Unspoken Sermons

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Well do I know it is faith that saves us--but not faith in any work of
God--it is faith in God himself. If I did not believe God as good as
the tenderest human heart, the fairest, the purest, the most unselfish
human heart could imagine him, yea, an infinitude better, higher than
we as the heavens are higher than the earth--believe it, not as a
proposition, or even as a thing I was convinced of, but with the
responsive condition and being of my whole nature; if I did not feel
every fibre of heart and brain and body safe with him because he is the
Father who made me that I am--I would not be saved, for this faith is
salvation; it is God and the man one. God and man together, the vital
energy flowing unchecked from the creator into his creature--that is
the salvation of the creature. But the poorest faith in the living God,
the God revealed in Christ Jesus, if it be vital, true, that is
obedient, is the beginning of the way to know him, and to know him is
eternal life. If you mean by faith anything of a different kind, that
faith will not save you. A faith, for instance, that God does not
forgive me because he loves me, but because he loves Jesus Christ,
cannot save me, because it is a falsehood against God: if the thing
were true, such a gospel would be the preaching of a God that was not
love, therefore in whom was no salvation, a God to know whom could not
be eternal life. Such a faith would damn, not save a man; for it would
bind him to a God who was anything but perfect. Such assertions going
by the name of Christianity, are nothing but the poor remnants of
paganism; and it is only with that part of our nature not yet Christian
that we are able to believe them--so far indeed as it is possible a lie
should be believed. We must forsake all our fears and distrusts for
Christ. We must receive his teaching heartily, nor let the
interpretation of it attributed to his apostles make us turn aside from
it. I say interpretation attributed to them; for what they teach is
never against what Christ taught, though very often the exposition of
it is--and that from no fault in the apostles, but from the grievous
fault of those who would understand, and even explain, rather than
obey. We may be sure of this, that no man will be condemned for any sin
that is past; that, if he be condemned, it will be because he would not
come to the light when the light came to him; because he would not
cease to do evil and learn to do well; because he hid his unbelief in
the garment of a false faith, and would not obey; because he imputed to
himself a righteousness that was not his; because he preferred
imagining himself a worthy person, to confessing himself everywhere in
the wrong, and repenting. We may be sure also of this, that, if a man
becomes the disciple of Christ, he will not leave him in ignorance as
to what he has to believe; he shall know the truth of everything it is
needful for him to understand. If we do what he tells us, his light
will go up in our hearts. Till then we could not understand even if he
explained to us. If you cannot trust him to let you know what is right,
but think you must hold this or that before you can come to him, then I
justify your doubts in what you call your worst times, but which I
suspect are your best times in which you come nearest to the
truth--those, namely, in which you fear you have no faith.

So long as a man will not set himself to obey the word spoken, the word
written, the word printed, the word read, of the Lord Christ, I would
not take the trouble to convince him concerning the most obnoxious
doctrines that they were false as hell. It is those who would fain
believe, but who by such doctrines are hindered, whom I would help.
Disputation about things but hides the living Christ who alone can
teach the truth, who is the truth, and the knowledge of whom is life; I
write for the sake of those whom the false teaching that claims before
all to be true has driven away from God--as well it might, for the God
so taught is not a God worthy to be believed in. A stick, or a stone,
or a devil, is all that some of our brethren of mankind have to believe
in: he who believes in a God not altogether unselfish and good, a God
who does not do all he can for his creatures, belongs to the same
class; his is not the God who made the heaven and the earth and the sea
and the fountains of water--not the God revealed in Christ. If a man
see in God any darkness at all, and especially if he defend that
darkness, attempting to justify it as one who respects the person of
God, I cannot but think his blindness must have followed his mockery of
'_Lord! Lord!_' Surely, if he had been strenuously obeying Jesus, he
would ere now have received the truth that God is light, and in him is
no darkness--a truth which is not acknowledged by calling the darkness
attributed to him light, and the candle of the Lord in the soul of man
darkness. It is one thing to believe that God can do nothing wrong,
quite another to call whatever presumption may attribute to him right.

