the flower. Its botany is but a thing of ways and means-of canvas and color and brush in relation to the picture in the painter's brain. [ 188 ] Water Is oxygen-and-hydrogen the divine idea of water? 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 honored 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 analyze. 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 witness 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 truth 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 might find in God. [ 189 ] Truth of Things 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. [ 190 ] Caution But far higher will the doing of the least, the most insignificant, duty raise him. [ 191 ] Duties These relations are facts of man's nature. ... 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. [ 192 ] Why Free Will Was Permitted 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. [ 193 ] Eternal Death 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. [ 194 ] The Redemption of Our Nature When (a man) 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 fulfill 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. [ 195 ] No Mystery Man bows down before a power that can account for him, a power to whom he is no mystery as he is to himself. [ 196 ] The Live Truth 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 more originating, living, visible truth, embracing all truths in all relations, is Jesus Christ. He is true: He is the live Truth. [ 197 ] Likeness to Christ His likeness to Christ is the truth of a man, even as the perfect meaning of a flower is the truth of a flower.... As Christ is the blossom of humanity, so the blossom of every man is the Christ perfected in him. [ 198 ] Grace and Freedom He gives us the will wherewith to will, and the power to use it, and the help needed to supplement the power: . . . but we ourselves must will the truth and for that the Lord is waiting. . . . 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. [ 199 ] Glorious Liberty 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. [ 200 ] No Middle Way 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. [ 201 ] On Having One's Own Way The liberty of the God who would have his creatures 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-as a freedom infinitely larger than the range of the universe of God's being. If he says, "At least I have it in 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 of 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 comes up into your consciousness, you call it your own way, and glory in it. [ 2O2 ] The Death of Christ Christ died to save us, not from suffering, but from ourselves; not from injustice, far less from justice, but from being unjust. He died that we might live-but live as He lives, by dying as He died who died to Himself. [ 203 ] Hell The one principle of hell is-"I am my own!" [ 204 ] The Lie To all these principles of hell, or of this world-they are the same thing, and it matters nothing whether they are asserted or defended so long as they are acted upon -the Lord, the King, gives the direct lie. [ 205 ] The Author's Fear If I mistake, He will forgive me. I do not fear Him: I fear only lest, able to see and write these things, I should fail of witnessing and myself be, after all, a castaway- no king but a talker; no disciple of Jesus, ready to go with Him to the death, but an arguer about the truth. [ 206 ] Sincerity We are not bound to say all we think but we are bound not even to look what we do not think. [ 207 ] First Things First Oh the folly of any mind that would explain God before obeying Him! That would map out the character of God instead of crying, Lord, what wouldst thou have me to do? [ 208 ] Inexorable Love A man might flatter, or bribe, or coax a tyrant; but there is no refuge from the love of God; that love will, for very love, insist upon the uttermost farthing.-"That is not the sort of love I care about!"-No; how should you? I well believe it. [ 209 ] Salvation The notion that the salvation of Jesus is a salvation from the consequences of our sins is a false, mean, low notion. . . . Jesus did not die to save us from punishment; He was called Jesus because He should save His people from their sins. [ 210 ] Charity and Orthodoxy Every man who tries to obey the Master is my brother, whether he counts me such or not, and I revere him; but dare I give quarter to what I see to be a lie because my brother believes it? The lie is not of God, whoever may hold it. [ 211 ] Evasion To put off obeying Him till we find a credible theory concerning Him is to set aside the potion we know it our duty to drink, for the study of the various schools of therapy. [ 212 ] Inexorable Love Such is the mercy of God that He will hold His children in the consuming fire of His distance until they pay the uttermost farthing, until they drop the purse of selfishness with all the dross that is in it, and rush home to the Father and the Son and the many