Unspoken Sermons

G >> George MacDonald >> Unspoken Sermons

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36

This will help to remove the difficulty that the parables are plainly
for the teaching of the truth, and yet the Lord speaks of them as for
the concealing of it. They are for the understanding of that man only
who is practical--who does the thing he knows, who seeks to understand
vitally. They reveal to the live conscience, otherwise not to the
keenest intellect--though at the same time they may help to rouse the
conscience with glimpses of the truth, where the man is on the borders
of waking. Ignorance may be at once a punishment and a kindness: all
punishment is kindness, and the best of which the man at the time is
capable: 'Because you will not do, you shall not see; but it would be
worse for you if you did see, not being of the disposition to do.' Such
are punished in having the way closed before them; they punish
themselves; their own doing results as it cannot but result on them. To
say to them certain things so that they could understand them, would
but harden them more, because they would not do them; they should have
but parables--lanterns of the truth, clear to those who will walk in
their light, dark to those who will not. The former are content to have
the light cast upon their way; the latter will have it in their eyes,
and cannot: if they had, it would but blind them. For them to know more
would be their worse condemnation. They are not fit to know more; more
shall not be given them yet; it is their punishment that they are in
the wrong, and shall keep in the wrong until they come out of it. 'You
choose the dark; you shall stay in the dark till the terrors that dwell
in the dark affray you, and cause you to cry out.' God puts a seal upon
the will of man; that seal is either his great punishment, or his
mighty favour: 'Ye love the darkness, abide in the darkness:' 'O woman,
great is thy faith: be it done unto thee even as thou wilt!'

What special meaning may be read in the different parts of magistrate,
judge, and officer, beyond the general suggestion, perhaps, of the
tentative approach of the final, I do not know; but I think I do know
what is meant by 'agree on the way,' and 'the uttermost farthing.' The
parable is an appeal to the common sense of those that hear it, in
regard to every affair of righteousness. Arrange what claim lies
against you; compulsion waits behind it. Do at once what you must do
one day. As there is no escape from payment, escape at least the prison
that will enforce it. Do not drive Justice to extremities. Duty is
imperative; it must be done. It is useless to think to escape the
eternal law of things; yield of yourself, nor compel God to compel you.

To the honest man, to the man who would fain be honest, the word is of
right gracious import. To the untrue, it is a terrible threat; to him
who is of the truth, it is sweet as most loving promise. He who is of
God's mind in things, rejoices to hear the word of the changeless
Truth; the voice of the Right fills the heavens and the earth, and
makes his soul glad; it is his salvation. If God were not inexorably
just, there would be no stay for the soul of the feeblest lover of
right: 'thou art true, O Lord: one day I also shall be true!' 'Thou
shalt render the right, cost you what it may,' is a dread sound in the
ears of those whose life is a falsehood: what but the last farthing
would those who love righteousness more than life pay? It is a joy
profound as peace to know that God is determined upon such payment, is
determined to have his children clean, clear, pure as very snow; is
determined that not only shall they with his help make up for whatever
wrong they have done, but at length be incapable, by eternal choice of
good, under any temptation, of doing the thing that is not divine, the
thing God would not do.

There has been much cherishing of the evil fancy, often without its
taking formal shape, that there is some way of getting out of the
region of strict justice, some mode of managing to escape doing _all_
that is required of us; but there is no such escape. A way to avoid any
demand of righteousness would be an infinitely worse way than the road
to the everlasting fire, for its end would be eternal death. No, there
is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it--no plan
to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out
Satan must go, every hair and feather! Neither shalt thou think to be
delivered from the necessity of _being_ good by being made good. God is
the God of the animals in a far lovelier way, I suspect, than many of
us dare to think, but he will not be the God of a man by making a good
beast of him. Thou must be good; neither death nor any admittance into
good company will make thee good; though, doubtless, if thou be willing
and try, these and all other best helps will be given thee. There is no
clothing in a robe of imputed righteousness, that poorest of legal
cobwebs spun by spiritual spiders. To me it seems like an invention of
well-meaning dulness to soothe insanity; and indeed it has proved a
door of escape out of worse imaginations. It is apparently an old
'doctrine;' for St. John seems to point at it where he says, 'Little
children, let no man lead you astray; he that doeth righteousness is
righteous even as he is righteous.' Christ is our righteousness, not
that we should escape punishment, still less escape being righteous,
but as the live potent creator of righteousness in us, so that we, with
our wills receiving his spirit, shall like him resist unto blood,
striving against sin; shall know in ourselves, as he knows, what a
lovely thing is righteousness, what a mean, ugly, unnatural thing is
unrighteousness. He _is_ our righteousness, and that righteousness is
no fiction, no pretence, no imputation.

