Unspoken Sermons

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We have seen that the moment whatever goes by the name of truth comes
into connection with man; the moment that, instead of merely mirroring
itself in his intellect as a thing outside of him, it comes into
contact with him as a being of action; the moment the knowledge of it
affects or ought to affect his sense of duty, it becomes a thing of far
nobler import; the question of truth enters upon a higher phase, looks
out of a loftier window. A fact which in itself is of no value, becomes
at once a matter of life and death--moral life and death, when a man
has the choice, the imperative choice of being true or false concerning
it. When the truth, the heart, the summit, the crown of a thing, is
perceived by a man, he approaches the fountain of truth whence the
thing came, and perceiving God by understanding what is, becomes more
of a man, more of the being he was meant to be. In virtue of this truth
perceived, he has relations with the universe undeveloped in him till
then. But far higher will the doing of the least, the most
insignificant duty raise him. He begins thereby to be a true man. A man
may delight in the vision and glory of a truth, and not himself be
true. The man whose vision is weak, but who, as far as he sees, and
desirous to see farther, does the thing he sees, is a true man. If a
man knows what is, and says it is not, his knowing does not make him
less than a liar. The man who recognizes the truth of any human
relation, and neglects the duty involved, is not a true man. The man
who knows the laws of nature, and does not heed them, the more he
teaches them to others, the less is he a true man. But he may obey them
all and be the falsest of men, because of far higher and closer duties
which he neglects. The man who takes good care of himself and none of
his brother and sister, is false. A man may be a poet, aware of the
highest truth of a thing, of that beauty which is the final cause of
its existence; he may draw thence a notion of the creative loveliness
that thought it out; he may be a man who would not tell a lie, or
steal, or slander--and yet he may not be a true man, inasmuch as the
essentials of manhood are not his aim: having nowise come to the flower
of his own being, nowise, in his higher degree, attained the truth of
_a thing_--namely, that for which he exists, the creational notion of
him--neither is he striving after the same. There are relations closer
than those of the facts around him, plainer than those that seem to
bring the maker nigh to him, which he is failing to see, or seeing
fails to acknowledge, or acknowledging fails to fulfil. Man is man only
in the doing of the truth, perfect man only in the doing of the highest
truth, which is the fulfilling of his relations to his origin. But he
has relations with his fellow man, closer infinitely than with any of
the things around him, and to many a man far plainer than his relations
with God. Now the nearer is plainer that he may step on it, and rise to
the higher, till then the less plain. These relations make a large part
of his being, are essential to his very existence, and spring from the
very facts of the origination of his being. They are the relation of
thought to thought, of being to being, of duty to duty. The very nature
of a man depends upon or is one with these relations. They are
_truths_, and the man is a true man as he fulfils them. Fulfilling them
perfectly, he is himself a _truth_, a living truth. As regarded merely
by the intellect, these relations are facts of man's nature; but that
they are of man's nature makes them truths, and the fulfilments of them
are duties. He is so constituted as to understand them at first more
than he can love them, with the resulting advantage of having thereby
the opportunity of choosing them purely because they are true; so doing
he chooses to love them, and is enabled to love them in the doing,
which alone can truly reveal them to him, and make the loving of them
possible. Then they cease to show themselves in the form of duties, and
appear as they more truly are, absolute truths, essential realities,
eternal delights. The man is a true man who chooses duty; he is a
perfect man who at length never thinks of duty, who forgets the name of
it. The duty of Jesus was the doing in lower forms than the perfect
that which he loved perfectly, and did perfectly in the highest forms
also. Thus he fulfilled all righteousness. One who went to the truth by
mere impulse, would be a holy animal, not a true man. Relations,
truths, duties, are shown to the man away beyond him, that he may
choose them, and be a child of God, choosing righteousness like him.
Hence the whole sad victorious human tale, and the glory to be
revealed!

The moral philosopher who regards duties only as facts of his system;
nay, even the man who rewards them as truths, essential realities of
his humanity, but goes no farther, is essentially a liar, a man of
untruth. He is a man indeed, but not a true man. He is a man in
possibility, but not a real man yet. The recognition of these things is
the imperative obligation to fulfil them. Not fulfilling these
relations, the man is undoing the right of his own existence,
destroying his _raison d'etre_, making of himself a monster, a live
reason why he should not live, for nothing on those terms could ever
have begun to be. His presence is a claim upon his creator for
destruction.

