Unspoken Sermons

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That this is the way poet or prophet--Paul was both--would think of the
thing, especially in the age of the apostle, I shall be able to make
appear even more probable by directing your notice to the following
passage from Dante--whose time, though so much farther from that of the
apostle than our time from Dante's, was in many respects much liker
Paul's than ours.

The passage is this:--Dell' Inferno: Canto xxiii. 25-27:

E quei: 'S'io fossi d'impiombato vetro,
L'immagine di fuor tua non trarrei
Piu tosto a me, che quella dentro impetro.'

Here Virgil, with reference to the power he had of reading the thoughts
of his companion, says to Dante:

'If I were of leaded glass,'--meaning, 'If I were glass covered at the
back with lead, so that I was a mirror,'--'I should not draw thy
outward image to me more readily than I gain thy inner one;'--meaning,
'than now I know your thoughts.'

It seems, then, to me, that the true simple word to represent the
Greek, and the most literal as well by which to translate it, is the
verb _mirror_--when the sentence, so far, would run thus: 'But we all,
with unveiled face, mirroring the glory of the Lord,--.'

I must now go on to unfold the idea at work in the heart of the
apostle. For the mere correctness of a translation is nothing, except
it bring us something deeper, or at least some fresher insight: with
him who cares for the words apart from what the writer meant them to
convey, I have nothing to do: he must cease to 'pass for a man' and
begin to be a man indeed, on the way to be a live soul, before I can
desire his intercourse. The prophet-apostle seems to me, then, to say,
'We all, with clear vision of the Lord, mirroring in our hearts his
glory, even as a mirror would take into itself his face, are thereby
changed into his likeness, his glory working our glory, by the present
power, in our inmost being, of the Lord, the spirit.' Our mirroring of
Christ, then, is one with the presence of his spirit in us. The idea,
you see, is not the reflection, the radiating of the light of Christ on
others, though that were a figure lawful enough; but the taking into,
and having in us, him working to the changing of us.

That the thing signified transcends the sign, outreaches the figure, is
no discovery; the thing figured always belongs to a higher stratum, to
which the simile serves but as a ladder; when the climber has reached
it, 'he then unto the ladder turns his back.' It is but according to
the law of symbol, that the thing symbolized by the mirror should have
properties far beyond those of leaded glass or polished metal, seeing
it is a live soul understanding that which it takes into its
deeps--holding it, and conscious of what it holds. It mirrors by its
will to hold in its mirror. Unlike its symbol, it can hold not merely
the outward visual resemblance, but the inward likeness of the person
revealed by it; it is open to the influences of that which it embraces,
and is capable of active co-operation with them: the mirror and the
thing mirrored are of one origin and nature, and in closest relation to
each other. Paul's idea is, that when we take into our understanding,
our heart, our conscience, our being, the glory of God, namely Jesus
Christ as he shows himself to our eyes, our hearts, our consciences, he
works upon us, and will keep working, till we are changed to the very
likeness we have thus mirrored in us; for with his likeness he comes
himself, and dwells in us. He will work until the same likeness is
wrought out and perfected in us, the image, namely, of the humanity of
God, in which image we were made at first, but which could never be
developed in us except by the indwelling of the perfect likeness. By
the power of Christ thus received and at home in us, we are
changed--the glory in him becoming glory in us, his glory changing us
to glory.