The whole secret of progress is the doing of the thing we know. There
is no other way of progress in the spiritual life; no other way of
progress in the understanding of that life: only as we do, can we know.

Is there then anything you will not leave for Christ? You cannot know
him--and yet he is the Truth, the one thing alone that can be known! Do
you not care to be imperfect? would you rather keep this or that, with
imperfection, than part with it to be perfect? You cannot know Christ,
for the very principle of his life was the simple absolute relation of
realities; his one idea was to be a perfect child to his Father. He who
will not part with all for Christ, is not worthy of him, and cannot
know him; and the Lord is true, and cannot acknowledge him: how could
he receive to his house, as one of his kind, a man who prefers
something to his Father; a man who is not for God; a man who will
strike a bargain with God, and say, 'I will give up so much, if thou
wilt spare me'! To yield all to him who has only made us and given us
everything, yea his very self by life and by death, such a man counts
too much. His conduct says, 'I never asked thee to do so much for me,
and I cannot make the return thou demandest.' The man will have to be
left to himself. He must find what it is to be without God! Those who
know God, or have but begun to catch a far-off glimmer of his
gloriousness, of what he is, regard life as insupportable save God be
the All in all, the first and the last.

To let their light shine, not to force on them their interpretations of
God's designs, is the duty of Christians towards their fellows. If you
who set yourselves to explain the theory of Christianity, had set
yourselves instead to do the will of the Master, the one object for
which the Gospel was preached to you, how different would now be the
condition of that portion of the world with which you come into
contact! Had you given yourselves to the understanding of his word that
you might do it, and not to the quarrying from it of material wherewith
to buttress your systems, in many a heart by this time would the name
of the Lord be loved where now it remains unknown. The word of life
would then by you have been held out indeed. Men, undeterred by your
explanations of Christianity, for you would not be forcing them on
their acceptance, and attracted by your behaviour, would be saying to
each other, as Moses said to himself when he saw the bush that burned
with fire and was not consumed, 'I will now turn aside and see this
great sight!' they would be drawing nigh to behold how these Christians
loved one another, and how just and fair they were to every one that
had to do with them! to note that their goods were the best, their
weight surest, their prices most _reasonable_, their word most certain!
that in their families was neither jealousy nor emulation! that mammon
was not there worshipped! that in their homes selfishness was neither
the hidden nor the openly ruling principle; that their children were as
diligently taught to share, as some are to save, or to lay out only
upon self--their mothers more anxious lest a child should hoard than
lest he should squander; that in no house of theirs was religion one
thing, and the daily life another; that the ecclesiastic did not think
first of his church, nor the peer of his privileges.

