Unspoken Sermons

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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, and 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 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 miry clay.
Nothing will help 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 torments 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; whence, if God were not better than that phantom _thou_
callest God, thou shouldst _never_ come out; but whence 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 eventide, 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 altogether 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_.--ST LUKE xx. 38.

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 earring 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 shalt 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 gone now. Worship and obey me, for I will be good to
you for threescore 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 Sadducee's 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 Godlike 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, are not worth their Maker's keeping alive? To
let his creatures die would be to change, to abjure his Godhood, 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, an awful cessation, an 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 puerile 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 funebrial existence, that they might well long for the
thicker, more tangible bodily being in which they had experienced the
pleasures of a tumultuous life on 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 visions, 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, 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
uptossed 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 favoured 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 snowdrop? 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 fulness 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 in 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 nonessential, 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 to-day," 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? Oh, 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 neighbour 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 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 ichor 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 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 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 known, as thou seest, hearest, and knowest. Give us
glorified bodies through which to reveal the glorified thoughts which
shall then inhabit us, when not only shalt 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.

END OF FIRST SERIES

UNSPOKEN SERMONS SERIES TWO

THESE ALSO
AFTER EIGHTEEN YEARS
TO
MY WIFE

CORAGGIO, BORDIGHERA

_January 1885_

THE WAY.

'_If thou wouldest be perfect_.'--ST. MATTHEW xix 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 fail utterly of perceiving and understanding the
life therein struggling to reveal itself--the life, that is, of the Son
of Man, the thought, the feeling, 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 revisers
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 betakes 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 x. 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 wheel 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, claiming 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. It 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, labour,
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. But he thought to gain a thing by a 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 set 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 sad
publican or despairing pharisee, 'How am I to be good?'

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