 Chapter 8 of Unspoken Sermons, series 1 This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by David Baldwin. Unspoken Sermons by George MacDonald. The LOI. My God, my God, why has Thou forsaken me? St. Matthew, chapter 27, verse 46. I do not know that I should dare to approach this of all utterances into which human breath has ever been molded most awful in import. Did I not feel that, containing both germ and blossom of the final devotion, it contains therefore the deepest, practical lesson the human heart has to learn? The Lord, the Revealer, hides nothing that can be revealed, and will not warn away the foot that treads in naked humility, even upon the ground of that terrible conflict between him and evil. In the smoke of the battle that was fought, not only with the garments rolled in blood, but with burning and fuel of fire, rose up between him and his father, and for the one terrible moment ere he broke the bonds of life, and walked weary and triumphant into his arms, hid God from the eyes of his son. He will give us even to meditate the one thought that slew him at last, when he could bear no more and fled to the father to know that he loved him and was well pleased with him. Our Satan had come at length yet again to urge him with his last temptation, to tell him that although he had done his part, God had forgotten his, that although he had lived by the word of God's mouth, that mouth had no word more to speak to him, that although he had refused to tempt him, God had left him to be tempted more than he could bear, that although he had worshipped none other, for that worship God did not care. The Lord hides not his sacred sufferings, for truth is light, and would be light in the minds of men. The holy child, the son of the father, has nothing to conceal, but all the God had to reveal. Let us then put off our shoes and draw near, and bow the head and kiss those feet that bear forever the scars of our victory. In those feet we clasp the safety of our suffering, our sinning brotherhood. It is with the holiest fear that we should approach the terrible fact of the sufferings of our Lord. Let no one think that those were less, because he was more. The more delicate the nature, the more alive to all that is lovely and true, lawful and right, the more does it feel the antagonism of pain, the inroad of death upon life, the more dreadful is the breach of the harmony of things whose sound is torture. He felt more than man could feel, because he had a larger feeling. He was even therefore worn out sooner than another man would have been. These sufferings were awful indeed when they began to invade the region about to the will. When the struggle to keep consciously trusting in God began to sink in darkness, when the will of the man put forth its last determined effort in that cry after the vanishing vision of the father, my God, my God, why has thou forsaken me? Never had it been so with him before. Never before had he been unable to see God beside him. Yet never was God nearer him than now. For never was Jesus more divine. He could not see, could not feel him near. And yet it is my God that he cries. Thus the will of Jesus in the very moment when his faith seems about to yield is finally triumphant. It has no feeling now to support its no beatific vision to absorb it. It stands naked in his soul and tortured as he stood naked and scourged before Pilate, pure and simple and surrounded by fire. It declares for God. The sacrifice ascends in the cry. My God. The cry comes not out of happiness, out of peace, out of hope, not even out of suffering comes that cry. It was a cry in desolation, but it comes out of faith. It is the last voice of truth speaking when it can but cry. The divine horror of that moment is unfathomable by human soul. It was blackness of darkness. And yet he would believe. Yet he would hold fast. God was his God yet. My God. And in the cry came forth the victory and all was over soon. Of the peace that followed that cry, the peace of a perfect soul large as the universe, pure as light, ardent as life, victorious for God and his brethren. He himself alone can ever know the breadth and length and depth and height. Without this last trial of all, the temptations of our master had not been so full as the human cup could hold. There would have been one region through which we had to pass wherein we might call aloud upon our captain brother, and there would be no voice or hearing. He had avoided the fatal spot. The temptations of the desert came to the young, strong man with his road before him and the presence of his God around him. Nay gathered their very force from the exuberance of his conscious faith. Dare and do, for God is with thee, said the devil. I know it, and therefore I will wait, returned to the king of his brothers. And now after three years of divine action, when his courses run, when the old age of finished work is come, when the whole frame is tortured until the regnant brain falls whirling down the blue gulf of fainting and the giving up of the ghost is at hand, when the friends have forsaken him and fled, comes the voice of the enemy again at his ear. Despair and die, for God is not with thee, all is in vain. Death, not life, is thy refuge. Make haste to Hades, where thy torture will be over. Thou hast deceived thyself, he never was with thee. He was the God of Abraham, Abraham is dead. Whom maketh thou thyself? My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? And the master cries, for God was his God still, although he had forsaken him, forsaken his vision that his faith might glow out triumphant. Forsaken himself? No, come nearer to him than ever. Come nearer, even as but with a yet deeper, more awful pregnancy of import, even as the Lord himself withdrew from the bodily eyes of his friends that he might dwell in their profoundest being. I do not think that it was our Lord's deepest trial, when in the garden he prayed that the cup might pass from him and prayed yet again that the will of the Father might be done, for God's will was then present with him. He was living and acting in that will. But now the foreseen horror has come. He is drinking the dread cup, and God's will has vanished from his eyes. Were God's will visible in his suffering, his will could bow with tearful gladness under the shelter of its grandeur. But now his will is left alone to drink the cup of God's will in torture. In the sickness of this agony, the will of Jesus arises perfect at last, and of itself, unsupported now, declares a naked consciousness of misery hung in the waist darkness of the universe, declares for God. In defiance of pain, of death, of apathy, of self, of negation, of the blackness within and around it, calls aloud upon the vanished God. This is the faith of the Son of God. God withdrew, as it were, that the perfect will of the Son might arise and go forth to find the will of the Father. Is it possible that even then he thought of the lost sheep who could not believe that God was their Father, and for them too, in all their loss and blindness and unlove, cried, saying the word they might say, knowing for them that God means Father and more, and knowing now, as he had never known till now, what a fearful thing it is to be without God and without hope? I dare not answer the question I put. But wherein or what can this alpine apex of faith have to do with the creatures who call themselves Christians, creeping about in the valleys, hardly knowing that there are mountains above them, save that they take a fence at and stumble over the pebbles washed across their path by the glacier streams? I will tell you, we are and remain such creeping Christians because we look at ourselves and not at Christ, because we gaze at the marks of our own soiled feet and the trail of our own defiled garments, instead of up at the snows of purity wither the soul of Christ cloned. Each putting his foot in the footprint of the master and so defacing it turns to examine how far his neighbor's footprint corresponds with that which he still calls the masters, although it is but his own. Or having committed a petty fault, I mean a fault such as only a petty creature could commit, we mourn over the defilements to ourselves and the shame of it before our friends, children, or servants, instead of hastening to make the due confession and amends to our fellow and then forgetting our paltry self with its well-earned disgrace, lift up our eyes to the glory which alone will quicken the true man in us and kill the peddling creature we so wrongly call ourself. The true self is that which can look Jesus in the face and say, my Lord. When the inward sun is shining and the wind of thought, blowing where it list amid the flowers and leaves of fancy and imagination, rouses clad forms and feelings, it is easy to look upwards and say, my God. It is easy when the frost of external failure have braced the mental nerves to healthy endurance and fresh effort after labor. It is easy then to turn to God and trust in Him in whom all honest exertion gives an ability as well as a right to trust. It is easy in pain so long as it does not pass certain undefinable bounds to trust in God for deliverance or pray for strength to endure. But what is to be done when all feeling is gone? When a man does not know whether he believes or not, whether he loves or not, when art, poetry, religion are nothing to him so swallowed up as he in pain or mental depression or disappointment or temptation or he knows not what? It seems to him that God does not care for him and certainly he does not care for God. If he is still humble, he thinks that he is so bad that God cannot care for him and he then believes for the time that God loves us only because and when and while we love him. Instead of believing that God loves us always because he is our God and that we live only by his love or he does not believe in a God at all, which is better. So long as we have nothing to say to God, nothing to do with him, save in the sunshine of the mind when we feel him near us, we are poor creatures, willed upon, not willing, reads, flowering reads it may be and pleasant to