But we must beware of receiving this or any symbol _after the flesh_,
beware of interpreting it in any fashion that partakes of the character
of the mere physical, psychical, or spirituo-mechanical. The symbol
deals with things far beyond the deepest region whence symbols can be
drawn. The indwelling of Jesus in the soul of man, who shall declare!
But let us note this, that the dwelling of Jesus in us is the power of
the spirit of God upon us; for 'the Lord is that spirit,' and that Lord
dwelling in us, we are changed 'even as from the Lord the spirit.' When
we think Christ, Christ comes; when we receive his image into our
spiritual mirror, he enters with it. Our thought is not cut off from
his. Our open receiving thought is his door to come in. When our hearts
turn to him, that is opening the door to him, that is holding up our
mirror to him; then he comes in, not by our thought only, not in our
idea only, but he comes himself, and of his own will--comes in as we
could not take him, but as he can come and we receive him--enabled to
receive by his very coming the one welcome guest of the whole universe.
Thus the Lord, the spirit, becomes the soul of our souls, becomes
spiritually what he always was creatively; and as our spirit informs,
gives shape to our bodies, in like manner his soul informs, gives shape
to our souls. In this there is nothing unnatural, nothing at conflict
with our being. It is but that the deeper soul that willed and wills
our souls, rises up, the infinite Life, into the Self we call _I_ and
_me_, but which lives immediately from him, and is his very own
property and nature--unspeakably more his than ours: this deeper
creative soul, working on and with his creation upon higher levels,
makes the _I_ and _me_ more and more his, and himself more and more
ours; until at length the glory of our existence flashes upon us, we
face full to the sun that enlightens what it sent forth, and know
ourselves alive with an infinite life, even the life of the Father;
know that our existence is not the moonlight of a mere consciousness of
being, but the sun-glory of a life justified by having become one with
its origin, thinking and feeling with the primal Sun of life, from whom
it was dropped away that it might know and bethink itself, and return
to circle for ever in exultant harmony around him. Then indeed we
_are_; then indeed we have life; the life of Jesus has, through light,
become life in us; the glory of God in the face of Jesus, mirrored in
our hearts, has made us alive; we are one with God for ever and ever.

What less than such a splendour of hope would he worthy the revelation
of Jesus? Filled with the soul of their Father, men shall inherit the
glory of their Father; filled with themselves, they cast him out, and
rot. The company of the Lord, soul to soul, is that which saves with
life, his life of God-devotion, the souls of his brethren. No other
saving can save them. They must receive the Son, and through the Son
the Father. What it cost the Son to get so near to us that we could say
_Come in_, is the story of his life. He stands at the door and knocks,
and when we open to him he comes in, and dwells with us, and we are
transformed to the same image of truth and purity and heavenly
childhood. Where power dwells, there is no force; where the spirit-Lord
is, there is liberty. The Lord Jesus, by free, potent communion with
their inmost being, will change his obedient brethren till in every
thought and impulse they are good like him, unselfish, neighbourly,
brotherly like him, loving the Father perfectly like him, ready to die
for the truth like him, caring like him for nothing in the universe but
the will of God, which is love, harmony, liberty, beauty, and joy.

I do not know if we may call this having life in ourselves; but it is
the waking up, the perfecting in us of the divine life inherited from
our Father in heaven, who made us in his own image, whose nature
remains in us, and makes it the deepest reproach to a man that he has
neither heard his voice at any time, nor seen his shape. He who would
thus live must, as a mirror draws into its bosom an outward glory,
receive into his 'heart of heart' the inward glory of Jesus Christ,
_the Truth_.

THE TRUTH.

I am the truth.--John xiv. 6

When the man of the five senses talks of _truth_, he regards it but as
a predicate of something historical or scientific proved a fact; or, if
he allows that, for aught he knows, there may be higher truth, yet, as
he cannot obtain proof of it from without, he acts as if under no
conceivable obligation to seek any other satisfaction concerning it.
Whatever appeal be made to the highest region of his nature, such a one
behaves as if it were the part of a wise man to pay it no heed, because
it does not come within the scope of the lower powers of that nature.
According to the word of _the_ man, however, truth means more than
fact, more than relation of facts or persons, more than loftiest
abstraction of metaphysical entity--means being and life, will and
action; for he says, '_I am the truth_.'

I desire to help those whom I may to understand more of what is meant
by _the truth_, not for the sake of definition, or logical
discrimination, but that, when they hear the word from the mouth of the
Lord, the right idea may rise in their minds; that the word may neither
be to them a void sound, nor call up either a vague or false notion of
what he meant by it. If he says, 'I am the truth,' it must, to say the
least, be well to know what he means by the word with whose idea he
identifies himself. And at once we may premise that he can mean nothing
merely intellectual, such as may be set forth and left there; he means
something vital, so vital that the whole of its necessary relations are
subject to it, so vital that it includes everything else which, in any
lower plane, may go or have gone by the same name. Let us endeavour to
arrive at his meaning by a gently ascending stair.