What do I hear you say?--'_How then shall the world go on_?' The Lord's
world will go on, and that without you; the devil's world will go on,
and that with you. The objection is but another and overwhelming proof
of your unbelief. Either you do not believe the word the Lord spake--
that, if we seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, all
things needful will be added to us; or what he undertakes does not
satisfy you; it is not enough; you want more; you prefer the offers of
Mammon. You are nowise anxious to be saved from the too-much that is a
snare; you want what you call a fortune--the freedom of the world. You
would not live under such restrictions as the Lord might choose to lay
upon you if he saw that something might be made of you precious in his
sight! You would inherit the earth, and not by meekness; you would have
the life of this world sweet, come of the life eternal, the life that
God shares with you, what may: so much as that comes to, you would
gladly leave God to look after, if only you might be sure of not sharing
with the rich man when you die. But you find that, unable to trust him
for this world, neither can you trust him for the world to come.
Refusing to obey him in your life, how can you trust him for your life?
Hence the various substitutes you seek for faith in him: you would hold
him to his word, bind him by his promises, appeal to the atonement, to
the satisfaction made to his justice, as you call it--while you will
take no trouble to fulfil the absolutely reasonable and necessary
condition, yea, morally and spiritually imperative condition--condition
and means in one--on which he offers, and through which alone he can
offer you deliverance from the burden of life into the strength and
glory of life--that you shall be true, and to him obedient children. You
say 'Christ has satisfied the law,' but you will not satisfy him! He
says, 'Come unto me,' and you will not rise and go to him. You say,
'Lord I believe; help mine unbelief,' but when he says, 'Leave
everything behind you, and be as I am towards God, and you shall have
peace and rest,' you turn away, muttering about _figurative language_.
If you had been true, had been living _the_ life, had been Christians
indeed, you would, however little, have drawn the world after you. In
your churches you would be receiving truest nourishment, yea strength to
live--thinking far less of serving God on the Sunday, and far more of
serving your neighbour in the week. The sociable vile, the masterful
rich, the deceitful trader, the ambitious poor, whom you have attracted
to your communities with the offer of a salvation other than deliverance
from sin, would not be lording it over them and dragging them down; they
would be the cleaner and the stronger for their absence; while the
publicans and the sinners would have been drawn instead, and turned into
true men and women; and the Israelite indeed, who is yet more repelled
by your general worldliness than by your misrepresentations of God,
showing him selfish like yourselves who is the purity of the creation--
the Israelite in whom is no guile would have hastened to the company of
the loving men and true, eager to learn what it was that made them so
good, so happy, so unselfish, so free of care, so ready to die, so
willing to live, so hopeful, so helpful, so careless to possess, so
undeferential to possession. Finding you to hold, from the traditional
force of false teaching, such things as you do, he would have said, 'No!
such beliefs can never account for such mighty results!' You would have
answered, 'Search the Scriptures and see.' He would have searched, and
found--not indeed the things you imagine there, but things infinitely
better and higher, things that indeed account for the result he wondered
at; he would have found such truth as he who has found will hold for
ever as the only gladness of his being. There you would have had your
reward for being true Christians in spite of the evil doctrines you had
been taught and teaching: you would have been taught in return the truth
of the matter by him whom your true Christianity had enticed to itself,
and sent to the fountainhead free of the prejudices that disabled your
judgment. Thus delivered from the false notions which could not fail to
have stunted your growth hitherto, how rapid would it not have become!

If any of you tell me my doctrine is presumptuous, that it is contrary
to what is taught in the New Testament, and what the best of men have
always believed, I will not therefore proceed to defend even my
beliefs, the principles on which I try to live--how much less my
opinions! I appeal to you instead, whether or not I have spoken the
truth concerning our paramount obligation to do the word of Christ. If
you answer that I have not, I have nothing more to say; there is no
other ground on which we can meet. But if you allow that it is a prime,
even if you do not allow it _the_ prime duty, then what I insist upon
is, that you should do it, so and not otherwise recommending the
knowledge of him. I do not attempt to change your opinions; if they are
wrong, the obedience alone on which I insist can enable you to set them
right; I only pray you to obey, and assert that thus only can you fit
yourselves for understanding the mind of Christ. I say none but he who
does right, can think right; you cannot _know_ Christ to be right until
you do as he does, as he tells you to do; neither can you set him
forth, until you know him as he means himself to be known, that is, as
he is. If you are serving and trusting in Mammon, how can you know the
living God who, the source of life, is alone to be trusted in! If you
do not admit that it is the duty of a man to do the word of Christ, or
if, admitting the duty, you yet do not care to perform it, why should I
care to convince you that my doctrine is right? What is it to any true
man what you think of his doctrine? What does it matter what you think
of any doctrine? If I could convince your judgment, your hearts
remaining as they are, I should but add to your condemnation. The true
heart must see at once, that, however wrong I may or may not be in
other things, at least I am right in this, that Jesus must be obeyed,
and at once obeyed, in the things he did say: it will not long imagine
to obey him in things he did not say. If a man do what is unpleasing to
Christ, believing it his will, he shall yet gain thereby, for it gives
the Lord a hold of him, which he will use; but before he can reach
liberty, he must be delivered from that falsehood. For him who does not
choose to see that Christ must be obeyed, he must be left to the
teaching of the Father, who brings all that hear and learn of him to
Christ, that they may learn what he is who has taught them and brought
them. He will leave no man to his own way, however much he may prefer
it. The Lord did not die to provide a man with the wretched heaven he
may invent for himself, or accept invented for him by others; he died
to give him life, and bring him to the heaven of the Father's peace;
the children must share in the essential bliss of the Father and the
Son. This is and has been the Father's work from the beginning--to
bring us into the home of his heart, where he shares the glories of
life with the Living One, in whom was born life to light men back to
the original life. This is our destiny; and however a man may refuse,
he will find it hard to fight with God--useless to kick against the
goads of his love. For the Father is goading him, or will goad him, if
needful, into life by unrest and trouble; hell-fire will have its turn
if less will not do: can any need it more than such as will neither
enter the kingdom of heaven themselves, nor suffer them to enter it
that would? The old race of the Pharisees is by no means extinct; they
were St Paul's great trouble, and are yet to be found in every
religious community under the sun.