The facts of human relation, then, are truths indeed, and of awfullest
import. 'Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer; and ye know that
no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him!' The man who lives a
hunter after pleasure, not a labourer in the fields of duty, who thinks
of himself as if he were alone on the earth, is in himself a lie.
Instead of being the man he looks, the man he was made to be, he lives
as the beasts seem to live--with this difference, I trust, that they
are rising, while he, so far as lies in himself, is sinking. But he
cannot be allowed to sink beyond God's reach; hence all the holy--that
is, healing--miseries that come upon him, of which he complains as so
hard and unfair: they are for the compelling of the truth he will not
yield--a painful suasion to be himself, to be a truth.

But suppose, for the sake of my progressive unfolding, that a man did
everything required of him--fulfilled all the relations to his fellows
of which I have been speaking, was toward them at least, a true man; he
would yet feel, doubtless would feel it the more, that something was
lacking to him--lacking to his necessary well-being. Like a live
flower, he would feel that he had not yet blossomed, and could not tell
what the blossom ought to be. In this direction the words of the Lord
point, when he says to the youth, 'If thou wouldst be perfect.' The man
whom I suppose, would feel that his existence was not yet justified to
itself, that the truth of his being and nature was not yet revealed to
his consciousness. He would remain unsatisfied; and the cause would be
that there was in him a relation, and that the deepest, closest, and
strongest, which had not yet come into live fact, which had not yet
become a truth in him, toward which he was not true, whereby his being
remained untrue, he was not himself, was not ripened into the divine
idea, which alone can content itself. A child with a child's heart who
does not even know that he has a father, yet misses him--with his whole
nature, even if not with his consciousness. This relation has not yet
so far begun to be fulfilled in him, as that the coming blossom should
send before it patience and hope enough to enable him to live by faith
without sight. When the flower begins to come, the human plant begins
to rejoice in the glory of God not yet revealed, the inheritance of the
saints in light; with uplifted stem and forward-leaning bud expects the
hour when the lily of God's field shall know itself alive, with God
himself for its heart and its atmosphere; the hour when God and the man
shall be one, and all that God cares for shall be the man's. But again
I forget my progression.

The highest truth to the intellect, the abstract truth, is the relation
in which man stands to the source of his being--his will to the will
whence it became a will, his love to the love that kindled his power to
love, his intellect to the intellect that lighted his. If a man deal
with these things only as things to be dealt with, as objects of
thought, as ideas to be analysed and arranged in their due order and
right relation, he treats them as facts and not as truths, and is no
better, probably much the worse, for his converse with them, for he
knows in a measure, and is false to all that is most worthy of his
faithfulness.

But when the soul, or heart, or spirit, or what you please to call that
which is the man himself and not his body, sooner or later becomes
aware that he needs some one above him, whom to obey, in whom to rest,
from whom to seek deliverance from what in himself is despicable,
disappointing, unworthy even of his own interest; when he is aware of
an opposition in him, which is not harmony; that, while he hates it,
there is yet present with him, and seeming to be himself, what
sometimes he calls _the old Adam_, sometimes _the flesh_, sometimes
_his lower nature_, sometimes _his evil self_; and sometimes recognizes
as simply that part of his being where God is not; then indeed is the
man in the region of truth, and beginning to come true in himself. Nor
will it be long ere he discover that there is no part in him with which
he would be at strife, so God were there, so that it were true, what it
ought to be--in right relation to the whole; for, by whatever name
called, the old Adam, or antecedent horse, or dog, or tiger, it would
then fulfil its part holily, intruding upon nothing, subject utterly to
the rule of the higher; horse or dog or tiger, it would be good horse,
good dog, good tiger.

When the man bows down before a power that can account for him, a power
to whom he is no mystery as he is to himself; a power that knows whence
he came and whither he is going; who knows why he loves this and hates
that, why and where he began to go wrong; who can set him right, longs
indeed to set him right, making of him a creature to look up to himself
without shadow of doubt, anxiety or fear, confident as a child whom his
father is leading by the hand to the heights of happy-making truth,
knowing that where he is wrong, the father is right and will set him
right; when the man feels his whole being in the embrace of
self-responsible paternity--then the man is bursting into his flower;
then the truth of his being, the eternal fact at the root of his new
name, his real nature, his idea--born in God at first, and responsive
to the truth, the being of God, his origin--begins to show itself; then
his nature is almost in harmony with itself. For, obeying the will that
is the cause of his being, the cause of that which demands of itself to
be true, and that will being righteousness and love and truth, he
begins to stand on the apex of his being, to know himself divine. He
begins to feel himself free. The truth--not as known to his intellect,
but as revealed in his own sense of being true, known by his essential
consciousness of his divine condition, without which his nature is
neither his own nor God's--trueness has made him free. Not any abstract
truth, not all abstract truth, not truth its very metaphysical self,
held by purest insight into entity, can make any man free; but the
truth done, the truth loved, the truth lived by the man; the truth _of_
and not merely _in_ the man himself; the honesty that makes the man
himself a child of the honest God.