A thing being so, the word that says it is so, is the truth. But the
fact may be of no value in itself, and our knowledge of it of no value
either. Of most facts it may be said that the truth concerning them is
of no consequence. For instance, it cannot be in itself important
whether on a certain morning I took one side of the street or the
other. It may be of importance to some one to know which I took, but in
itself it is of none. It would therefore be felt unfit if I said, 'It
is a _truth_ that I walked on the sunny side.' The correct word would
be a _fact_, not a truth. If the question arose whether a statement
concerning the thing were correct, we should still be in the region of
fact or no fact; but when we come to ask whether the statement was true
or false, then we are concerned with the matter as the assertion of a
human being, and ascend to another plane of things. It may be of no
consequence which side I was upon, or it may be of consequence to some
one to know which, but it is of vital importance to the witness and to
any who love him, whether or not he believes the statement he
makes--whether the man himself is true or false. Concerning the thing
it can be but a question of _fact_; it remains a question of fact even
whether the man has or has not spoken the truth; but concerning the man
it is a question of truth: he is either a pure soul, so far as this
thing witnesses, or a false soul, capable and guilty of a lie. In this
relation it is of no consequence whether the man spoke the fact or not;
if he meant to speak the fact, he remains a true man.

Here I would anticipate so far as to say that there are _truths_ as
well as _facts_, and lies against truths as well as against facts. When
the Pharisees said _Corban_, they lied against the truth that a man
must honour his father and mother.

Let us go up now from the region of facts that seem casual, to those
facts that are invariable, by us unchangeable, which therefore involve
what we call _law_. It will be seen at once that the _fact_ here is of
more dignity, and the truth or falsehood of a statement in this region
of more consequence in itself. It is a small matter whether the water
in my jug was frozen on such a morning; but it is a fact of great
importance that at thirty-two degrees of Fahrenheit water always
freezes. We rise a step here in the nature of the facts concerned: are
we come therefore into the region of truths? Is it a truth that water
freezes at thirty-two degrees? I think not. There is no principle, open
to us, involved in the changeless fact. The principle that lies at the
root of it in the mind of God must be a truth, but to the human mind
the fact is as yet only a fact. The word truth ought to be kept for
higher things. There are those that think such facts the highest that
can be known; they put therefore the highest word they know to the
highest thing they know, and call the facts of nature truths; but to me
it seems that, however high you come in your generalization, however
wide you make your law---including, for instance, all solidity under
the law of freezing--you have not risen higher than the statement that
such and such is an invariable fact. Call it a law if you will--a law
of nature if you choose--that it always is so, but not a truth. It
cannot be to us a truth until we descry the reason of its existence,
its relation to mind and intent, yea to self-existence. Tell us why it
_must_ be so, and you state a truth. When we come to see that a law is
such, because it is the embodiment of a certain eternal thought, beheld
by us in it, a fact of the being of God, the facts of which alone are
truths, then indeed it will be to us, not a law merely, but an embodied
truth. A law of God's nature is a way he would have us think of him; it
is a necessary truth of all being. When a law of Nature makes us see
this; when we say, I understand that law; I see why it ought to be; it
is just like God; then it rises, not to the dignity of a truth in
itself, but to the truth of its own nature--namely, a revelation of
character, nature, and will in God. It is a picture of something in
God, a word that tells a fact about God, and is therefore far nearer
being called a truth than anything below it. As a simple illustration:
What notion should we have of the unchanging and unchangeable, without
the solidity of matter? If, such as we are, we had nothing solid about
us, where would be our thinking about God and truth and law?