One thing that tends to keep men from seeing righteousness and
unrighteousness as they are, is, that they have been told many things
are righteous and unrighteous, which are neither the one nor the other.
Righteousness is just fairness--from God to man, from man to God and to
man; it is giving every one his due--his large mighty due. He is
righteous, and no one else, who does this. And any system which tends
to persuade men that there is any salvation but that of becoming
righteous even as Jesus is righteous; that a man can be made good, as a
good dog is good, without his own willed share in the making; that a
man is saved by having his sins hidden under a robe of imputed
righteousness--that system, so far as this tendency, is of the devil
and not of God. Thank God, not even error shall injure the true of
heart; it is not wickedness. They grow in the truth, and as love casts
out fear, so truth casts out falsehood.

I read, then, in this parable, that a man had better make up his mind
to be righteous, to be fair, to do what he can to pay what he owes, in
any and all the relations of life--all the matters, in a word, wherein
one man may demand of another, or complain that he has not received
fair play. Arrange your matters with those who have anything against
you, while you are yet together and things have not gone too far to be
arranged; _you will have to do it_, and that under less easy
circumstances than now. Putting off is of no use. You must. The thing
has to be done; there are means of compelling you.

'In this affair, however, I am in the right.'

'If so, very well--for this affair. But I have reason to doubt whether
you are capable of judging righteously in your own cause:--do you hate
the man?'

'No, I don't hate him.'

'Do you dislike him?'

'I can't say I _like_ him.'

'Do you love him as yourself?'

'Oh, come! come! no one does that!'

'Then no one is to be trusted when he thinks, however firmly, that he
is all right, and his neighbour all wrong, in any matter between them.'

'But I don't say I am all right, and he is all wrong; there may be
something to urge on his side: what I say is, that I am more in the
right than he.'

'This is not fundamentally a question of things: it is a question of
condition, of spiritual relation and action, towards your neighbour. If
in yourself you were all right towards him, you could do him no wrong.
Let it be with the individual dispute as it may, you owe him something
that you do not pay him, as certainly as you think he owes you
something he will not pay you.'

'He would take immediate advantage of me if I owned that.'

'So much the worse for him. Until you are fair to him, it does not
matter to you whether he is unfair to you or not.'

'I beg your pardon--it is just what does matter! I want nothing but my
rights. What can matter to me more than my rights?'

'Your duties--your debts. You are all wrong about the thing. It is a
very small matter _to you_ whether the man give you your rights or not;
it is life or death to you whether or not you give him his. Whether he
pay you what you count his debt or no, you will be compelled to pay him
all you owe him. If you owe him a pound and he you a million, you must
pay him the pound whether he pay you the million or not; there is no
business-parallel here. If, owing you love, he gives you hate, you,
owing him love, have yet to pay it. A love unpaid you, a justice undone
you, a praise withheld from you, a judgment passed on you without
judgment, will not absolve you of the debt of a love unpaid, a justice
not done, a praise withheld, a false judgment passed: these uttermost
farthings--not to speak of such debts as the world itself counts
grievous wrongs--you must pay him, whether he pay you or not. We have a
good while given us to pay, but a crisis will come--come soon after
all--comes always sooner than those expect it who are not ready for
it--a crisis when the demand unyielded will be followed by prison.

The same holds with every demand of God: by refusing to pay, the man
makes an adversary who will compel him--and that for the man's own
sake. If you or your life say, 'I will not,' then he will see to it.
There is a prison, and the one thing we know about that prison is, that
its doors do not open until entire satisfaction is rendered, the last
farthing paid.

