacks instead the cause in themselves which led to their mistake, a matter always of infinitely more consequence than any mistake itself. The one is a live mistake, an untruth in the soul. The other a near-dead blunder of it. The word connection, therefore, between their blunder and our Lord's exhortation is not to be found. The logic of what the Lord said is not on the surface. Then he speaks not to the words, but to the thought. Here he speaks not even to the thought, but to the whole mode of thinking, to the thought matrix, the inward condition of the men. He addresses himself to rousen them a sense of their lack of confidence in God, which was the cause of their blunder as to his meaning. He reminds them of the two miracles with the loaves, and the quantity of fragments left beyond the need. From one of these miracles they had just come, it was not a day behind them, yet here they were doubting already. He makes them go over the particulars of the miracles, hardly to refresh their memories, and they were tenacious enough of the marvel, but to make their heart dwell on them, for they had already forgotten, or had failed to see their central revelation, the eternal fact of God's love, and care, and compassion. They knew the number of the men each time, the number of the loaves each time, the number of the baskets of fragments they had each time taken up, but they forgot the love that had so broken the bread that its remnants twenty times outweighed its loaves. Having thus questioned them like children, and listened as to the answers of children, he turns the light of their thoughts upon themselves, and with an argument to the man which overlaps all the links of its own absolute logic demands, how is it that ye do not understand? Then they did understand, and knew that he did not speak to them of the leaven of bread, but of the teaching of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees. He who trusts can understand. He whose mind is set at ease can discover a reason. How otherwise than by rebuking and quailing their anxiety could those words have made them see what then they saw? What connection was there between how many baskets took ye up, and how is it that ye do not understand? What had the miracles to do with their discovering that when he spoke of leaven it was not the leaven of bread? If not of the leaven of bread, how did the reference to those miracles of bread make them recognize the fact? The lesson he would have had them learn from the miracle, the natural lesson, the only lesson worthy of the miracle, was that God cared for his children and could, did, and would provide for their necessities. This lesson they had not learned. No doubt the power of the miracle was some proof of his mission, but the love of it proved it better, for it made it worth proving. It was a throb of the Father's heart. The ground of the master's up-braiding is not that they did not understand him, but that they did not trust God, that after all they had seen they yet troubled themselves about bread. Because we easily imagine ourselves in want, we imagine God ready to forsake us. The miracles of Jesus were the ordinary works of his Father, but small and swift that we might take them in. The lesson of them was that help is always within God's reach when his children wanted, their design, to show what God is, not that Jesus was God, but that his Father was God, that is, was what he was, for no other kind of God could be, or be worth believing in, no other notion of God be worth having. The mission undertaken by the Son was not to show himself as having all power in heaven and earth, but to reveal his Father, to show him to men such as he is, that men may know him and knowing trust him. It were a small boon indeed that God should forgive men, and not give himself. It would be but to give them back themselves, and less than God just as he is will not comfort men for the essential sorrow of their existence. Only God the gift can turn that sorrow into essential joy. Jesus came to give them God, who is eternal life. Those miracles of feeding gave the same lesson to their eyes, their hands, their mouths, that his words gave to their ears when he said, Seek not ye what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, neither be ye of doubtful mind, for your Father knoweth that ye have need of these things. Be ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you. So little had they learned it yet that they remembered the loaves, but forgot the Father. As men in their theology forget the very Theos logos. Thus forgetting they were troubled about provision for the day, and the moment Levin was mentioned thought of bread. What else could he mean? The connection was plain. The Lord reminds them of the miracle, which had they believed after its true value they would not have been so occupied as to miss what he meant. It had set forth to them the truth of God's heart towards them, revealed the loving care without which he would not be God. Had they learned this lesson they would not have needed the reminder, for their hearts would not have been so filled with discomfort as to cause them to mistake his word. Had they but said with themselves that, though they had but one loaf, they had him who makes all the loaves, they would never have made the foolest blunder they did. The answer then to the Lord's reproach, how is it that ye do not understand, is plainly this. Their minds