When a man is, with his whole nature, loving and willing the truth, he
is then a live truth. But this he has not originated in himself. He has
seen it and striven for it, but not originated it. The one originating,
living, visible truth, embracing all truths in all relations, is Jesus
Christ. He is true; he is the live Truth. His truth, chosen and willed
by him, the ripeness of his being, the flower of his sonship which is
his nature, the crown of his one topmost perfect relation acknowledged
and gloried in, is his absolute obedience to his father. The obedient
Jesus is Jesus the Truth. He is true and the root of all truth and
development of truth in men. Their very being, however far from the
true human, is the undeveloped Christ in them, and his likeness to
Christ is the truth of a man, even as the perfect meaning of a flower
is the truth of a flower. Every man, according to the divine idea of
him, must come to the truth of that idea; and under every form of
Christ is the Christ. The truth of every man, I say, is the perfected
Christ in him. As Christ is the blossom of humanity, so the blossom of
every man is the Christ perfected in him. The vital force of humanity
working in him is Christ; he is his root--the generator and perfecter
of his individuality. The stronger the pure will of the man to be true;
the freer and more active his choice; the more definite his
individuality, ever the more is the man and all that is his, Christ's.
Without him he could not have been; being, he could not have become
capable of truth; capable of truth, he could never have loved it;
loving and desiring it, he could not have attained to it. Nothing but
the heart-presence, the humanest sympathy, and whatever deeper thing
else may be betwixt the creating Truth and the responding soul, could
make a man go on hoping, until at last he forget himself, and keep open
house for God to come and go. He gives us the will wherewith to will,
and the power to use it, and the help needed to supplement the power,
whatever in any case the need may be; but we ourselves must will the
truth, and for that the Lord is waiting, for the victory of God his
father in the heart of his child. In this alone can he see of the
travail of his soul, in this alone be satisfied. The work is his, but
we must take our willing share. When the blossom breaks forth in us,
the more it is ours the more it is his, for the highest creation of the
Father, and that pre-eminently through the Son, is the being that can,
like the Father and the Son, of his own self will what is right. The
groaning and travailing, the blossom and the joy, are the Father's and
the Son's and ours. The will, the power of willing, may be created, but
the willing is begotten. Because God wills first, man wills also.

When my being is consciously and willedly in the hands of him who
called it to live and think and suffer and be glad--given back to him
by a perfect obedience--I thenceforward breathe the breath, share the
life of God himself. Then I am free, in that I am true--which means one
with the Father. And freedom knows itself to be freedom. When a man is
true, if he were in hell he could not be miserable. He is right with
himself because right with him whence he came. To be right with God is
to be right with the universe; one with the power, the love, the will
of the mighty Father, the cherisher of joy, the lord of laughter, whose
are all glories, all hopes, who loves everything, and hates nothing but
selfishness, which he will not have in his kingdom.

Christ then is the Lord of life; his life is the light of men; the
light mirrored in them changes them into the image of him, the Truth;
and thus _the truth, who is the Son, makes them free_.

FREEDOM.

_The Truth shall make you free.... Whosoever committeth sin, is the
servant of sin. And the servant abideth not in the house for ever: but
the Son abideth ever. If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye
shall be free indeed._--John viii. 32, 34-36.

As this passage stands, I have not been able to make sense of it. No
man could be in the house of the Father in virtue of being the servant
of sin; yet this man is in the house as a servant, and the house in
which he serves is not the house of sin, but the house of the Father.
The utterance is confused at best, and the reasoning faulty. He must be
in the house of the Father on some other ground than sin. This, had no
help come, would have been sufficient cause for leaving the passage
alone, as one where, perhaps, the words of the Lord were
misrepresented--where, at least, perceiving more than one fundamental
truth involved in the passage, I failed to follow the argument. I do
not see that I could ever have suggested where the corruption, if any,
lay. Most difficulties of similar nature have originated, like this, I
can hardly doubt, with some scribe who, desiring to explain what he did
not understand, wrote his worthless gloss on the margin: the next
copier took the words for an omission that ought to be replaced in the
body of the text, and inserting them, falsified the utterance, and
greatly obscured its intention. What do we not owe to the critics who
have searched the scriptures, and found what really was written! In the
present case, Dr. Westcott's notation gives us to understand that there
is another with 'a reasonable probability of being the true reading.'
The difference is indeed small to the eye, but is great enough to give
us fine gold instead of questionable ore. In an alternative of the
kind, I must hope in what seems logical against what seems illogical;
in what seems radiant against what seems trite.