The main debts whose payment God demands are those which lie at the
root of all right, those we owe in mind, and soul, and being. Whatever
in us can be or make an adversary, whatever could prevent us from doing
the will of God, or from agreeing with our fellow--all must be yielded.
Our every relation, both to God and our fellow, must be acknowledged
heartily, met as a reality. Smaller debts, if any debt can be small,
follow as a matter of course.

If the man acknowledge, and would pay if he could but cannot, the
universe will be taxed to help him rather than he should continue
unable. If the man accepts the will of God, he is the child of the
Father, the whole power and wealth of the Father is for him, and the
uttermost farthing will easily be paid. If the man denies the debt, or
acknowledging does nothing towards paying it, then--at last--the
prison! God in the dark can make a man thirst for the light, who never
in the light sought but the dark. The cells of the prison may differ in
degree of darkness; but they are all alike in this, that not a door
opens but to payment. There is no day but the will of God, and he who
is of the night cannot be for ever allowed to roam the day; unfelt,
unprized, the light must be taken from him, that he may know what the
darkness is. When the darkness is perfect, when he is totally without
the light he has spent the light in slaying, then will he know
darkness.

I think I have seen from afar something of the final prison of all, the
innermost cell of the debtor of the universe; I will endeavour to
convey what I think it may be.

It is the vast outside; the ghastly dark beyond the gates of the city
of which God is the light--where the evil dogs go ranging, silent as
the dark, for there is no sound any more than sight. The time of signs
is over. Every sense has its signs, and they were all misused: there is
no sense, no sign more--nothing now by means of which to believe. The
man wakes from the final struggle of death, in absolute loneliness--
such a loneliness as in the most miserable moment of deserted childhood
he never knew. Not a hint, not a shadow of anything outside his
consciousness reaches him. All is dark, dark and dumb; no motion--not
the breath of a wind! never a dream of change! not a scent from far-off
field! nothing to suggest being or thing besides the man himself, no
sign of God anywhere. God has so far withdrawn from the man, that he is
conscious only of that from which he has withdrawn. In the midst of the
live world he cared for nothing but himself; now in the dead world he
is in God's prison, his own separated self. He would not believe in God
because he never saw God; now he doubts if there be such a thing as the
face of a man--doubts if he ever really saw one, ever anything more
than dreamed of such a thing:--he never came near enough to human
being, to know what human being really was--so may well doubt if human
beings ever were, if ever he was one of them.

Next after doubt comes reasoning on the doubt: 'The only one must be
God! I know no one but myself: I must myself be God--none else!' Poor
helpless dumb devil!--his own glorious lord god! Yea, he will imagine
himself that same resistless force which, without his will, without his
knowledge, is the law by which the sun burns, and the stars keep their
courses, the strength that drives all the engines of the world. His
fancy will give birth to a thousand fancies, which will run riot like
the mice in a house but just deserted: he will call it creation, and
_his_. Having no reality to set them beside, nothing to correct them
by; the measured order, harmonious relations, and sweet graces of God's
world nowhere for him; what he thinks, will be, for lack of what God
thinks, the man's realities: what others can he have! Soon, misery will
beget on imagination a thousand shapes of woe, which he will not be
able to rule, direct, or even distinguish from real presences--a whole
world of miserable contradictions and cold-fever-dreams.

But no liveliest human imagination could supply adequate representation
of what it would be to be left without a shadow of the presence of God.
If God gave it, man could not understand it: he knows neither God nor
himself in the way of the understanding. For not he who cares least
about God was in this world ever left as God could leave him. I doubt
if any man could continue following his wickedness from whom God had
withdrawn.