But there is a region perhaps not so high as this from the scientific
point of view, where yet the word truth may begin to be rightly
applied. I believe that every fact in nature is a revelation of God, is
there such as it is because God is such as he is; and I suspect that
all its facts impress us so that we learn God unconsciously. True, we
cannot think of any one fact thus, except as we find the soul of
it--its fact of God; but from the moment when first we come into
contact with the world, it is to us a revelation of God, his things
seen, by which we come to know the things unseen. How should we imagine
what we may of God, without the firmament over our heads, a visible
sphere, yet a formless infinitude! What idea could we have of God
without the sky? The truth of the sky is what it makes us feel of the
God that sent it out to our eyes. If you say the sky could not but be
so and such, I grant it--with God at the root of it. There is nothing
for us to conceive in its stead--therefore indeed it must be so. In its
discovered laws, light seems to me to be such because God is such. Its
so-called laws are the waving of his garments, waving so because he is
thinking and loving and walking inside them.

We are here in a region far above that commonly claimed for science,
open only to the heart of the child and the childlike man and woman--a
region in which the poet is among his own things, and to which he has
often to go to fetch them. For things as they are, not as science deals
with them, are the revelation of God to his children. I would not be
misunderstood: there is no fact of science not yet incorporated in a
law, no law of science that has got beyond the hypothetic and
tentative, that has not in it the will of God, and therefore may not
reveal God; but neither fact nor law is there for the sake of fact or
law; each is but a mean to an end; in the perfected end we find the
intent, and there God--not in the laws themselves, save as his means.
For that same reason, human science cannot discover God; for human
science is but the backward undoing of the tapestry-web of God's
science, works with its back to him, and is always leaving him--his
intent, that is, his perfected work--behind it, always going farther
and farther away from the point where his work culminates in
revelation. Doubtless it thus makes some small intellectual approach to
him, but at best it can come only to his back; science will never find
the face of God; while those who would reach his heart, those who, like
Dante, are returning thither where they are, will find also the
spring-head of his science. Analysis is well, as death is well;
analysis is death, not life. It discovers a little of the way God walks
to his ends, but in so doing it forgets and leaves the end itself
behind. I do not say the man of science does so, but the very process
of his work is such a leaving of God's ends behind. It is a following
back of his footsteps, too often without appreciation of the result for
which the feet took those steps. To rise from the perfected work is the
swifter and loftier ascent. If the man could find out why God worked
so, then he would be discovering God; but even then he would not be
discovering the best and the deepest of God; for his means cannot be so
great as his ends. I must make myself clearer.

Ask a man of mere science, what is the truth of a flower: he will pull
it to pieces, show you its parts, explain how they operate, how they
minister each to the life of the flower; he will tell you what changes
are wrought in it by scientific cultivation; where it lives originally,
where it can live; the effects upon it of another climate; what part
the insects bear in its varieties--and doubtless many more facts about
it. Ask the poet what is the truth of the flower, and he will answer:
'Why, the flower itself, the perfect flower, and what it cannot help
saying to him who has ears to hear it.' The truth of the flower is, not
the facts about it, be they correct as ideal science itself, but the
shining, glowing, gladdening, patient thing throned on its stalk--the
compeller of smile and tear from child and prophet. The man of science
laughs at this, because he is only a man of science, and does not know
what it means; but the poet and the child care as little for his
laughter as the birds of God, as Dante calls the angels, for his
treatise on aerostation. The children of God must always be mocked by
the children of the world, whether in the church or out of it--children
with sharp ears and eyes, but dull hearts. Those that hold love the
only good in the world, understand and smile at the world's children,
and can do very well without anything they have got to tell them. In
the higher state to which their love is leading them, they will
speedily outstrip the men of science, for they have that which is at
the root of science, that for the revealing of which God's science
exists. What shall it profit a man to know all things, and lose the
bliss, the consciousness of well-being, which alone can give value to
his knowledge?