were so full of care about the day's bread that they could not think with simplicity about anything else. The mere mention of Levin threw them floundering afresh in the bog of their unbelief. When the Lord reminded them of what their eyes had seen, so of what he was and what God was, and of the foolishness of their care, the moment their fear was taught to look up, that moment they began to see what the former words of the Lord must have meant. Their minds grew clear enough to receive and reflect in a measure their intent. The care of the disciples was care for the day, not for the morrow. The word morrow must stand for any and every point of the future. The next hour, the next moment, is as much beyond our grasp and as much in God's care as that a hundred years away. Care for the next minute is just as foolish as care for the morrow or for a day in the next thousand years, and neither can we do anything, and both God is doing everything. Those claims only of the morrow which have to be prepared today are of the duty of today. The moment which coincides with work to be done is the moment to be minded. The next is nowhere till God has made it. Their lack of bread seems to have come from no neglect, but from the immediacy of the Lord's re-embarcation. At the same time, had there been a want of foresight, that was not the kind of thing the Lord cared to reprove. It was not this and that fault he had come to set right, but the primary evil of life without God, the root of all evils, from hatred to discourtesy. Certain minor virtues also, prudence among the rest, would thus at length be almost, if not altogether, superseded. If a man forget a thing, God will see to that. Man is not Lord of his memory or his intellect, but man is Lord of his will, his action, and is then verily to blame when, remembering a duty, he does not do it, but puts it off, and so forgets it. If a man lay himself out to do the immediate duty of the moment, wonderfully little forethought, I suspect, will be found needful. That forethought only is right which has to determine duty, and pass into action. To the foundation of yesterday's work well done, the work of the moral will be sure to fit. Work done is of more consequence for the future than the foresight of an archangel. With the disciples, as with the rich youth, it was things that prevented the Lord from being understood. As a possession the young man had not a suspicion of the grandeur of the call with which Jesus honoured him. He thought he was hardly dealt with to be offered a patent of heaven's nobility. He was so very rich. Things filled his heart. Things blocked up his windows. Things barricaded his door, so that the very God could not enter. His soul was not empty, swept and garnished, but crowded with meanest idols, among which his spirit crept about upon its knees, wasting on them the gazes that belonged to his fellows and his master. The disciples were a little further on than he. They had left all and followed the Lord. But neither had they yet got rid of things. The paltry solitariness of a loaf was enough to hide the Lord from them, to make them unable to understand him. Why, having forgotten, could they not trust? Surely if he had told them that for his sake they must go all day without food they would not have minded, but they lost sight of God, and were as if either he did not see or did not care for them. In the former case it was the possession of wealth, in the latter the not having more than a loaf that rendered incapable of receiving the word of the Lord. The evil principle was precisely the same. If it be things that slay you, what matter whether things you have or things you have not? The youth, not trusting in God, the source of his riches, cannot brook the word of his son, offering him better riches, more direct from the heart of the Father. The disciples, forgetting who was Lord of the harvest of the earth, cannot understand his word because filled with the fear of a day's hunger. He did not trust in God as having given. They did not trust in God as ready to give. We are like them when, in any trouble, we do not trust him. It is hard on God when his children will not let him give, when they carry themselves so that he must withhold his hand lest he harm them. To take no care that they acknowledge whence their help comes would be to leave them worshipers of idols, trusters in that which is not. Trust is atheism, and the barrier to all growth. Lord, we do not understand thee, because we do not trust thy Father. Wholehearted to us as never yet was mother to her firstborn. Full of care, as if he had none, we think this and that escapes his notice. For this and that he does not think. While we who are evil would die to give our children bread to We are not certain that the only good will give us anything of what we desire. The things of thy world so crowd our hearts that there is no room in them for the things of thy heart, which would raise ours above all fear and make us marry children in our Father's house. Surely, many a whisper of the watching spirit we let slip through brooding over a need not yet come to us. The world makes today's whole head sick, its whole heart faint. When we should be still, sleeping, or dreaming, we are fretting about an hour that lies a half-son's journey away. Not so doest thou, Lord, thou doest the work of thy Father. Work thou such as we, then should we have good cause to be troubled. But