The most frightful idea of what could, to his own consciousness, befall
a man, is that he should have to lead an existence with which God had
nothing to do. The thing could not be; for being that is caused, the
causation ceasing, must of necessity cease. It is always in, and never
out of God, that we can live and do. But I suppose the man so left that
he seems to himself utterly alone, yet, alas! with himself--smallest
interchange of thought, feeblest contact of existence, dullest
reflection from other being, impossible: in such evil case I believe
the man would be glad to come in contact with the worst-loathed insect:
it would be a shape of life, something beyond and besides his own huge,
void, formless being! I imagine some such feeling in the prayer of the
devils for leave to go into the swine. His worst enemy, could he but be
aware of him, he would be ready to worship. For the misery would be not
merely the absence of all being other than his own self, but the
fearful, endless, unavoidable presence of that self. Without the
correction, the reflection, the support of other presences, being is
not merely unsafe, it is a horror--for anyone but God, who is his own
being. For him whose idea is God's, and the image of God, his own being
is far too fragmentary and imperfect to be anything like good company.
It is the lovely creatures God has made all around us, in them giving
us himself, that, until we know him, save us from the frenzy of
aloneness--for that aloneness is Self, Self, Self. The man who minds
only himself must at last go mad if God did not interfere.

Can there be any way out of the misery? Will the soul that could not
believe in God, with all his lovely world around testifying of him,
believe when shut in the prison of its own lonely, weary all-and-
nothing? It would for a time try to believe that it was indeed nothing,
a mere glow of the setting sun on a cloud of dust, a paltry dream that
dreamed itself--then, ah, if only the dream might dream that it was no
more! that would be the one thing to hope for. Self-loathing, and that
for no sin, from no repentance, from no vision of better, would begin
and grow and grow; and to what it might not come no soul can tell--of
essential, original misery, uncompromising self disgust! Only, then, if
a being be capable of self-disgust, is there not some room for hope--as
much as a pinch of earth in the cleft of a rock might yield for the
growth of a pine? Nay, there must be hope while there is existence; for
where there is existence there must be God; and God is for ever good,
nor can be other than good. But alas, the distance from the light! Such
a soul is at the farthest verge of life's negation!--no, not the
farthest! a man is nearer heaven when in deepest hell than just ere he
begins to reap the reward of his doings--for he is in a condition to
receive the smallest show of the life that is, as a boon unspeakable.
All his years in the world he received the endless gifts of sun and
air, earth and sea and human face divine, as things that came to him
because that was their way, and there was no one to prevent them; now
the poorest thinning of the darkness he would hail as men of old the
glow of a descending angel; it would be as a messenger from God. Not
that he would think of God! it takes long to think of God; but hope,
not yet seeming hope, would begin to dawn in his bosom, and the thinner
darkness would be as a cave of light, a refuge from the horrid self of
which he used to be so proud.

A man may well imagine it impossible ever to think so unpleasantly of
himself! But he has only to let things go, and he will make it the
real, right, natural way to think of himself. True, all I have been
saying is imaginary; but our imagination is made to mirror truth; all
the things that appear in it are more or less after the model of things
that are; I suspect it is the region whence issues prophecy; and when
we are true it will mirror nothing but truth. I deal here with the same
light and darkness the Lord dealt with, the same St. Paul and St. John
and St. Peter and St. Jude dealt with. Ask yourself whether the
faintest dawn of even physical light would not be welcome to such a
soul as some refuge from the dark of the justly hated self.

And the light would grow and grow across the awful gulf between the
soul and its haven--its repentance--for repentance is the first
pressure of the bosom of God; and in the twilight, struggling and
faint, the man would feel, faint as the twilight, another thought
beside his, another thinking Something nigh his dreary self--perhaps
the man he had most wronged, most hated, most despised--and would be
glad that some one, whoever, was near him: the man he had most injured,
and was most ashamed to meet, would be a refuge from himself--oh, how
welcome!

So might I imagine a thousand steps up from the darkness, each a little
less dark, a little nearer the light--but, ah, the weary way! He cannot
come out until he have paid the uttermost farthing! Repentance once
begun, however, may grow more and more rapid! If God once get a willing
hold, if with but one finger he touch the man's self, swift as
possibility will he draw him from the darkness into the light. For that
for which the forlorn, self-ruined wretch was made, was to be a child
of God, a partaker of the divine nature, an heir of God and joint heir
with Christ. Out of the abyss into which he cast himself, refusing to
be the heir of God, he must rise and be raised. To the heart of God,
the one and only goal of the human race--the refuge and home of all and
each, he must set out and go, or the last glimmer of humanity will die
from him. Whoever will live must cease to be a slave and become a child
of God. There is no half-way house of rest, where ungodliness may be
dallied with, nor prove quite fatal. Be they few or many cast into such
prison as I have endeavoured to imagine, there can be no deliverance
for human soul, whether in that prison or out of it, but in paying the
last farthing, in becoming lowly, penitent, self-refusing--so receiving
the sonship, and learning to cry, _Father_!