behold, but only reads blown about of the wind, not bad but poor creatures. And how in such a condition do we generally act? Do we not sit mourning over the loss of our feelings or worse make frantic efforts to rouse them or 10 times worse, relapse into a state of temporary atheism and yield to the pressing temptation or being heartless, consent to remain careless, conscious of evil thoughts and low feelings alone, but too lazy to content to rouse ourselves against them. We know we must get rid of them someday, but meantime, nevermind, we do not feel them bad. We do not feel anything else good. We are asleep and we know it and we cannot be troubled to wake. No impulse comes to arouse us and so we remain as we are. God does not, by the instant gift of his spirit, make us always feel right, desire good, love, purity, aspire after him and his will. Therefore either he will not or he cannot. If he will not, it must be because it would not be well to do so. If he cannot, then he would not if he could, else a better condition than God's is conceivable to the mind of God, a condition in which he could save the creatures whom he has made better than he can save them. The truth is this. He wants to make us in his own image, choosing the good, refusing the evil. How should he affect this if he were always moving us from within as he does at divine intervals towards the beauty of holiness? God gives us room to be, does not oppress us with his will, stands away from us that we may act from ourselves, that we may exercise the pure will for good. Do not therefore imagine me to mean that we can do anything of ourselves without God. If we choose the right at last, it is all God's doing and only the more his that it is ours, only in a far more marvelous way his than if he had kept us filled with all holy impulses precluding the need of choice. For up to this very point, for this very point, he has been educating us, leading us, pushing us, driving us, enticing us that we may choose him and his will and so be tenfold more his children of his own best making in the freedom of the will found our own first in its loving sacrifice to him, for which in his grandfatherhood he has been thus working from the foundations of the earth that we could be in the most aesthetic worship flowing from the divinest impulse without this willing sacrifice. For God made our individuality as well as and a greater marvel than our dependence, made our apartness from himself that freedom should bind us divinely dearer to himself with a new and inscrutable marvel of love. For the Godhead is still at the root, is the making root of our individuality and the freer the man, the stronger the bond that binds him to him who made his freedom. He made our wills and is striving to make them free for only in the perfection of our individuality and the freedom of our wills can we be all together his children. This is full of mystery, but can we not see enough in it to make us very glad and very peaceful? Not in any other act than one which in spite of impulse or of weakness declares for the truth for God does the will spring into absolute freedom into true life. See then what lies within our reach every time that we are thus lapped in the folds of night. The highest condition of the human will is in sight, is attainable. I say not the highest condition of the human being. That surely lies in the beatific vision in the sight of God. But the highest condition of the human will as distinct, not as separated from God is when not seeing God, not seeming to itself to grasp him at all, it yet holds him fast. It cannot continue in this condition for not finding, not seeing God, the man would die. But the will thus asserting itself, the man has passed from death into life and the vision is nigh at hand. Then first thus free and thus asserting its freedom is the individual will one with the will of God. The child is finally restored to the father. The childhood and the fatherhood meet in one. The brotherhood of the race arises from the dust and the prayer of our Lord is answered. I in them and thou in me that they may be made perfect in one. Let us then arise in God born strength every time that we feel the darkness closing or become aware that it has closed around us and say, I am of the light and not of the darkness. Troubled soul, thou art not bound to feel, but thou art bound to arise. God loves thee whether thou feelest or not. Thou can't not love when thou wilt, but thou art bound to fight the hatred in thee to the last. Try not to feel good when thou art not good, but cry to him who is good. He changes not because thou changes. Nay, he has a special tenderness of love towards thee, for that thou art in the dark and has no light, and his heart is glad when thou dost arise and say, I will go to my father. For he sees thee through all the gloom through which thou can't not see him. Will thou his will? Say to him, my God, I am very dull and low and hard, but thou art wise and high and tender, and thou art, my God, I am thy child, forsake me not. Then fold the arms of thy faith and wait in quietness until light goes up in thy darkness. Fold the arms of thy faith, I say, but not of thy action. Be think thee of something that thou oughtest to do and go and do it, if it be but the sweeping of a room, or the preparing of a meal, or a visit to a friend. He'd not thy feelings, do thy work. As God lives by his own will and we live in him, so has he given to us power to will in ourselves. How much better should we not fare if finding that we are standing with our heads bowed away from the good, finding that we have no feeble inclination to seek the source of our life, we should yet will upwards toward God, rousing that essence of life in us, which he has given us from his own heart, to call again upon him who is our life, who can fill the emptiest heart, rouse the deadest conscious, quicken the dullest feeling, and strengthen the feeblest will. Then if ever the time should come, as perhaps it must come to each of us, when all consciousness of well-being shall have vanished, when the earth shall be but a sterile promontory and the heavens a dull and pestilent congregation of vapors, when man nor woman shall delight us more, may when God himself shall be but a name and Jesus an old story. Then even then when a death far worse than that fathom of grizzly bone is gripping at our hearts and having slain love, hope, faith, forces existence upon us only in agony, then even then we shall be able to cry out with our Lord, my God, my God, why has thou forsaken me? Nor shall we die then, I think, without being able to take up his last words as well and say, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit. End of chapter eight, series one. Chapter nine of Unspoken Sermons, series one. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by David Baldwin. Unspoken Sermons by George MacDonald. The hands of the Father. Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit. Luke chapter 23, verse 26. Neither St. Matthew nor St. Mark tells us of any words uttered by our Lord after the Eloi. They both, along with St. Luke, tell us of a cry with a loud voice and the giving up of the ghost. Between which cry and the giving up, St. Luke records the words, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit. St. Luke says nothing of the Eloi prayer of desolation. St. John records neither the Eloi nor the Father into thy hands, nor the loud cry. He tells us only that after Jesus had received the vinegar, he said, it is finished, and bowed his head and gave up the ghost. Will the Lord ever tell us why he cried so? Was it the cry of relief at the touch of death? Was it the cry of victory? Was it the cry of gladness that he had endured to the end? Or did the Father look out upon him in answer to his my God, and the blessedness of it make him cry aloud because he could not smile? Was such his condition now that the greatest gladness of the universe could express itself only in a loud cry? Or was it but the last wrench of pain ere the final repose began? It may have been all in one. But never surely in all books, in all words of thinking men, can there be so much expressed as lay unarticulated in that cry of the Son of God. Now had he made his Father Lord no longer in the might of making and loving alone, but Lord in right of devotion and deed of love. Now should inward sonship and the spirit of glad sacrifice be born in the hearts of men, for the divine obedience was perfected by suffering. He had been amongst his brethren what he would have his brethren be. He had done for them what he would have them do for God and for each other. God was henceforth inside and beneath them as well as around and above them, suffering with them and for them, giving them all he had, his very life being, his essence of existence, what best he loved, what best he was. He had been among them their God-brother and the mighty story ends with a cry. Then the cry meant it is finished. The cry meant, Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit. Every highest human act is just a giving back to God of that which he first gave to us. Thou God has given me, here again is thy gift. I send my spirit home. Every act of worship is a holding up to God of what God hath made us. Here Lord, look what I have got. Fill with me in what thou hast made me and this thy own bounty, my being. I am thy child and know not how to thank thee save by uplifting the heave offering of the overflowing of thy life and calling aloud, it is thine, it is mine. I am thine and therefore I am mine. The vast operation of the spiritual as of the physical world are simply a turning again to the source. The last act of our Lord in thus commending his spirit at the close of his life was only a summing up of what he had been doing all his life. He had been offering this sacrifice, the sacrifice of himself all the years and in the sacrificing he had lived the divine life. Every morning when he went out ere it was day. Every evening when he lingered on the night-lapped mountain after his friends were gone, he was offering himself to his father in the communion of loving words, of high thoughts, of speechless feelings. And between he turned to do the same thing in deed, namely in loving word, in helping thought in healing action towards his fellows. For the way to worship God while the daylight last is to work. The service of God, the only divine service, is the helping of our fellows. I do not seek to point out this commending of our spirits to the Father as a duty. That is to turn the highest privilege we possess into a burden grievous to be born. But I want to show that it is the simplest, blessedest thing in the human world. For the human being may say thus with himself, am I going to sleep, to lose consciousness, to be helpless for a time, thoughtless, dead, or more awful consideration in the dreams that may come, may I not be weak of will and scant of conscience. Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit. I give myself back to thee. Take me, soothe me, refresh me, make me over again. Am I going out into the business and turmoil of the day where so many temptations may come to do less honorably, less faithfully, less kindly, less diligently than the ideal man would have me do? Father, into thy hands. Am I going to do a good deed? Then of all times, Father, into thy hands, lest the enemy should have me now. Am I going to do a hard duty from which I would gladly be turned aside, to refuse a friend's request, to urge a neighbor's conscience? Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit. Am I in pain? Is illness coming upon me to shed out the glad visions of a healthy brain and bring me such as are troubled and untrue? Take my spirit, Lord, and see as thou art want, that it has no more to bear than it can bear. Am I going to die? Thou knowest, if only from the cry of thy son, how terrible that is. And if it comes not to me in so terrible a shape as that in which it came to him, think how poor to bear I am beside him. I do not know what the struggle means, for of the thousands who pass through it every day, not one enlightens his neighbor left behind. But shall I not long with agony for one breath of thy air and not receive it? Shall I not be torn asunder with dying? I will question no more. Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit. For it is thy business, not mine. Thou wilt know every shade of my suffering. Thou wilt care for me with thy perfect fatherhood, for that makes my sonship and enwraps and enfolds it. As a child, I could bear great pain when my father was leaning over me or had his arm about me. How much nearer my soul cannot thy hands come, yea, with the comfort, Father, of me, that I have never yet even imagined. For how shall my imagination overtake thy swift heart? I care not for the pain, so long as my spirit is strong. And into thy hands I commend that spirit. If thy love, which is better than life, receive it, then surely thy tenderness will make it great. Thus made the human being, say with himself, thank brothers, thank sisters. We walk in the air of an eternal fatherhood. Every uplifting of the heart is a looking up to the Father. Graciousness and truth are around, above, beneath us, yea, in us. When we are least worthy then, most tempted, hardest, unkindest, let us yet commend our spirit into his hands. With or else dare we send them. How the earthly Father would love a child who would creep into his room with angry troubled face and sit down at his feet saying when asked what he wanted. I feel so naughty, Papa, and I want to get good. Would he say to his child, how dare you? Go away and be good, and then come to me. And shall we dare to thank God would send us away if we came thus and would not be pleased that we came, even if we were angry as Jonah? Would we not let all the tenderness of our nature flow forth upon such a child? And shall we dare to thank that if we, being evil, know how to give good gifts to our children, God will not give us his own spirit when we come to ask him. Will not some heavenly dew descend upon the hot anger, some genial raindrop on the dry selfishness, some glance of sunlight on the cloudy hopelessness? Bread, at least, will be given, and not a stone. Water, at least, will be sure, and not vinegar mingled with gall. Nor is there anything we can ask for ourselves that we may not ask for another. We may commend any brother, any sister, to the common fatherhood, and there will be moments when, filled with that spirit which is the Lord, nothing will ease our hearts of their love, but the commending of all men, all our brothers, all our sisters, to the one father. Nor shall we ever know that repose in the Father's hands that rest of the Holy Sepulcher, which the Lord knew when the agony of death was over, when the storm of the world died away behind his retiring spirit, and he entered the regions where there is only life, and therefore all that is not music is silence, for all noise comes of the conflict of life and death. We shall never be able, I say, to rest in the bosom of the Father, till the Fatherhood is fully revealed to us in the love of the brothers. For he cannot be our Father, save as he is their Father, and if we do not see him and fill him as their Father, we cannot know him as ours. Never shall we know him a right until we rejoice and exult for our race that he is the Father. He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? To rest, I say, at last, even in those hands into which the Lord commended his spirit, we must have learned already to love our neighbor as ourselves. End of chapter nine, series one. After ten of unspoken sermons, series one. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by David Baldwin. Unspoken sermons by George McDonald. Love thy neighbor. Thou shalt's love thy neighbor as thyself. Saint Matthew chapter 22, verse 39. The original here, quoted by our Lord, is to be found in the words of God to Moses, Leviticus chapter 19, verse 18. Thou shalt not avenge nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. I am the Lord. Our Lord never thought of being original. The older the saying, the better, if it utters the truth he wants to utter. In him it becomes fact. The word was made flesh. And so, in the wondrous meeting of extremes, the words he spoke were no more words, but spirit and life. The same words are twice quoted by Saint Paul and once by Saint James, always in a similar mode. Love they represent as the fulfilling of the law. Is the converse true then? Is the fulfilling of the law love? The apostle Paul says, love worketh no ill to his neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. Does it follow that working no ill is love? Love will fulfill the law. Will the law fulfill love? No, verily. If a man keeps the law, I know he is a lover of his neighbor, but he is not a lover because he keeps the law. He keeps the law because he is a lover. No heart will be content with the law for love. The law cannot fulfill love, but at least the law will be able to fulfill itself, though it reaches not to love. I do not believe it. I am certain that it is impossible to keep the law towards one's neighbor, except one loves him. The law itself is infinite, reaching to such delicacies of action that to the man who tries most will be the man most aware of defeat. We are not made for law, but for love. Love is law because it is infinitely more than law. It is of an altogether higher region than law is, in fact, the creator of law. Had it not been for love, not one of the shelt's knots of the law would have been uttered. True, once uttered, they show themselves in the forms of justice, yay, even in the inferior and worldly forms of prudence and self-preservation. But it was love that spoke them first. Were there no love in us, what sense of justice could we have? Would not each be filled with the sense of his own wants and before ever tearing to himself? I do not see that it is conscious love that breeds justice, but I do say that without love in our nature, justice would never be born. For I do not call that justice, which consists only in a sense of our own rights. True, there are poor and withered forms of love, which are immeasurably below justice now, but even now they are of speechless worth, for they will grow into that which will supersede because it will necessitate justice. Of what use, then, is the law? To lead us to Christ, the truth. To waken in our minds a sense of what our deepest nature, the presence, namely, of God in us, requires of us. To let us know, in part by failure, that the purest effort of will, of which we are capable, cannot lift us up even to the abstaining from wrong to our neighbor. What man, for instance, who loves not his neighbor and yet wishes to keep the law, will there be confident that never by word, look, tone, gesture, silence, will he bear false witness against that neighbor? What man can judge his neighbor aright, save him whose love makes him refuse to judge him? Therefore, are we told to love and not judge? Love is the sole justice of which we are capable, and that perfect it will comprise all justice. Nay more, to refuse our neighbor love, is to do him the greatest wrong, but of this afterwards. In order to fulfill the commonest law, I repeat, we must rise into a loftier region altogether, a region that is above law because it is spirit and life and makes the law. In order to keep the law towards our neighbor, we must love our neighbor. We are not made for law, but for grace, or for faith, to use another word so much misused. We are made on two largest scale altogether to have any pure relation to mere justice, if indeed we can say there is such a thing. It is but an abstract idea which in reality will not be abstracted. The law comes to make us long for the needful grace, that is for the divine condition in which love is all, for God is love. Though the fulfilling of the law is the practical form love will take and the neglect of it is the conviction of lovelessness, though it is the mode in which a man's will must begin at once to be loved to his neighbor. Yet that our Lord meant by the love of our neighbor, not the fulfilling of the law towards him, but that condition of being, which results in the fulfilling of the law and more, is sufficiently clear from his story of the Good Samaritan. Who is my neighbor? Said the lawyer. And the Lord taught him that everyone to whom he could be or for whom he could do anything was his neighbor. Therefore, that each of the race, as he comes within the touch of one tentacle of our nature, is our neighbor. Which of the inhibitions of the law is illustrated in the tale? Not one. The love that is more than law and renders its breach impossible lives in the endless story, coming out in active kindness, that is the recognition of kin, of kind, of nine-ness of neighborhood. Yay, in tenderness and loving kindness, the Samaritan heart akin to the Jew heart, the Samaritan hands neighbors to the Jewish wounds. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. So direct and complete is this parable of our Lord, that one becomes almost the shame of further talk about it. Suppose a man of the company had put the same question to our Lord that we have been considering, had said, but may I keep the law and yet not love my neighbor? Would he not have returned? Keep thou the law thus, not in the letter, but in the spirit, that is in the truth of action, and thou wilt soon find, O Jew, that thou lovest thy Samaritan. And yet when thoughts and questions arise in our minds, he desires that we should follow them. He will not check us with a word of heavenly wisdom scornfully uttered. He knows that not even his words will apply to every question of the willing soul, and we know that his spirit will reply. When we want to know more, that more will be there for us. Not every man, for instance, finds his neighbor in need of help, and he would gladly hasten the slow results of opportunity by true thinking. Thus would we be ready for further teaching from that spirit who is the Lord. But how, says a man who is willing to recognize the universal neighbor head, but finds himself unable to fulfill the bare law towards the woman even whom he loves best, how am I then to rise into that higher region, that imperian of love? And beginning straightway to try to love his neighbor, he finds that the imperian of which he spoke is no more to be reached in itself than the law was to be reached in itself. As he cannot keep the law without first rising into the love of his neighbor, so he cannot love his neighbor without first rising higher still. The whole system of the universe works upon this law, the driving of things upwards toward the center. The man who will love his neighbor can do so by no immediately operative exercise of the will. It is the man fulfilled of God from whom he came and by whom he is, who alone can as himself love his neighbor who came from God too and is by God too. The mystery of individuality and consequent relation is deep as the beginnings of humanity and the questions then arising can be solved only by him who has practically at least solved the holy necessities resulting from his origin. In God alone can man meet man. In him alone the converging lines of existence touch and cross not. When the mind of Christ, the life of the head courses through that atom which the man is of the slowly revivifying body, when he is alive too, then the love of the brothers is there as conscious life. From Christ through the neighbors comes the life that makes him a part of the body. It is possible to love our neighbors as ourselves. Our Lord never spoke hyperbolically, although indeed that is the supposition on which many unconsciously interpret his words in order to be able to persuade themselves that they believe them. We may see that it is possible before we attain to it for our perceptions of truth are always in advance of our condition. True, no man can see it perfectly until he is it, but we must see it, that we may be it. A man who knows that he does not yet love his neighbor as himself may believe in such a condition, may even see that there is no other goal of human perfection, nothing else to which the universe is speeding propelled by the Father's will. Let him labor on and not faint at the thought that God's day is a thousand years. His millennium is likewise one day, yea, this day, for we have him, the love in us working even now the far end. But while it is true that only when a man loves God with all his heart will he love his neighbor as himself, yet there are mingled processes in the attainment of this final result. Let us try to aid such operation of truth by looking farther. Let us suppose that the man who believes our Lord both meant what he said and knew the truth of the matter proceeds to endeavor obedience in this of loving his neighbor as himself. He begins to think about his neighbors generally and he tries to fill love towards them. He finds at once that they begin to classify themselves. With some he feels no difficulty, for he loves them already, not indeed because they are, but because they have, by friendly qualities, by showing themselves lovable, that is, loving already, moved his feelings as the wind moves the water, that is, without any self-generated action on his part. And he feels that this is nothing much to the point, though of course he would be farther from the desired end if he had none such to love and farther still if he loved none such. He recalls the words of our Lord, if he loved them that love you, what reward have ye? And his mind fixes upon, let us say, one of a second class and he tries to love him. The man is no enemy. We have not come to that class of neighbors yet, but he is dull, uninteresting, in a negative way he thinks, unlovable. What is he to do with him? With all his effort he finds the goal as far off as ever. Naturally, in his failure, the question arises, is it my duty to love him who is unlovable? Certainly not if he is unlovable, but that is a begging of the question. Thereupon the man falls back on the primary foundation of things and asks, how then is the man to be loved by me? Why should I love my neighbor as myself? We must not answer, because the Lord says so. It is because the Lord says so that the man is inquiring after some help to obey. No man can love his neighbor, merely because the Lord says so. The Lord says so because it is right and necessary and natural and the man wants to fill it to thus right and necessary and natural. Although the Lord would be pleased with any man for doing a thing because he said it, he would show his pleasure by making the man more and more dissatisfied until he knew why the Lord had said it. He would make him see that he could not, in the deepest sense, in the way the Lord loves, obey any command until he saw the reasonableness of it. Observe, I do not say the man ought to put off obeying the command until he sees its reasonableness. That is another thing quite and does not lie in the scope of my presence opposition. It is a beautiful thing to obey the rightful source of a command. It is a more beautiful thing to worship the radiant source of our light and it is for the sake of obedient vision that our Lord commands us. For then our heart meets his, we see God. Let me represent in the form of a conversation what might pass in the man's mind on the opposing sides of the question. Why should I love my neighbor? He is the same as I and therefore I ought to love him. Why? I am I, he is he. He has the same thoughts, feelings, hopes, sorrows, joys as I. Yes, but why should I love him for that? He must mind his. I can only do with mine. He has the same consciousness as I have. As things look to me, so things look to him. Yes, but I cannot get into his consciousness nor he into mine. I feel myself, I do not feel him. My life flows through my veins, not through his. The world shines into my consciousness and I am not conscious of his consciousness. I wish I could love him, but I do not see why. I am an individual. He is an individual. Myself must be closer to me than he can be. Two bodies keep me apart from his self. I am isolated with myself. Now here lies the mistake at last. While the thinker supposes a duality in himself which does not exist, he falsely judges the individuality a separation. On the contrary, it is the sole possibility and very bond of love. Otherness is the essential ground of affection. But in spiritual things, such a unity is presupposed in the very contemplation of them by the spirit of man that wherever anything does not exist that ought to be there, the space it ought to occupy, even if but a blank, assumes the appearance of a separating gulf. The negative looks a positive. Where a man does not love, the not loving must seem rational. For no one loves because he sees why, but because he loves. No human reason can be given for the highest necessity of divinely created existence, for reasons are always from above downwards. A man must just feel this necessity and then questioning is over. It justifies itself. But he who has not felt has it not to argue about. He has but its phantom, which he created himself in a vain effort to understand and which he supposes to be it. Love cannot be argued about in its absence, for there is no reflex, no symbol of its near enough to the fact of it to admit of just treatment by the algebra of reason or imagination. Indeed, the very talking about it raises a mist between the mind and the vision of it. But let a man once love and all those difficulties which appear to pose to love will just be so many arguments for loving. Let a man once find another who has fallen among thieves. Let him be a neighbor to him, pouring oil and wine into his wounds and binding them up and setting him on his own beast and paying for him at the end. Let him do all this merely from a sense of duty. Let him even in the pride of his fancied and the ignorance of his true calling, bait no jot of his Jewish superiority. Let him condescend to the very baseness of his own lowest nature. Yet such will be the virtue of obeying an eternal truth even to his poor measure of putting in actuality what he has not even seen in theory, of doing the truth even without believing it. That even if the truth does not after the deed give the faintest glimmerest truth in the man, he