God's science in the flower exists for the existence of the flower in
its relation to his children. If we understand, if we are at one with,
if we love the flower, we have that for which the science is there,
that which alone can equip us for true search into the means and ways
by which the divine idea of the flower was wrought out to be presented
to us. The idea of God _is_ the flower; his idea is not the botany of
the flower. Its botany is but a thing of ways and means--of canvas and
colour and brush in relation to the picture in the painter's brain. The
mere intellect can never find out that which owes its being to the
heart supreme. The relation of the intellect to that which is born of
the heart is an unreal except it be a humble one. The idea of God, I
repeat, is the flower. He thought it; invented its means; sent it, a
gift of himself, to the eyes and hearts of his children. When we see
how they are loved by the ignorant and degraded, we may well believe
the flowers have a place in the history of the world, as written for
the archives of heaven, which we are yet a long way from understanding,
and which science could not, to all eternity, understand, or enable to
understand. Watch that child! He has found one of his silent and
motionless brothers, with God's clothing upon it, God's thought in its
face. In what a smile breaks out the divine understanding between them!
Watch his mother when he takes it home to her--no nearer understanding
it than he! It is no old association that brings those tears to her
eyes, powerful in that way as are flowers, and things far inferior to
flowers; it is God's thought, unrecognized as such, holding communion
with her. She weeps with a delight inexplicable. It is only a daisy!
only a primrose! only a pheasant-eye-narcissus! only a lily of the
field! only a snowdrop! only a sweet-pea! only a brave yellow crocus!
But here to her is no mere fact; here is no law of nature; here is a
truth of nature, the truth of a flower--a perfect thought from the
heart of God--a truth of God!--not an intellectual truth, but a divine
fact, a dim revelation, a movement of the creative soul! Who but a
father could think the flowers for his little ones? We are nigh the
region now in which the Lord's word is at home--'I am the truth.'

I will take an illustrative instance altogether to my mind and special
purpose. What, I ask, is the truth of water? Is it that it is formed of
hydrogen and oxygen?--That the chemist has now another mode of stating
the _fact_ of water, will not affect my illustration. His new mode will
probably be one day yet more antiquated than mine is now.--Is it for
the sake of the fact that hydrogen and oxygen combined form water, that
the precious thing exists? Is oxygen-and-hydrogen the divine idea of
water? Or has God put the two together only that man might separate and
find them out? He allows his child to pull his toys to pieces; but were
they made that he might pull them to pieces? He were a child not to be
envied for whom his inglorious father would make toys to such an end! A
school-examiner might see therein the best use of a toy, but not a
father! Find for us what in the constitution of the two gases makes
them fit and capable to be thus honoured in forming the lovely thing,
and you will give us a revelation about more than water, namely about
the God who made oxygen and hydrogen. There is no water in oxygen, no
water in hydrogen: it comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the
living God, rushing from under the great white throne of the glacier.
The very thought of it makes one gasp with an elemental joy no
metaphysician can analyse. The water itself, that dances, and sings,
and slakes the wonderful thirst--symbol and picture of that draught for
which the woman of Samaria made her prayer to Jesus--this lovely thing
itself, whose very wetness is a delight to every inch of the human body
in its embrace--this live thing which, if I might, I would have running
through my room, yea, babbling along my table--this water is its own
self its own truth, and is therein a truth of God. Let him who would
know the love of the maker, become sorely athirst, and drink of the
brook by the way--then lift up his heart--not at that moment to the
maker of oxygen and hydrogen, but to the inventor and mediator of
thirst and water, that man might foresee a little of what his soul may
find in God. If he become not then as a hart panting for the
water-brooks, let him go back to his science and its husks: they will
at last make him thirsty as the victim in the dust-tower of the
Persian. As well may a man think to describe the joy of drinking by
giving thirst and water for its analysis, as imagine he has revealed
anything about water by resolving it into its scientific elements. Let
a man go to the hillside and let the brook sing to him till he loves
it, and he will find himself far nearer the fountain of truth than the
triumphal car of the chemist will ever lead the shouting crew of his
half-comprehending followers. He will draw from the brook the water of
joyous tears, 'and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the
sea, and the fountains of waters.'

The truth _of a thing_, then, is the blossom of it, the thing it is
made for, the topmost stone set on with rejoicing; truth in a man's
imagination is the power to recognize this truth of a thing; and
wherever, in anything that God has made, in the glory of it, be it sky
or flower or human face, we see the glory of God, there a true
imagination is beholding a truth of God. And now we must advance to a
yet higher plane.

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