ABBA, FATHER!

'_--the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father._'-ROMANS
viii. 15.

The hardest, gladdest thing in the world is, to cry _Father_! from a
full heart. I would help whom I may to call thus upon the Father.

There are things in all forms of the systematic teaching of
Christianity to check this outgoing of the heart--with some to render
it simply impossible. The more delicate the affections, the less easy
to satisfy, the readier are they to be damped and discouraged, yea
quite blown aside; even the suspicion of a cold reception is enough to
paralyze them. Such a cold wind blowing at the very gate of heaven--
thank God, _outside_ the gate!--is the so-called doctrine of
_Adoption_. When a heart hears--and believes, or half believes--that it
is not the child of God by origin, from the first of its being, but may
possibly be adopted into his family, its love sinks at once in a cold
faint: where is its own father, and who is this that would adopt it? To
myself, in the morning of childhood, the evil doctrine was a mist
through which the light came struggling, a cloud-phantom of repellent
mien--requiring maturer thought and truer knowledge to dissipate it.
But it requires neither much knowledge nor much insight to stand up
against its hideousness; it needs but love that will not be denied, and
courage to question the phantom.

A devout and honest scepticism on God's side, not to be put down by
anything called authority, is absolutely necessary to him who would
know the liberty wherewith Christ maketh free. Whatever any company of
good men thinks or believes, is to be approached with respect; but
nothing claimed or taught, be the claimers or the teachers who they
may, must come between the soul and the spirit of the father, who is
himself the teacher of his children. Nay, to accept authority may be to
refuse the very thing the 'authority' would teach; it may remain
altogether misunderstood just for lack of that natural process of doubt
and inquiry, which we were intended to go through by him who would have
us understand.

As no scripture is of private interpretation, so is there no feeling in
human heart which exists in that heart alone, which is not, in some
form or degree, in every heart; and thence I conclude that many must
have groaned like myself under the supposed authority of this doctrine.
The refusal to look up to God as our Father is the one central wrong in
the whole human affair; the inability, the one central misery: whatever
serves to clear any difficulty from the way of the recognition of the
Father, will more or less undermine every difficulty in life.

'Is God then not my Father,' cries the heart of the child, 'that I need
to be adopted by him? Adoption! that can never satisfy me. Who is my
father? Am I not his to begin with? Is God not my very own Father? Is
he my Father only in a sort or fashion--by a legal contrivance? Truly,
much love may lie in adoption, but if I accept it from any one, I allow
myself the child of another! The adoption of God would indeed be a
blessed thing if another than he had given me being! but if he gave me
being, then it means no reception, but a repudiation.--"O Father, am I
not your child?"'

'No; but he will adopt you. He will not acknowledge you his child, but
he will call you his child, and be a father to you.'

'Alas!' cries the child, 'if he be not my father, he cannot become my
father. A father is a father from the beginning. A primary relation
cannot be superinduced. The consequence might be small where earthly
fatherhood was concerned, but the very origin of my being--alas, if he
be only a maker and not a father! Then am I only a machine, and not a
child--not a man! It is false to say I was created in his image!

'It avails nothing to answer that we lost our birthright by the fall. I
do not care to argue that _I_ did not fall when Adam fell; for I have
fallen many a time, and there is a shadow on my soul which I or another
may call a curse; I cannot get rid of a something that always intrudes
between my heart and the blue of every sky. But it avails nothing,
either for my heart or their argument, to say I have fallen and been
cast out: can any repudiation, even that of God, undo the facts of an
existent origin? Nor is it merely that he made me: by whose power do I
go on living? When he cast me out, as you say, did I then begin to draw
my being from myself--or from the devil? In whom do I live and move and
have my being? It cannot be that I am not the creature of God.'

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36