brethren-rush inside the center of the life-giving fire whose outer circles burn. [ 213 ] The Holy Ghost To him who obeys, and thus opens the door of his heart to receive the eternal gift, God gives the Spirit of His Son, the Spirit of Himself, to be in him, and lead him to the understanding of all truth. . . . The true disciple shall thus always know what he ought to do, though not necessarily what another ought to do. [ 214 ] The Sense of Sin Sense of sin is not inspiration, though it may lie not far from the temple door. It is indeed an opener of the eyes, but upon home defilement, not upon heavenly truth. [ 215 ] Mean Theologies They regard the Father of their spirits as their governor! They yield the idea of ... "the glad Creator," and put in its stead a miserable, puritanical, martinet of a God, caring not for righteousness but for His rights: not for the eternal purities, but the goody proprieties. The prophets of such a God take all the glow, all the hope, all the color, all the worth, out of life on earth, and offer you instead what they call eternal bliss-a pale, tearless hell. . . . But if you are straitened in your own mammon-worshipping soul, how shall you believe in a God any greater than can stand up in that prison chamber? [ 216 ] On Believing 111 of God Neither let thy cowardly conscience receive any word as light because another call it light, while it looks to thee dark. Say either the thing is not what it seems, or God never said or did it. But of all evils, to misinterpret what God does, and then say the thing, as interpreted, must be right because God does it, is of the devil. Do not try to believe anything that affects thee as darkness. Even if thou mistake and refuse something true thereby, thou wilt do less wrong to Christ by such a refusal than thou wouldst by accepting as His what thou canst see only as darkness . .. but let thy words be few, lest thou say with thy tongue what thous wilt afterward repent with thy heart. [ 217 ] Condemnation No man is condemned for anything he has done: he is condemned for continuing to do wrong. He is condemned for not coming out of the darkness, for not coming to the light. [ 218 ] Excuses As soon as a man begins to make excuse, the time has come when he might be doing that from which he excuses himself. [ 219 ] Impossibilities "I thank thee, Lord, for forgiving me, but I prefer staying in the darkness: forgive me that too."-"No; that cannot be. The one thing that cannot be forgiven is the sin of choosing to be evil, of refusing deliverance. It is impossible to forgive that. It would be to take part in it." [ 22O ] Disobedience How many are there not who seem capable of anything for the sake of the Church or Christianity, except the one thing its Lord cares about-that they should do what He tells them. He would deliver them from themselves into the liberty of the sons of God, make them His brothers: they leave Him to vaunt their Church. [ 221 ] The Same To say a man might disobey and be none the worse would be to say that no might be yes and light sometimes darkness. [ 222 ] The God of Remembrance I do not mean that God would have even His closest presence make us forget or cease to desire that of our friend. God forbid! The Love of God is the perfecting of every love. He is not the God of oblivion but of eternal remembrance. There is no past with Him. [ 223 ] Bereavement "Ah, you little know my loss!"-"Indeed it is great! It seems to include God! If you knew what He knows about death you would clap your listless hands. But why should I seek in vain to comfort you? You must be made miserable that you may wake from your sleep to know that you need God. If you do not find Him, endless life with the living (being) whom you bemoan would become and remain to you unendurable. The knowledge of your own heart will teach you this:-not the knowledge you have, but the knowledge that is on its way to you through suffering. Then you will feel that existence itself is the prime of evils without the righteousness that is of God by faith." [ 224 ] Abraham's Faith The Apostle says that a certain thing was imputed to Abraham for righteousness: or, as the revised version has it, "reckoned unto him": what was it that was thus imputed to Abraham? The righteousness of another? God forbid! It was his own faith. The faith of Abraham is reckoned to him for righteousness. [ 225 ] The Same Paul says faith in God was counted righteousness before Moses was born. You may answer, Abraham was unjust in many things, and by no means a righteous man. True: he was not a righteous man in any complete sense. His righteousness would never have satisfied Paul; neither, you may be sure, did it satisfy Abraham. But his faith was nevertheless righteousness. [ 226 ] Perception of Duties You may say this is not one's first feeling of duty. True: but the first in reality is seldom the first perceived. The first duty is too high and too deep to come first into consciousness. If anyone were born perfect ... the