What I take for the true reading then, I English thus: 'Every one
committing sin is a slave. But the slave does not remain in the house
for ever; the son remaineth for ever. If then the son shall make you
free, you shall in reality be free.' The authorized version gives,
'Whosoever committeth sin, is the servant of _sin_; 'the revised
version gives, 'Every one that committeth sin is the bondservant of
_sin_;' both accepting the reading that has the words, '_of sin_.' The
statement is certainly in itself true, but appears to me useless for
the argument that follows. And I think it may have been what I take to
be the true reading, that suggested to the apostle Paul what he says in
the beginning of the fourth chapter of his Epistle to the
Galatians--words of spirit and life from which has been mistakenly
drawn the doctrine of adoption, merest poison to the child-heart. The
words of the Lord here are not that he who sins is the slave of sin,
true utterly as that is; but that he is a slave, and the argument shows
that he means a slave to God. The two are perfectly consistent. No
amount of slavery to sin can keep a man from being as much the slave of
God as God chooses in his mercy to make him. It is his sin makes him a
slave instead of a child. His slavery to sin is his ruin; his slavery
to God is his only hope. God indeed does not love slavery; he hates it;
he will have children, not slaves; but he may keep a slave in his house
a long time in the hope of waking up the poor slavish nature to aspire
to the sonship which belongs to him, which is his birthright. But the
slave is not to be in the house for ever. The father is not bound to
keep his son a slave because the foolish child prefers it.

Whoever will not do what God desires of him, is a slave whom God can
compel to do it, however he may bear with him. He who, knowing this, or
fearing punishment, obeys God, is still a slave, but a slave who comes
within hearing of the voice of his master. There are, however, far
higher than he, who yet are but slaves. Those to whom God is not all in
all, are slaves. They may not commit great sins; they may be trying to
do right; but so long as they _serve_ God, as they call it, from duty,
and do not know him as their father, the joy of their being, they are
slaves--good slaves, but slaves. If they did not try to do their duty,
they would be bad slaves. They are by no means so slavish as those that
serve from fear, but they are slaves; and because they are but slaves,
they can fulfil no righteousness, can do no duty perfectly, but must
ever be trying after it wearily and in pain, knowing well that if they
stop trying, they are lost. They are slaves indeed, for they would be
glad to be adopted by one who is their own father! Where then are the
sons? I know none, I answer, who are yet utterly and entirely sons or
daughters. There may be such--God knows; I have not known them; or,
knowing them, have not been myself such as to be able to recognize
them. But I do know some who are enough sons and daughters to be at war
with the slave in them, who are not content to be slaves to their
father. Nothing I have seen or known of sonship, comes near the glory
of the thing; but there are thousands of sons and daughters, though
their number be yet only a remnant, who are siding with the father of
their spirits against themselves, against all that divides them from
him from whom they have come, but out of whom they have never come,
seeing that in him they live and move and have their being. Such are
not slaves; they are true though not perfect children; they are
fighting along with God against the evil separation; they are breaking
at the middle wall of partition. Only the rings of their fetters are
left, and they are struggling to take them off. They are children--with
more or less of the dying slave in them; they know it is there, and
what it is, and hate the slavery in them, and try to slay it. The real
slave is he who does not seek to be a child; who does not desire to end
his slavery; who looks upon the claim of the child as presumption; who
cleaves to the traditional authorized service of forms and ceremonies,
and does not know the will of him who made the seven stars and Orion,
much less cares to obey it; who never lifts up his heart to cry
'Father, what wouldst thou have me to do?' Such are continually
betraying their slavery by their complaints. 'Do we not well to be
angry?' they cry with Jonah; and, truly, being slaves, I do not know
how they are to help it. When they are sons and daughters, they will no
longer complain of the hardships, and miseries, and troubles of life;
no longer grumble at their aches and pains, at the pinching of their
poverty, at the hunger that assails them; no longer be indignant at
their rejection by what is called Society. Those who believe in their
own perfect father, can ill blame him for anything they do not like.
Ah, friend, it may be you and I are slaves, but there _are_ such sons
and daughters as I speak of.