will yet be ages nearer the truth than before. For he will go on his way loving that Samaritan neighbor a little more than his Jewish dignity will justify. Nor will he question the reasonableness of so doing, although he may not care to spend any logic upon its support. How much more if he be a man who would love his neighbor if he could, will the higher condition unsought have been found in the action. For man is a whole, and as soon as he unites himself by obedient action, the truth that is in him makes itself known to him, shining from the new whole. For his action is his response to his maker's design, his individual part in the creation of himself, his yielding to the all in all, to the tides of whose harmonious cosmoplastic life, all his being since forth lies open for interpenetration and assimilation. When will once begins to aspire, it will soon find that action must proceed feeling that the man may know the foundation itself of feeling. With those who recognize no authority as the ground of tentative action, a doubt, a suspicion of truth, ought to be ground enough for putting it to the test. The whole system of divine education as regards the relation of man and man has for its end that man should love his neighbor as himself. It is not a lesson that he can learn by itself or a duty the obligation of which can be shown by argument, any more than the difference between right and wrong can be defined in other terms than their own. But that difference, it may be objected, manifests itself of itself to every mind. It is self-evident, whereas the loving of one's neighbor is not seen to be a primary truth. So far from it that far the greater number of those who hope for an eternity of blessedness through him who taught it, do not really believe it to be a truth. Believe on the contrary that the paramount obligation is to take care of oneself at much risk of forgetting one's neighbor. But the human race generally has got as far as the recognition of right and wrong and therefore most men are capable of making the distinction. The race has not yet lived long enough for its latest offspring to be born with the perception of the truth of love to the neighbor. It is to be seen by the present individual only after a long reception of and submission to the education of life. And once seen it is believed. The whole constitution of human society exists for the express end, I say, of teaching the two truths by which man lives, love to God and love to man. I will say nothing more of the mysteries of the parental relation because they belong to the teaching of the former truth than that we come into the world as we do to look up to the love over us and see in it a symbol poor and weak yet the best we can have or receive of the divine love. Footnote. It might be expressed after a deeper and truer fashion by saying that God making human affairs after his own thoughts, they are therefore such as to be the best teachers of love to him and love to our neighbor. This is an immeasurably nobler and truer manner of regarding them than as a scheme or plan invented by the divine intellect. Footnote closed. And thousands more would find it easy to love God if they had not such miserable types of him in the self seeking impulse driven, purposeless, faithless beings who are all they have for father and mother and to whom their children are no dearer than her litter is to the unthinking dam. What I want to speak of now with regard to the second grade commandment is the relation of brotherhood and sisterhood. Why does my brother come of the same father and mother? Why do I behold the helplessness and confidence of his infancy? Why is the infant laid on the knee of the child? Why do we grow up with the same nurture? Why do we behold the wonder of the sunset and the mystery of the growing moon together? Why do we share one bed, join in the same games and attempt the same exploits? Why do we quarrel, vow revenge and silence and endless enmity and unable to resist the brotherhood within us wind arm in arm and forget all within the hour? Is it not that love may grow lord of all between him and me? Is it not that I may feel towards him what there are no words or forms of words to express? A love namely in which the divine self rushes forth in utter self-forgetfulness to live in the contemplation of the brother. A love that is stronger than death, glad and proud and satisfied. But if love stopped there, what will be the result? Ruin to itself, loss of the brotherhood. He who loves not his brother for deeper reasons than those of a common parentage will cease to love him at all. The love that enlarges not its borders that is not ever spreading and including and deepening will contract, shrivel, decay, die. I have had the sons of my mother that I may learn the universal brotherhood. For there is a bond between me and the most wretched liar that ever died for the murder he would not even confess closer infinitely than that which springs only from having one father and mother. That we are the sons and the daughters of God born from his heart, the outcoming offspring of his love is a bond closer than all other bonds in one. No man ever loved his own child or right who did not love him for his humanity, for his divinity, to the utter forgetting of his origin from himself. The son of my mother is indeed my brother by this greater and closer bond as well. But if I recognize that bond between him and me at all, I recognize it for my race. True and, thank God, the greater excludes not the less. It makes all the weaker bonds stronger and truer, nor forbids that we're all our brothers. Some should be those of our bosom. Still, my brother, according to the flesh, is my first neighbor, that we may be very nigh to each other, whether we will or know, while our hearts are still tender and so may learn brotherhood. For our love to each other is but the throbbing of the heart of the great brotherhood and could come only from the eternal father, not from our parents. Then my second neighbor appears, and who is he? Whom I come in contact with so ever. He with whom I have any transactions, any human dealings, whatever. Not the man only with whom I dine, not the friend only with whom I share my thoughts. Not the man only whom my compassion would lift from some slow, but the man who makes my clothes, not the man who prints my books, the man who drives me in his cab, the man who begs for me in the street, to whom it may be for brotherhood's sake I must not give. Yet even the man who condescends to me, with all and each there is a chance of doing the part of a neighbor, if in no other way yet by speaking truly, acting justly and thinking kindly. Even these deeds will help to that love which is born of righteousness. All true action clears the springs of right feeling and lets their waters rise and flow. A man must not choose his neighbor. He must take the neighbor that God sends him. In him, whoever he be, lies hidden or revealed a beautiful brother. The neighbor is just the man who is next to you at the moment, the man with whom any business has brought you in contact. Thus will love spread and spread in wider and stronger pulses till the whole human race will be to the man sacredly lovely. Drink debased, vice-defeatured, pride-puffed, wealth-bollen, vanity-smeared. They will yet be brothers, yet be sisters, yet be God-born neighbors. Any rough-hewn semblance of humanity will its length be enough to move the man to reverence and affection. It is harder for some to learn thus than others. There are whose first impulses ever to repel and not to receive. But learn they may and learn they must. Even these may learn in this grace until a countenance unknown will awaken them a yearning of affection rising to pain because there is for it no expression and they can only give the man to God and to be still. And now will come in all the arguments out of which the man tried in vain before to build a stair up to the sunny heights of love. Ah, brother, thou hast a soul like mine, he will say. Out of thine eyes thou lookest, and sights and sounds and odors visit thy soul as mine with wonder and tender comforting. Thou too lovest the faces of thy neighbors. Thou art oppressed with thy sorrows, uplifted with thy joys. Perhaps thou knowest not so well as I that the region of gladness surrounds all thy grief, of light all thy darkness, of peace all thy tumult. Oh, my brother, I will love thee. I cannot come very near thee. I will love thee the more. It may be thou does not love thy neighbor. It may be thou thinkest only how to get from him, how to gain by him, how lonely then must thou be, how shut up in thy poverty-stricken room with the bare walls of thy selfishness and the hard couch of thy unsatisfaction. I will love thee the more. Thou shalt not be alone with thyself. Thou art not me. Thou art another life, a second self. Therefore I can, may, and will love thee. When once to a man the human face is the human face divine, and the hand of his neighbor is the hand of a brother, then will he understand what Saint Paul meant when he said, I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren. But he will no longer understand those who, so far from feeling the love of their neighbor and essential of their being, expect to be set free from its law in the world to come. There, at least for the glory of God, they may limit its expansive tendencies to the narrow circle of their heaven. On its battlements of safety, they will regard hell from afar and say to each other, Hark, listen to their moans, but do not weep, for they are our neighbors no more. Saint Paul would be wretched before the throne of God if he thought there was one man beyond the pale of his mercy, and that as much for God's glory as for the man's sake. And what shall we say of the man Christ, Jesus, who, that loves his brother, would not, upheld by the love of Christ, and with a dim hope that in the far off time there might be some help for him, arise from the company of the blessed and walk down into the dismal regions of despair, to sit with the last, the only unredeemed, the Judas of his race, and be himself more