highest duty would come first into the consciousness. As we are born, it is the doing of, or at least the honest trying to do many another duty, that will at length lead a man to see that his duty to God is the first and deepest and highest of all, including and requiring the performance of all other duties whatever. [ 227 ] Righteousness of Faith To the man who has no faith in God, faith in God cannot look like righteousness; neither can he know that it is creative of all other righteousness toward equal and inferior lives. [ 228 ] The Same It is not like some single separate act of righteousness: it is the action of the whole man, turning to good from evil-turning his back on all that is opposed to righteousness, and starting on a road on which he cannot stop, in which he must go on growing more and more righteous, discovering more and more what righteousness is, and more and more what is unrighteous in himself. [ 229 ] Reckoned unto Us for Righteousness With what life and possibility is in him, he must keep turning to righteousness and abjuring iniquity, ever aiming at the righteousness of God. Such an obedient faith is most justly and fairly, being all that God Himself can require of the man, called by God righteousness in the man. It would not be enough for the righteousness of God, or Jesus, or any perfected saint, because they are capable of perfect righteousness. [ 230 ] St. Paul's Faith His faith was an act recognizing God as his law, and that is not a partial act, but an all-embracing and all-determining action. A single righteous deed toward one's fellow could hardly be imputed to a man as righteousness. A man who is not trying after righteousness may yet do many a righteous act: they will not be forgotten to him, neither will they be imputed to him as righteousness. [ 231 ] The Full-Grown Christian He does not take his joy from himself. He feels joy in himself, but it comes to him from others, not from himself-from God first, and from somebody, anybody, everybody next.. .. He could do without knowing himself, but he could not know himself and spare one of the brothers or sisters God has given him. . . . His consciousness of himself is the reflex from those about him, not the result of his own turning in of his regard upon himself. It is not the contemplation of what God had made him, it is the being what God has made him, and the contemplation of what God himself is, and what He has made his fellows, that gives him his joy. [ 232 ] Revealed to Babes The wise and prudent must make a system and arrange things to his mind before he can say, / believe. The child sees, believes, obeys-and knows he must be perfect as his Father in heaven is perfect. If an angel, seeming to come from heaven, told him that God had let him off, that He did not require so much of him, but would be content with less ... the child would at once recognize, woven with the angel's starry brilliancy, the flicker of the flames of hell. [ 233 ] Answer "But how can God bring this about in me?"-Let Him do it and perhaps you will know. [ 234 ] Useless Knowledge To teach your intellect what has to be learned by your whole being, what cannot be understood without the whole being, what it would do you no good to understand save you understood it in your whole being-if this be the province of any man, it is not mine. Let the dead bury their dead, and the dead teach their dead. [ 235 ] The Art of Being Created Let patience have her perfect work. Statue under the chisel of the sculptor, stand steady to the blows of his mallet. Clay on the wheel, let the fingers of the divine potter model you at their will. Obey the Father's lightest word: hear the Brother who knows you and died for you. [ 236 ] When We Do Not Find Him Thy hand be on the latch to open the door at His first knock. Shouldst thou open the door and not see Him, do not say He did not knock, but understand that He is there, and wants thee to go out to Him. It may be He has something for thee to do for Him. Go and do it, and perhaps thou wilt return with a new prayer, to find a new window in thy soul. [ 237 ] Prayer Never wait for fitter time or place to talk to Him. To wait till thou go to church or to thy closet is to make Him wait. He will listen as thou walkest. [ 238 ] On One's Critics Do not heed much if men mock you and speak lies of you, or in goodwill defend you unworthily. Heed not much if even the righteous turn their backs upon you. Only take heed that you turn not from them. [ 239 ] Free Will He gave man the power to thwart His will, that, by means of that same power, he might come at last to do His will in a higher kind and way than would otherwise have been possible to him. [ 240 ] On Idle Tongues Let a man do right, not trouble himself about worthless opinion; the less he heeds tongues, the less difficult will he find it to love men. [ 241 ] Do We Love Light? Do you so love the truth and the right that you welcome, or at least submit willingly to, the idea of an exposure of what