thou knowest it is difficult, things pressing upon every sense, to believe that the informing power of them is in the unseen, that out of it they come, that where we can describe no hands directing, a will, nearer than any hand, is moving them from within, causing them to fulfill his word. Help us to obey, to resist, to trust. The care that is filling your mind at this moment, or but waiting till you lay the book aside to leap upon you, that need which is no need, is a demon seeking at the spring of your life. No, mine is a reasonable care, and unavoidable care indeed. Is it something you have to do this very moment? No. Then you are allowing it till you serp the place of something that is required of you this moment. There is nothing required of me at this moment. Nay, but there is. The greatest thing that can be required of man. Pray, what is it? Trust in the living God. His will is your life. He may not will, I should have what I need. Then you only think you need it. Is it a good thing? Yes, it is a good thing. Then why doubt you shall have it? Because God may choose to have me go without it. Why should he? I cannot tell. Must it not be in order to give you something instead? I want nothing instead. I thought I was talking to a Christian. I can consent to be called as nothing else. Do you not then know that when God denies anything a child of his values, it is to give him something he values? But if I do not want it, you are nonetheless miserable just because you do not have it. Instead of his great possessions, the young man was to have the company of Jesus and treasure in heaven. When God refused to deliver a certain man from a sore evil concerning which he three times besought him, unaccustomed to be denied, he gave him instead his own graciousness, consoled him in person for his pain. Ah, but that was St. Paul. True, what of that? He was won by himself. God deals with all his children after his own father nature. No scripture is of private interpretation, even for St. Paul. It sets forth God's way with man. If thou art not willing that God should have his way with thee, then in the name of God be miserable, till thy misery drive thee to the arms of the Father. I do trust him in spiritual matters. Everything is an affair of the spirit. If God has a way, then that is the only way. Every little thing in which you would have your own way has a mission for your redemption, and he will treat you as a naughty child until you take your father's way for yours. There will be this difference, however, between the rich that loves his riches and the poor that hates his poverty. That, when they die, the heart of the one will be still crowded with things and their pleasures, while the heart of the other will be relieved of their lack. The one has had his good things, the other his evil things. But the rich man who held his things lightly, nor let them nestle in his heart, who was a channel and no cistern, who was ever and always forsaking his money, starts in the new world side by side with the man who accepted, not hated his poverty. Each will say, I am free. For the only air of the soul in which it can breathe and live is the present God and the spirits of the just. That is our heaven, our home, our all-right place. Cleansed of greed, jealousy, vanity, pride, possession, all the thousand forms of the evil self, we shall be God's children on the hills and in the fields of that heaven, not one desiring to be before another any more than to cast that other out. For ambition and hatred will then be seen to be one and the same spirit. What thou hast, I have. What thou desirest, I will. I give to myself 10 times in giving once to thee. My want that thou mightest have would be rich possession. But let me be practical, for thou art ready to be miserable over trifles and thus to not believe God good enough to care for thy care. I would reason with thee to help thee rid of thy troubles for they hide from thee the thoughts of thy God. The things readiness to be done, those which lie not at the door but on the very table of a man's mind are not merely in general the most neglected but even by the thoughtful man the oftenest let alone. The oftenest postponed. The Lord of life demanding high virtue of us, can it be that he does not care for the first principles of justice? May a man become strong in righteousness without learning to speak the truth to his neighbor? Shall a man climb the last flight of the stair who has never set foot on the lowest step? Truth is one. And he who does the truth in the small thing is of the truth. He who will do it only in a great thing who postpones the small thing near him to the great thing farther from him is not of the truth. Let me suggest some possible parallels between ourselves and the disciples monitoring over their loaf with the bread of life at their side in the boat. We too dull our understandings with trifles, fill the heavenly spaces with phantoms, waste the heavenly time with hurry. To those who possess their souls and patience come the heavenly visions. When I trouble myself over a trifle, even a trifle confessed, the loss of some little article say, spurring my memory and hunting the house, not from immediate need but from dislike of loss. When a book has been borrowed of me and not returned and I have forgotten the borrower and fred over the missing volume while there are thousands on my shelves from which the moments thus lost might