blessed in the pains of hell than in the glories of heaven? Who in the midst of the golden harps and the white wings, knowing that one of his kind, one miserable brother in the old world time when men were taught to love their neighbor as themselves, was howling unheeded far below in the vaults of the creation, who, I say, would not feel that he must arise, that he had no choice, that, awful as it was, he must gird his loins and go down into the smoke and the darkness and the fire, traveling the weary and fearful road into the far country to find his brother? Who, I mean, that had the mind of Christ, that had the love of the Father? But it is a wild question. God is and shall be all in all. Father of our brothers and sisters, thou wilt not be less glorious than we, taught of Christ, are able to thank thee. When thou goest into the wilderness to seek, thou wilt not come home until thou hast found. It is because we hope not for them in thee, not knowing thee, not knowing thy love, that we are so hard and so heartless to the brothers and sisters whom thou hast given us. One word more. This love of our neighbor is the only door out of the dungeon of self, where we mope and mow, striking sparks and rubbing phosphorescence out of the walls and blowing our own breath into our own nostrils, instead of issuing to the fair sunlight of God the sweet winds of the universe. The man thinks his consciousness is himself, whereas his life consists in the in-breathing of God and the consciousness of the universe of truth. To have himself, to know himself, to enjoy himself, he calls life, whereas if he would forget himself, tenfold would be his life in God and his neighbors. The region of man's life is a spiritual region. God, his friends, his neighbors, his brothers all, is the wide world in which alone his spirit can find room. Himself is his dungeon. If he feels it not now, he will yet feel it one day, feel it as a living soul would feel being prisoned in a dead body, wrapped in sevenfold sermons, and buried in a stone-ribbed vault within the last ripple of the sound of the chanting people in the church above. His life is not in knowing that he lives, but in loving all forms of life. He is made for the all, for God who is the all is his life, and the essential joy of his life lies abroad in the liberty of the all. His delights, like those of the ideal wisdom, are with the sons of men. His health is in the body of which the son of man is the head. The whole region of life is open to him, nay, he must live in it or perish. Nor thus shall a man lose the consciousness of well-being. Far deeper and more complete, God and his neighbor will flash it back upon him, pure as life. No more will he agonize with sickest say to generate it in the light of his own decadence, for he shall know the glory of his own being in the light of God and of his brother. But he may have begun to love his neighbor, with the hope of air long loving him as himself, and notwithstanding start back a frightened, at yet another word of our Lord, seeming to be another law yet harder than the first. Although in truth it is not another, for without obedience to it the former cannot be attained unto. He has not yet learned to love his neighbor as himself, whose heart sinks within him at the word. I say unto you, love your enemies. End of Chapter 10, Series 1 Chapter 11 of Unspoken Sermons, Series 1 You have heard that it has been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, love your enemies. Bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you, that ye may be the children of your father which is in heaven. For he maketh his son to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the public ins the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do you more than others? Do not even the public ins so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your father which is in heaven is perfect? St. Matthew Chapter 5, Verses 43-48 Is not this at length too much to expect? Will a man ever love his enemies? He may come to do good to them that hate him, but when will he pray for them that despitefully use him and persecute him? When? When he is the child of his father in heaven. Then shall he love his neighbor as himself, even if that neighbor be his enemy. In the passage in Leviticus Chapter 19, Verses 18, already referred to in the previous sermon as quoted by our Lord and his apostles, we find the neighbor and the enemy are one. Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. I am the Lord. Look at the glorious way in which Jesus interprets the scripture that went before him. I am the Lord. That ye may be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect. Is it then reasonable to love our enemies? God does. Therefore it must be the highest reason. But is it reasonable to expect that man should become capable of doing so? Yes, on one ground, that the divine energy is at work in man to render at length man's doing divine as his nature is. For this our Lord prayed when he said, that they all may be one as thou father art to me and I in thee, that they also may be one in us. Nothing could be less likely to human judgment. Our Lord knows that one day it will come. Why should we love our enemies? The deepest reason for this we cannot put in words, for it lies in the absolute reality of their being where our enemies are of one nature with us, even of the divine nature. Into this we cannot see save as into a dark abyss. But we can adumbrate something of the form of this deepest reason, if we let the thoughts of our heart move upon the face of the dim profound. Are our enemies men like ourselves? Let me begin by asking. Yes, upon what ground, the ground of their enmity, the ground of the wrong they do us? No, in virtue of cruelty, heartlessness, injustice, disrespect, misrepresentation, certainly not. Humanum est arrere, or to err is human, is a truism. But it possesses, like most truisms, a latent germ of worthy truth. The very word arrere is a sign that there is a way so truly the human that, for man to leave it, is to wander. If it be human to wander, yet the wandering is not humanity. The very words humane and humanity denote some shadow of that loving kindness which, when perfected after the divine fashion, shall include even our enemies. We do not call the offering of human sacrifices, the torturing of captives, cannibalism, humanity. Not because they do such deeds are they men. Their humanity must be deeper than those. It is in virtue of the divine essence which is in them that pure essential humanity, that we call our enemies men and women. It is this humanity that we are to love, a something, I say, deeper altogether than and independent of the region of hate. It is the humanity that originates the claim of neighbor head. The neighborhood only determines the occasion of its exercise. Is this humanity and every one of our enemies, else there were nothing to love? Is it there in very deed? Then we must love it, come between us and it's what may. But how can we love a man or a woman who is cruel and unjust to us, who sears with contempt or cuts off with wrong every tendril we would put forth to embrace, who is mean, unlovely, carping, uncertain, self-righteous, self-seeking, and self-admiring, who can even sneer the most inhuman of human faults, far worse in its essence than mere murder. These things cannot be loved. The best man hates the most, the worst man cannot love them. But are these the man? Does a woman bear that form in virtue of these? Lies there not within the man and the woman a divine element of brotherhood, of sisterhood, a something lovely and lovable, slowly fading it may be, dying away under the fierce heat of vile passions or the yet more fearful cold of sepulchral selfishness? But there that divine something which once awakened to be its own holy self in the man will loathe these unlovely things tenfold more than we loathe them now. Shall this divine thing have no recognition from us? It is the very presence of this fading humanity that makes it possible for us to hate. If it were an animal only and not a man or a woman that did hurt us, we should not hate. We should only kill. We hate the man just because we are prevented from loving him. We push over the verge of the creation. We damn just because we cannot embrace. For to embrace is the necessity of our deepest being, that foiled we hate. Instead of admonishing ourselves that there is our enchanced brother, that there lies our enchanted, disfigured, scarce, recognizable sister, captive of the devil to break how much sooner from their bonds that we love them. We recoil into the hate which would fix them there, and the dearly lovable reality of them we sacrifice to the outer falsehood of Satan's incantations, thus leaving them to perish. Nay, we murder them to get rid of them. We hate them. Yet within the most obnoxious to our hate lies that which could it but show itself as it is, as it will show itself one day, would compel from our hearts a devotion of love. It is not the unfriendly, the unlovely that we are told to love, but the brother, the sister who is unkind, who is unlovely. Shall we leave our brother to his desolate fate? Shall we not rather say, With my love at least, Shall to thou be compassed about? For thou hast not thy own lovingness to enfold thee. Love shall come as near thee as it may, and when thine comes forth to meet mine, we shall be one in the indwelling God. Let no one say I have been speaking in a figure merely, that I have been so speaking, I know. But many things which we see most vividly and certainly, are more truly expressed by using a right figure than by attempting to give them a clear outline of logical expression. My figure means a truth. If any one say, Do not make such vague distinctions. There is the person. Can you deny that that person is unlovely? How then can you love him? I answer. That person with the evil thing cast out of him will be yet more the person, for he will be his real self. The thing that now makes you dislike him, is separable from him, is therefore not he, makes himself so much less himself, for it is working death