The one only thing truly to reconcile all differences is, to walk in
the light. So St Paul teaches us in his epistle to the Philippians, the
third chapter and sixteenth verse. After setting forth the loftiest
idea of human endeavour in declaring the summit of his own aspiration,
he says--not, 'This must be your endeavour also, or you cannot be
saved;' but, 'If in anything ye be otherwise minded, God shall reveal
even this unto you. Nevertheless whereto we have already attained, let
us walk by that same.' Observe what widest conceivable scope is given
by the apostle to honest opinion, even in things of grandest
import!--the one only essential point with him is, that whereto we have
attained, what we have seen to be true, _we walk by that_. In such
walking, and in such walking only, love will grow, truth will grow; the
soul, then first in its genuine element and true relation towards God,
will see into reality that was before but a blank to it; and he who has
promised to teach, will teach abundantly. Faster and faster will the
glory of the Lord dawn upon the hearts and minds of his people so
walking--then his people indeed; fast and far will the knowledge of him
spread, for truth of action, both preceding and following truth of
word, will prepare the way before him. The man walking in that whereto
he has attained, will be able to think aright; the man who does not
think right, is unable because he has not been walking right; only when
he begins to do the thing he knows, does he begin to be able to think
aright; then God comes to him in a new and higher way, and works along
with the spirit he has created. The soul, without its heaven above its
head, without its life-breath around it, without its love-treasure in
its heart, without its origin one with it and bound up in it, without
its true self and originating life, cannot think to any real purpose--
nor ever would to all eternity. When man joins with God, then is all
impotence and discord cast out. Until then, there can be but jar; God
is in contest with the gates of hell that open in the man, and can but
hold his own; when the man joins him, then is Satan foiled. For then
first nature receives her necessity: no such necessity has she as this
law of all laws--that God and man are one. Until they begin to be one
in the reality as in the divine idea, in the flower as in the root, in
the finishing as in the issuing creation, nothing can go right with the
man, and God can have no rest from his labour in him. As the greatest
orbs in heaven are drawn by the least, God himself must be held in
divine disquiet until every one of his family be brought home to his
heart, to be one with him in a unity too absolute, profound, far-
reaching, fine, and intense, to be understood by any but the God from
whom it comes, yet to be guessed at by the soul from the
unspeakableness of its delight when at length it is with the _only_
that can be its own, the one that it can possess, the one that can
possess it. For God is the heritage of the soul in the ownness of
origin; man is the offspring of his making will, of his life; God
himself is his birth-place; God is the self that makes the soul able to
say _I too, I myself_. This absolute unspeakable bliss of the creature
is that for which the Son died, for which the Father suffered with him.
Then only is life itself; then only is it right, is it one; then only
is it as designed and necessitated by the eternal life-outgiving Life.

Whereto then we have attained let us walk by that same!

END OF THE SECOND SERIES.