in you is yet unknown to yourself-an exposure that may redound to the glory of the truth by making you ashamed and humble? . . . Are you willing to be made glad that you were wrong when you thought others were wrong? [ 242 ] Shame We may trust God with our past as heartily as with our future. It will not hurt us so long as we do not try to hide things, so long as we are ready to bow our heads in hearty shame where it is fit we should be ashamed. For to be ashamed is a holy and blessed thing. Shame is a thing to shame only those who want to appear, not those who want to be. Shame is to shame those who want to pass their examination, not those who would get into the heart of things. ... To be humbly ashamed is to be plunged in the cleansing bath of truth. [ 243 ] The Wakening What a horror will it not be to a vile man .. . when his eyes are opened to see himself as the pure see him, as God sees him! Imagine such a man waking all at once, not only to see the eyes of the universe fixed upon him with loathing astonishment, but to see himself at the same moment as those eyes see him. [ 244 ] The Wakening of the Rich What riches and fancied religion, with the self-sufficiency they generate between them, can make man or woman capable of, is appalling. ... To many of the religious rich in that day, the great damning revelation will be their behavior to the poor to whom they thought themselves very kind. [ 245 ] Self-Deception A man may loathe a thing in the abstract for years, and find at last that all the time he has been, in his own person, guilty of it. To carry a thing under our cloak caressingly, hides from us its identity with something that stands before us on the public pillory. Many a man might read this and assent to it, who cages in his own bosom a carrion bird that he never knows for what it is, because there are points of difference in its plumage from that of the bird he calls by an ugly name. [ 246 ] Warning "Oh God," we think, "How terrible if it were I!" Just so terrible is it that it should be Judas. And have I not done things with the same germ in them, a germ which, brought to its evil perfection, would have shown itself the cankerworm, treachery? Except I love my neighbor as myself, I may one day betray him! Let us therefore be compassionate and humble, and hope for every man. [ 247 ] The Slow Descent A man may sink by such slow degrees that, long after he is a devil, he may go on being a good churchman or a good dissenter and thinking himself a good Christian. [ 248 ] Justice and Revenge While a satisfied justice is an unavoidable eternal event, a satisfied revenge is an eternal impossibility. [ 249 ] Recognition Hereafter Our friends will know us then; for their joy, will it be, or their sorrow? Will their hearts sink within them when they look on the real likeness of us? Or will they rejoice to find that we were not so much to be blamed as they thought? [ 250 ] From Dante To have a share in any earthly inheritance is to diminish the share of the other inheritors. In the inheritance of the saints, that which each has goes to increase the possession of the test. [ 251 ] What God Means by "Good" "They are good"; that is, "They are what I mean." [ 252 ] All Things from God All things are God's, not as being in His power-that of course-but as coming from Him. The darkness itself becomes light around Him when we think that verily He hath created the darkness, for there could have been no darkness but for the light. [ 253 ] Absolute Being There is no word to represent that which is not God, no word for the where without God in it; for it is not, could not be. [ 254 ] Beasts The ways of God go down into microscopic depths as well as up to telescopic heights. ... So with mind; the ways of God go into the depths yet unrevealed to us: He knows His horses and dogs as we cannot know them, because we are not yet pure sons of God. When through our sonship, as Paul teaches, the redemption of these lower brothers and sisters shall have come, then we shall understand each other better. But now the Lord of Life has to look on at the willful torture of multitudes of His creatures. It must be that offenses come, but woe unto that man by whom they come! The Lord may seem not to heed, but He sees and knows. [ 255 ] Diversity of Souls Every one of us is something that the other is not, and therefore knows something-it may be without knowing that he knows it-which no one else knows: and ... it is everyone's business, as one of the kingdom of light and inheritor in it all, to give his portion to the rest. [ 256 ] The Disillusioned Loving but the body of Truth, even here they come to call it a lie, and break out in maudlin moaning over the illusions of life. [ 257 ] Evil What springs from myself and not from God is evil: It is a perversion of something of God's. Whatever is not of faith is sin; it is a stream cut off-a stream that cuts itself off from its source and thinks to run on without it. [ 258 ] The Loss of the Shadow I learned that it was not myself but only my shadow that I had lost. I learned that it is better ... for a proud man to fall and be humbled than to hold up his head in pride and fancied innocence. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood. [ 259 ] Love It is by loving and not by being loved that one can come nearest to the soul of another. [ 260 ] From Spring to Summer The birds grew silent, because their history kid hold on them, compelling them to turn their words into deeds, and keep eggs warm, and hunt for worms. [ 261 ] The Door into Life But the door into life generally opens behind us, and a hand is put forth which draws us in backwards. The sole wisdom for man or boy who is haunted with the hovering of unseen wings, with the scent of unseen roses, and the subtle enticements of "melodies unheard," is work. If he follow any of those, they will vanish. But if he work, they will come unsought. [ 262 ] A Lonely Religion There is one kind of religion in which the more devoted a man is, the fewer proselytes he makes: the worship of himself. [ 263 ] Love Love makes everything lovely: hate concentrates itself on the one thing hated. [ 264 ] A False Method It is not by driving away our brother that we can be alone with God. [ 265 ] Assimilation All wickedness tends to destroy individuality and declining natures assimilate as they sink. [ 266 ] Looking "But ye was luikin' for somebody, auntie."-"Na. I was only jist luikin'." ... It is this formless idea of something at hand that keeps men and women striving to tear from the bosom of the world the secret of their own hopes. How little they know that what they look for in reality is their God! [ 267 ] Progress To tell the truth, I feel a good deal younger. For then I only knew that a man had to take up his cross; whereas now I know that a man has to follow Him. [ 268 ] Providence People talk about special providences. I believe in the providences, but not in the specialty. . . . The so-called special providences are no exception to the rule-they are common to all men at all moments. [ 269 ] Ordinariness That which is best He gives most plentifully, as is reason with Him. Hence the quiet fullness of ordinary nature; hence the Spirit to them that ask it. [ 270 ] Forgiveness I prayed to God that He would make me . . . into a rock which swallowed up the waves of wrong in its great caverns and never threw them back to swell the commotion of the angry sea whence they came. Ah, what it would be actually to annihilate wrong in this way-to be able to say, "It shall not be wrong against me, so utterly do I forgive it!" . . . But the painful fact will show itself, not less curious than painful, that it is more difficult to forgive small wrongs than great ones. Perhaps, however, the forgiveness of the great wrongs is not so true as it seems. For do we not think it a fine thing to forgive such wrongs and so do it rather for our own sakes than for the sake of the wrongdoer? It is dreadful not to be good, and to have bad ways inside one. [ 271 ] Visitors By all means tell people, when you are busy about something that must be done, that you cannot spare the time for them except they want of you something of yet more pressing necessity; but tell them, and do not get rid of them by the use of the instrument commonly called the cold shoulder. It is a wicked instrument. [ 272 ] Prose My own conviction is that the poetry is far the deepest in us and that the prose is only broken-down poetry; and likewise that to this our lives correspond. ... As you will hear some people read poetry so that no mortal could tell it was poetry, so do some people read their own lives and those of others. [ 273 ] Integrity I would not favor a fiction to keep a whole world out of hell. The hell that a lie would keep any man out of is doubtless the very best place for him to go to. It is truth . . . that saves the world! [ 274 ] Contentment Let me, if I may, be ever welcomed to my room in winter by a glowing hearth, in summer by a vase of flowers; if I may not, let me think how nice they would be, and bury myself in my work. I do not think that the road to contentment lies in despising what we have not got. Let us acknowledge all good, all delight that the world holds, and be content without it. [ 275 ] Psychical Research Offered the Spirit of God for the asking .. . they betake themselves to necromancy instead, and raise the dead to ask their advice, and follow it, and will find some day that Satan had not forgotten how to dress like an angel of light. . . . What religion is there in being convinced of a future state? Is that to worship God? It is no more religion than the belief that the sun will rise tomorrow is religion. It may be a source of happiness to those who could not believe it before, but it is not religion. [ 276 ] The Blotting Out If He pleases to forget anything, then He can forget it. And I think that is what He does with our sins- that is, after He has got them away from us, once we are