in him. Now he is in danger of ceasing to be a person at all. When he is clothed and in his right mind, he will be a person indeed. You could not then go on hating him. Begin to love him now, and help him into the loveliness which is his. Do not hate him, although you can. The personality I say, though clouded, besmeared, defiled with the wrong, lies deeper than the wrong. And indeed, so far as the wrong has reached it, is by the wrong injured, yea, so far it may be destroyed. But those who will not acknowledge the claim of love may yet acknowledge the claim of justice. There are who would shrink with horror from the idea of doing injustice to those, from the idea of loving whom they would shrink with equal horror. But if it is impossible, as I believe, without love to be just, much more cannot justice coexist with hate. The pure eye for the true vision of another's claim can only go with the loving heart. The man who hates can hardly be delicate in doing justice, say, to his neighbor's love, to his neighbor's predilections and peculiarities. It is hard enough to be just to our friends. And how shall our neighbors fare with us? For justice demands that we shall think rightly of our neighbor, as certainly as that we shall neither steal his goods nor bear false witness against him. Man is not made for justice from his fellow, but for love, which is greater than justice, and by including supersedes justice. Mere justice is an impossibility, a fiction of analysis. It does not exist between man and man, save relatively to human law. Justice to be justice must be much more than justice. Love is the law of our condition, without which we can no more render justice than a man can keep a straight line walking in the dark. The eye is not single, and the body is not full of light. No man who is even indifferent to his brother can recognize the claims which his humanity has upon him. Nay, the very indifference itself is an injustice. I have taken for granted that the fault flies with the enemy so considered, for upon the primary rocks would I build my foundation. But the question must be put to each man by himself. Is my neighbor indeed my enemy? Or am I my neighbor's enemy? And so take him to be mine. Awful thought. Or if he be mine, am I not his? Am I not refusing to acknowledge the child of the kingdom within his bosom, so killing the child of the kingdom within my own? Let us claim for ourselves no more indulgence than we give to him. Such honesty will end in severity at home and clemency abroad. For we are accountable for the ill in ourselves and have to kill it, for the good in our neighbor and have to cherish it. He only in the name and power of God can kill the bad in him. We can cherish the good in him by being good to it across all the evil fog that comes between our love and his good. Nor ought it to be forgotten that this fog is often the result of misapprehension and mistake, giving rise to all kinds of indignations, resentments, and regrets. Scares anything about us is just as it seems. But at the core there is truth enough to dispel all falsehood and reveal life as unspeakably divine. Oh, brother, sister, across this weary fog, dim lighted by the faint torches of our truth-seeking, I call to the divine in thee which is mine, not to rebuke thee, not to rouse thee, not to say, why hate is thou me? But to say, I love thee, in God's name, I love thee. And I will wait until the true self looks out of thine eyes and knows the true self in me. But in the working of the divine love upon the race, my enemy is doomed to cease to be my enemy and to become my friend. One flash of truth towards me would destroy my enmity at once. One hearty confession of wrong in our enmity passes away. From each comes forth the brother who was inside the enemy all the time. For this the truth is at work. In the faith of this, let us look at the true self. Let us love the enemy now, accepting God's work in reversion as it were. Let us believe as seeing his yet invisible triumph, clasping and holding fast our brother, in defiance of the changeful wiles of the wicked enchantment, which would persuade our eyes and hearts that he is not our brother, but some horrible thing, hateful and hating. But again, I must ask, what if we are in the wrong and do the wrong and hate because we have injured? What then? Why then? Let us cry to God as from the throat of hell, struggle as under the weight of a spiritual incubus, cry as knowing the vile disease that cleaveth fast unto us, cry as possessed of an evil spirit, cry as one buried alive from the sepulchre of our evil consciousness, that he would take pity upon us, the chief of sinners, the most wretched and vile of men, and send some help to lift us from the fearful pit and the myery clay. Nothing will help us but the spirit proceeding from the father and the son, the spirit of the father and the brother casting out and revealing. It will be with tearing and foaming, with a terrible cry, and a lying as one dead that such a demon will go out. But what a vision will then arise in the depths of the purified soul. Be ye therefore perfect, even as your father which is in heaven is perfect. Love your enemies, and ye shall be the children of the highest. It is the divine glory to forgive. Yet a time will come when the unchangeable will cease to forgive, when it will no more belong to his perfection to love his enemies, when he will look calmly, and have his children look calmly too, upon the ascending smoke of the everlasting torment of our strong brothers, our beautiful sisters. Nay, alas, the brothers are weak now, the sisters are ugly now. O brother, believe it not, O Christ, the redeemed would cry, where art thou our strong Jesus, come our grand brother, see the suffering brothers down below, see the tormented sisters, come, lord of life, monarch of suffering, redeem them. For us, we will go down into the burning, and see whether we cannot at least carry through the howling flames a drop of water to cool their tongues. Believe it not, my brother, lest it quench forgiveness in thee, and thou be not forgiven, but go down with those thy brothers to the torment. Wince, if God were not better than that phantom thou callest God, thou should never come out, but wince assuredly thou shalt come out, when thou hast paid the uttermost farthing, when thou hast learned of God in hell, what thou didst refuse to learn of him upon the gentle-toned earth, what the sunshine and the rain could not teach thee, nor the sweet compunctions of the seasons, nor the stately visitings of the morn and the even tide, nor the human face divine, nor the word that was nigh thee in thy heart and in thy mouth, the story of him who was mighty to save, because he was perfect in love. O Father, thou art all in all, perfect beyond the longing of thy children, and we are all and all together thine. Thou wilt make us pure and loving and free. We shall stand fearless in thy presence, because perfect in thy love. Then shall thy children be of good cheer, infinite in the love of each other, and eternal in thy love. Lord Jesus, let the heart of a child be given to us, that so we may arise from the grave of our dead selves and die no more, but see face to face the God of the living. THE GOD OF THE LIVING He is not a God of the dead, but of the living, for all live unto him. It is a recurring cause of perplexity in our Lord's teaching that he is too simple for us, that while we are questioning with ourselves about the design of Solomon's carving upon some gold-plated door of the temple, he is speaking about the foundations of Mount Zion, yea, of the earth itself upon which it stands. If the reader of the Gospel supposes that our Lord was here using a verbal argument with the Sadducees, namely, I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, therefore they are. He will be astonished that no Sadducee was found with courage enough to reply. All that God meant was to introduce himself to Moses as the same God who had aided and protected his fathers while they were alive, saying, I am he that was the God of thy fathers. They found me faithful, thou therefore listen to me, and thou too shall find me faithful unto the death. But no such reply suggested itself even to the Sadducees of that day, for their eastern nature could see argument beyond logic. Shall God call himself the God of the dead, of those who were alive once, but whom he either could not or would not keep alive? Is that the Godhood and its relation to those who worship it? The changeless God of an ever-born and ever-perishing torrent of life, of which each atom cries with burning heart, my God, and straightway passes into the godless cold? Trust in me, for I took care of your fathers once upon a time, though they are God now. Worship and obey me, for I will be good to you for three score years and ten or thereabouts, and after that, when you are not, and the world goes on all the same without you, I will call myself your God still. God changes not. Once God, he is always God. If he has once said to a man, I am thy God, and that man has died the death of the Sadducees creed, then we have a right to say that God is the God of the dead. And wherefore should he not be so far the God of the dead, if during the time allotted to them here, he was the faithful God of the living? What God-like relation can the ever-living, life-giving, changeless God hold to creatures who partake not of his life, who have death at the very core of their being, and are not worth their makers keeping alive? To let his creatures die would be to change, to abjure his Godhead, to cease to be that which he had made himself. If they are not worth keeping alive, then his creating is a poor thing, and he is not so great, nor so divine, as even the poor thoughts of those his dying creatures have been able to imagine him. But our Lord says, all live unto him. With him death is not. Thy life sees our life, O Lord, all of whom all can be said, are present to thee. Thou thinkest about us eternally more than we think about thee. The little life that burns within the body of this death glows unquenchable in thy true seeing