UNSPOKEN SERMONS SERIES THREE

_TO MY WIFE_

Sun and wind and rain, the Lord
Is to seed his Father buried
For he is the living Word,
And the quickening Spirit.

BORDIGHERA:
_May_ 3, 1889.

THE CREATION IN CHRIST.

_All things were made by him, and without him was not anything
made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the
light of men_.--John i. 3, 4.

It seems to me that any lover of the gospel given to thinking, and
especially one accustomed to the effort of uttering thought, can hardly
have failed to feel dissatisfaction, more or less definite, with the
close of the third verse, as here presented to English readers. It
seems to me in its feebleness, unlike, and rhetorically unworthy of the
rest. That it is no worse than pleonastic, that is, redundant,
therefore only unnecessary, can be no satisfaction to the man who would
find perfection, if he may, in the words of him who was nearer the Lord
than any other. The phrase 'that was made' seems, from its uselessness,
weak even to foolishness after what precedes: 'All things were made by
him, and without him was not anything made _that was made_.'

My hope was therefore great when I saw, in reading the Greek, that the
shifting of a period would rid me of the pleonasm. If thereupon any
precious result of meaning should follow, the change would not merely
be justifiable--seeing that points are of no authority with anyone
accustomed to the vagaries of scribes, editors, and printers--but one
for which to give thanks to God. And I found the change did unfold such
a truth as showed the rhetoric itself in accordance with the highest
thought of the apostle. So glad was I, that it added little to my
satisfaction to find the change supported by the best manuscripts and
versions. It could add none to learn that the passage had been, in
respect of the two readings, a cause of much disputation: the ground of
argument on the side of the common reading, seemed to me worse than
worthless.

Let us then look at the passage as I think it ought to be translated,
and after that, seek the meaning for the sake of which it was written.
It is a meaning indeed by no means dependent for its revelation on this
passage, belonging as it does to the very truth as it is in Jesus; but
it is therein magnificently expressed by the apostle, and differently
from anywhere else--that is, if I am right in the interpretation which
suggested itself the moment I saw the probable rhetorical relation of
the words.

'All things were made through him, and without him was made not one
thing. That which was made in him was life, and the life was the light
of men.'

Note the antithesis of the _through_ and the _in_.

In this grand assertion seems to me to lie, more than shadowed, the
germ of creation and redemption--of all the divine in its relation to
all the human.

In attempting to set forth what I find in it, I write with no desire to
provoke controversy, which I loathe, but with some hope of presenting
to the minds of such as have become capable of seeing it, the glory of
the truth of the Father and the Son, as uttered by this first of seers,
after the grandest fashion of his insight. I am as indifferent to a
reputation for orthodoxy as I despise the championship of novelty. To
the untrue, the truth itself must seem unsound, for the light that is
in them is darkness.

I believe, then, that Jesus Christ is the eternal son of the eternal
father; that from the first of firstness Jesus is the son, because God
is the father--a statement imperfect and unfit because an attempt of
human thought to represent that which it cannot grasp, yet which it so
believes that it must try to utter it even in speech that cannot be
right. I believe therefore that the Father is the greater, that if the
Father had not been, the Son could not have been. I will not apply
logic to the thesis, nor would I state it now but for the sake of what
is to follow. The true heart will remember the inadequacy of our
speech, and our thought also, to the things that lie near the unknown
roots of our existence. In saying what I do, I only say what Paul
implies when he speaks of the Lord giving up the kingdom to his father,
that God may be all in all. I worship the Son as the human God, the
divine, the only Man, deriving his being and power from the Father,
equal with him as a son is the equal at once and the subject of his
father--but _making himself the equal of his father in what is most
precious in Godhead, namely, Love_--which is, indeed, the essence of
that statement of the evangelist with which I have now to do--a higher
thing than the making of the worlds and the things in them, which he
did by the power of the Father, not by a self-existent power in
himself, whence the apostle, to whom the Lord must have said things he
did not say to the rest, or who was better able to receive what he said
to all, says, 'All things were made' not _by_, but '_through_ him.'

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