The slaves of sin rarely grumble at that slavery; it is their slavery
to God they grumble at; of that alone they complain--of the painful
messengers he sends to deliver them from their slavery both to sin and
to himself. They must be sons or slaves. They cannot rid themselves of
their owner. Whether they deny God, or mock him by acknowledging and
not heeding him, or treat him as an arbitrary, formal monarch; whether,
taking no trouble to find out what pleases him, they do dull things for
his service he cares nothing about, or try to propitiate him by
assuming with strenuous effort some yoke the Son never wore, and never
called on them to wear, they are slaves, and not the less slaves that
they are slaves to God; they are so thoroughly slaves, that they do not
care to get out of their slavery by becoming sons and daughters, by
finding the good of life where alone it can or could lie. Could a
creator make a creature whose well-being should not depend on himself?
And if he could, would the creature be the greater for that? Which, the
creature he made more, or the creature he made less dependent on
himself, would be the greater? The slave in heart would immediately,
with Milton's Satan, reply, that the farthest from him who made him
must be the freest, thus acknowledging his very existence a slavery,
and but two kinds in being--a creator, and as many slaves as he pleases
to make, whose refusal to obey is their unknown protest against their
own essence. _Being_ itself must, for what they call liberty, be
repudiated! Creation itself, to go by their lines of life, is an
injustice! God had no right to create beings less than himself; and as
he could not create equal, he ought not to have created! But they do
not complain of having been created; they complain of being required to
do justice. They will not obey, but, his own handiwork, ravish from his
work every advantage they can! They desire to be free with another kind
of freedom than that with which God is free; unknowing, they seek a
more complete slavery. There is, in truth, no mid way between absolute
harmony with the Father and the condition of slaves--submissive, or
rebellious. If the latter, their very rebellion is by the strength of
the Father in them. Of divine essence, they thrust their existence in
the face of their essence, their own nature.

Yet is their very rebellion in some sense but the rising in them of his
spirit against their false notion of him--against the lies they hold
concerning him. They do not see that, if his work, namely, they
themselves, are the chief joy to themselves, much more might the life
that works them be a glory and joy to them the work--inasmuch as it is
nearer to them than they to themselves, causing them to be, and
extends, without breach of relation, so infinitely above and beyond
them. For nothing can come so close as that which creates; the nearest,
strongest, dearest relation possible is between creator and created.
Where this is denied, the schism is the widest; where it is
acknowledged and fulfilled, the closeness is unspeakable. But ever
remains what cannot be said, and I sink defeated. The very protest of
the rebel against slavery, comes at once of the truth of God in him,
which he cannot all cast from him, and of a slavery too low to love
truth--a meanness that will take all and acknowledge nothing, as if his
very being was a disgrace to him. The liberty of the God that would
have his creature free, is in contest with the slavery of the creature
who would cut his own stem from his root that he might call it his own
and love it; who rejoices in his own consciousness, instead of the life
of that consciousness; who poises himself on the tottering wall of his
own being, instead of the rock on which that being is built. Such a one
regards his own dominion over himself--the rule of the greater by the
less, inasmuch as the conscious self is less than the self--as a
freedom infinitely greater than the range of the universe of God's
being. If he says, 'At least I have it my own way!' I answer, You do
not know what is your way and what is not. You know nothing of whence
your impulses, your desires, your tendencies, your likings come. They
may spring now from some chance, as of nerves diseased; now from some
roar of a wandering bodiless devil; now from some infant hate in your
heart; now from the greed or lawlessness of some ancestor you would be
ashamed of if you knew him; or it may be now from some far-piercing
chord of a heavenly orchestra: the moment it comes up into your
consciousness, you call it your own way, and glory in it! Two devils
amusing themselves with a duet of inspiration, one at each ear, might
soon make that lordly _me_ you are so in love with, rejoice in the
freedom of willing the opposite each alternate moment; and at length
drive you mad at finding that you could not, will as you would, make
choice of a way and its opposite simultaneously. The whole question
rests and turns on the relation of creative and created, of which
relation few seem to have the consciousness yet developed. To live
without the eternal creative life is an impossibility; freedom from God
can only mean an incapacity for seeing the facts of existence, an
incapability of understanding the glory of the creature who makes
common cause with his creator in his creation of him, who wills that
the lovely will calling him into life and giving him choice, should
finish making him, should draw him into the circle of the creative
heart, to joy that he lives by no poor power of his own will, but is
one with the causing life of his life, in closest breathing and
willing, vital and claimant oneness with the life of all life. Such a
creature knows the life of the infinite Father as the very flame of his
life, and joys that nothing is done or will be done in the universe in
which the Father will not make him all of a sharer that it is possible
for perfect generosity to make him. If you say this is irreverent, I
doubt if you have seen the God manifest in Jesus. But all will be well,
for the little god of your poor content will starve your soul to
misery, and the terror of the eternal death creeping upon you, will
compel you to seek a perfect father. Oh, ye hide-bound Christians, the
Lord is not straitened, but ye are straitened in your narrow unwilling
souls! Some of you need to be shamed before yourselves; some of you
need the fire.

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