gather treasure holding relation with neither moth nor rust nor thief. Am I not like the disciples? Am I not a fool whenever loss troubles me more than recovery would gladden? God would have me wise and smile at the trifle. Is it not time I lost a few things when I care for them so unreasonably? This losing of things is of the mercy of God. It comes to teach us to let them go. Or have I forgotten a thought that came to me which seemed of the truth and the revealments to my heart? I want it to keep it, to have it, to use it by and by and it is gone. I keep trying and trying to call it back, feeling a poor man till that thought to be recovered, to be far more lost perhaps in a notebook and to which I shall never look again to find it. I forget that it is live things God cares about, live truths, not set down in a book or in a memory or embalmed in the joy of knowledge, but things lifting up the heart, things active in an act of will. True, my lost thought might have so worked, but had I faith in God, the maker of thought and memory, I should know that if the thought was a truth and so alone worth anything, it must come again, for it is in God, so like the dead, not beyond my reach. Kept for me, I shall have it again. These are foolish illustrations, not worth writing. If such things are not, then the mention of them is foolish, if they are, then he is foolish who would treat them as if they were not. I choose them for their smallness and appeal especially to all who keep house concerning the size of trouble that suffices to hide word and face of God. With every haunting trouble then, great or small, the loss of thousands or the lack of a shilling, go to God and appeal to him, the God of your life to deliver you, his child, from that which is unlike him and therefore does not belong to you, but is antagonistic to your nature. If your trouble is such that you cannot appeal to him, the more need you should appeal to him, where one cannot go to God, there is something especially wrong. If you let thought for the moral or the next year or the next month distress you, if you let the chatter of what is called the public, peering per-blind and through the sanctuary of motive, annoy you, if you seek or greatly heed the judgment of men, capable or incapable, you set open your windows to the mosquitoes of care to drown with their buzzing the voice of the eternal. If you tell me, but that for care, the needful work of the world would be ill done. What work, I ask, can that be, which will be better done by the greedy or anxious than by the free, fearless soul? Can care be a better inspirer of labor than the sending of God? If the work is not his work, then indeed, care may well help it, for its success is loss, but is he worthy the name of man who, for the fear of starvation, will do better work than for the joy that his labor is not in vain in the Lord? I know as well as you that you are not likely to get rich that way, but neither will you block up the gate of the kingdom of heaven against yourself. Ambition in every shape has to do with things, with outward advantages for the satisfaction of self-worship. It is that form of pride, foul shadow of Satan, which usurps the place of aspiration. The sole ambition that is of God is the ambition to rise above one's self. All other is of the devil. Yet is it nursed and cherished and many a soul that thinks itself devout, filling it with petty cares and disappointments, that swarm like bats in its air and shut out the glory of God? The love of the praise of men, the desire of fame, the pride that takes offense, the puffing up of knowledge, these in every other form of protein self-worship, we must get rid of them all. We must be free. The man whom another enslaves may be free as God, to him who is a slave in himself, God will not enter in. He will not sep with him, for he cannot be his friend. He will sit by the humblest hearth where the daily food is prepared. He will not eat in a lumber room, let the lumber be thrones and crowns. Will not, did I say? Cannot, I say. Men full of things would not once partake with God, where he buy them all the day. Nor will God force any door to enter in. He may send a tempest about the house. The wind of his admonishment may burst doors and windows, ye shake the house to its foundations. But not then, not so will he enter. The door must be opened by the willing hand, ere the foot of love will cross the threshold. He watches to see the door move from within. Every tempest is but an assault in the siege of love. The terror of God is but the other side of his love. It is love outside the house that would be inside. Love that knows the house is no house, only a place until it enter, no home, but a tent until the eternal dwell there. Things must be cast out to make room for their souls, the eternal truths which in things find shape and show. But who is sufficient to cast them out? If a man take courage and encounter the army of bats and demon snakes that infest the place of the holy, it is but to find the task too great for him, that the temple of God will not be cleansed by him, that the very dust he raises and sweeping is full of corruptive forces, let such as would do what they must yet cannot, be what they must yet cannot. Remember with hope and courage that he who knows all about our being once spake a parable to the end that they ought always to pray and not to faint. End of chapter three, series two.