eyes. If thou didst forget us for a moment, then indeed death would be. But unto thee we live. The beloved pass from our sight, but they pass not from thine. This that we call death is but a form in the eyes of men. It looks something final and awful cessation and utter change. It seems not probable that there is anything beyond. But if God could see us before we were, and make us after his ideal, that we shall have passed from the eyes of our friends can be no argument that he beholds us no longer. All live unto him. Let the change be ever so great, ever so imposing. Let the unseen life be ever so vague to our conception. It is not against reason to hope that God could see Abraham after his Isaac had ceased to see him. Saw Isaac after Jacob ceased to see him. Saw Jacob after some of the Sadducees had begun to doubt whether there ever had been a Jacob at all. He remembers them, that is, he carries them in his mind. He of whom God thinks lives. He takes to himself the name of their God. The living one cannot name himself after the dead when the very Godhead lies in the giving of life. Therefore they must be alive. If he speaks of them, remembers his own loving thoughts of them, would he not have kept them alive if he could? And if he could not, how could he create them? Can it be an easier thing to call into life than to keep alive? But if they live to God, they are aware of God, and if they are aware of God, they are conscious of their own being, whence then the necessity of a resurrection. For their relation to others of God's children in mutual revelation, and for fresh revelation of God to all. But let us inquire what is meant by the resurrection of the body. With what body do they come? Surely we are not required to believe that the same body is raised again. That is against science, common sense, scripture. St. Paul represents the matter quite otherwise. One feels ashamed of arguing such a purile point. Who could wish his material body, which has indeed died over and over again, since he was born, never remaining for one hour composed of the same matter, its endless activity depending upon its endless change, to be fixed as his changeless possession, such as it may then be, at the moment of death, and secured to him in worthless identity for the ages to come. A man's material body will be to his consciousness at death no more than the old garment he throws aside at night, intending to put on a new and a better in the morning. To desire to keep the old body seems to me to argue a degree of sensual materialism, excusable only in those pagans who, in their Elysian fields, could hope to possess only such a thin, fleeting, dreamy, and altogether finibrial existence, that they might well long for the thicker, more tangible bodily being in which they had experienced the pleasures of a tumultuous life of the upper world. As well might a Christian desire that the hair which has been shorn from him through all his past life, should be restored to his risen and glorified head. Yet not the less is the doctrine of the resurrection, gladdening as the sound of the silver trumpet of its vision, needful as the very breath of life to our longing souls. Let us know what it means, and we shall see that it is thus precious. Let us first ask, what is the use of this body of ours? It is the means of revelation to us. It is the means of revelation to us. The camera in which God's eternal shows are set forth. It is by the body that we come into contact with nature, with our fellow men, with all their revelations of God to us. It is through the body that we receive all the lessons of passion, of suffering, of love, of beauty, of science. It is through the body that we are both trained outwards from ourselves and driven inwards into our deepest selves to find God. There is glory and might in this vital evanescence, this slow glacier-like flow of clothing and revealing matter, this ever-obtossed rainbow of tangible humanity. It is no less of God's making than the Spirit that is clothed therein. We cannot yet have learned all that we are meant to learn through the body. How much of the teaching even of this world can the most diligent and most favored man have exhausted before he is called to leave it? Is all that remains to be lost? Who that has loved this earth can but believe that the spiritual body of which St. Paul speaks will be a yet higher channel of such revelation. The meek, who have found that their Lord spake true and have indeed inherited the earth, who have seen that all matter is radiant of spiritual meaning, who would not cast a sigh after the loss of mere animal pleasure, would, I think, be the least willing to be without a body, to be unclothed without being again clothed upon. Who, after centuries of glory in heaven, would not rejoice to behold once more that patient-headed child of winter and spring, the meek snow drop, in whom, amidst the golden choirs, would not the vision of an old sunset wake such a song as the ancient dwellers of the earth would, with gently flattened palm, hush their throbbing harps to hear? All this revelation, however, would render only a body necessary, not this body. The fullness of the word resurrection would be ill-met if this were all. We need not only a body to convey revelation to us, but a body to reveal us to others. The thoughts, feelings, imaginations which arise on us must have their garments of revelation, whereby shall be made manifest the unseen world within us to our brothers and sisters around us, else is each left in human loneliness. Now, if this be one of the uses my body served on earth before, the new body must be like the old, nay, it must be the same body, glorified as we are glorified, with all that was distinctive of each from his fellows more visible than ever before. The accidental, the non-essential, the unrevealing, the incomplete will have vanished. That which made the body what it was in the eyes of those who loved us will be tenfold there. Will not this be the resurrection of the body, of the same body, though not of the same dead matter? Every eye shall see the beloved, every heart will cry, my own again, more mine because more himself than ever I beheld him. For do we not say on earth he is not himself today, or she looks her own self, she is more like herself than I have seen her for long, and is not this when the heart is glad and the face is radiant? For we carry a better likeness of our friends in our hearts than their countenances, save at precious seasons, manifest to us. Who will dare to call anything less than this a resurrection? O how the letter killeth, there are who can believe that the dirt of their bodies will rise the same as it went down to the friendly grave, who yet doubt if they will know their friends when they rise again, and they call that believing in the resurrection. What? Shall a man love his neighbor as himself, and must he be content not to know him in heaven? Better be content to lose our consciousness and know ourselves no longer. What? Shall God be the God of the families of the earth, and shall the love that he has thus created towards father and mother, brother and sister, wife and child, go moaning and longing to all eternity, or worse, far worse, die out of our bosoms? Shall God be God, and shall this be the end? Ah, my friends, what will resurrection or life be to me? How shall I continue to love God as I have learned to love him through you, if I find he cares so little for this human heart of mine as to take from me the gracious visitings of your faces and forms? True, I might have a gaze at Jesus now and then, but he would not be so good as I had thought him. And how should I see him if I could not see you? God will not take you, has not taken you from me to bury you out of my sight in the abyss of his own unfathomable being, where I cannot follow and find you, myself lost in the same awful gulf. No, our God is an unveiling, a revealing God. He will raise you again from the dead that I may behold you, that that which vanished from the earth may again stand forth, looking out of the same eyes of eternal love and truth, holding out the same mighty hand of brotherhood, the same delicate and gentle yet strong hand of sisterhood, to me, this me, that knew you and loved you in the days gone by. I shall not care that the matter of the forms I loved a thousand years ago has returned to mingle with the sacred goings on of God's science, upon that far-off world wheeling its nursery of growing loves and wisdoms through space. I shall not care that the muscle which now sends the eye core through your veins is not formed of the very particles which once sent the blood to the pondering brain, the flashing eye, or the nervous right arm. I shall not care, I say, so long as it is yourselves that are before me, beloved, so long as through these forms I know that I look on my own, on my own loving souls of the ancient time, so long as my spirits have got garments of revealing, after their own old, lovely fashion, garments to reveal themselves to me. The new shall then be dear as the old, and for the same reason, that it reveals the old love. And in the changes which, thank God, must take place when the mortal puts on immortality, shall we not feel that the nobler our friends are, the more they are themselves, that the more the idea of each is carried out in the perfection of beauty, the more like they are to what we thought to them in our most exalted moods, to that which we saw in them in the rarest moments of profoundest communion, to that which we beheld through the veil of all their imperfections when we loved them the truest? Lord, evermore give us this resurrection, like thine own in the body of thy transfiguration. Let us see and hear and know, and be seen and heard and know, as thou seest and hearest and knowest. Give us glorified bodies through which to reveal the glorified thoughts which shall inhabit us, when not only shall thou reveal God, but each of us shall reveal thee. And for this, Lord Jesus, come thou, the child, the obedient God, that we may be one with thee, and with every man and woman whom thou hast made in the Father.