clean from them altogether. It would be a dreadful thing if He forgot them before that. . . . [ 277 ] On a Chapter in Isaiah The power of God is put side by side with the weakness of men, not that He, the perfect, may glory over His feeble children ... but that He may say thus: "Look, my children, you will never be strong with my strength. I have no other to give you." [ 278 ] Providence And if we believe that God is everywhere, why should we not think Him present even in the coincidences that sometimes seem so strange? For, if He be in the things that coincide, He must be in the coincidence of those things. [ 279 ] No Other Way The Old Man of the Earth stooped over the floor of the cave, raised a huge stone, and left it leaning. It disclosed a great hole that went plumb-down. "That is the way," he said. "But there are no stairs. You must throw yourself in. There is no other way." [ 280 ] Death "You have tasted of death now," said the Old Man. "Is it good?" "It is good," said Mossy. "It is better than life." "No," said the Old Man. "It is only more life." [ 281 ] Criterion of a True Vision This made it the more likely that he had seen a true vision; for instead of making common things look commonplace, as a false vision would have done, it had made common things disclose the wonderful that was in them. [ 282 ] One Reason for Sex One of the great goods that come of having two parents is that the one balances and rectifies the motions of the other. No one is good but God. No one holds the truth, or can hold it, in one and the same thought, but God. Our human life is often, at best, but an oscillation between the extremes which together make the truth. [ 283 ] Easy Work Do you think the work God gives us to do is never easy? Jesus says His yoke is easy, His burden is light. People sometimes refuse to do God's work just because it is easy. This is sometimes because they cannot believe that easy work is His work; but there may be a very bad pride in it. ... Some, again, accept it with half a heart and do it with half a hand. But however easy any work may be, it cannot be well done without taking thought about it. And such people, instead of taking thought about their work, generally take thought about the morrow, in which no work can be done any more than in yesterday. The Holy Present! [ 284 ] Lebensraum It is only in Him that the soul has room. In knowing Him is life and its gladness. The secret of your own heart you can never know; but you can know Him who knows its secret. [ 285 ] Nature If the flowers were not perishable, we should cease to contemplate their beauty, either blinded by the passion for hoarding the bodies of them, or dulled by the hebetude of commonplaceness that the constant presence of them would occasion. To compare great things with small, the flowers wither, the bubbles break, the clouds and sunsets pass, for the very same holy reason (in the degree of its application to them) for which the Lord withdrew from His disciples and ascended again to His Father-that the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, the Soul of things, might come to them and abide with them, and so, the Son return, and the Father be revealed. The flower is not its loveliness, and its loveliness we must love, else we shall only treat them as flower-greedy children, who gather and gather, and fill hands and baskets from a mere desire of acquisition. [ 286 ] For Parents A parent must respect the spiritual person of his child, and approach it with reverence, for that too looks the Father in the face and has an audience with Him into which no earthly parent can enter even if he dared to desire it. [ 287 ] Hoarding The heart of man cannot hoard. His brain or his hand may gather into its box and hoard, but the moment the thing has passed into the box, the heart has lost it and is hungry again. If a man would have, it is the Giver he must have; . .. Therefore all that He makes must be free to come and go through the heart of His child; he can enjoy it only as it passes, can enjoy only its life, its soul, its vision, its meaning, not itself. [ 288 ] Today and Yesterday This day's adventure, however, did not turn out like yesterday's, although it began like it; and indeed today is very seldom like yesterday, if people would note the differences. . . . The princess ran through passage after passage, and could not find the stair of the tower. My own suspicion is that she had not gone up high enough, and was searching on the second instead of the third floor. [ 289 ] Obstinate Illusion He jumped up, as he thought, and began to dress, but, to his dismay, found that he was still lying in bed. "Now then I will!" he said. "Here goes! I am up now!" But yet again he found himself snug in bed. Twenty times he tried, and twenty times he failed; for in fact he was not awake, only dreaming that he was. [ 290 ] Possessions Happily for our blessedness, the joy of possession soon palls. [ 291 ] Lost in the Mountains The fear returned. People had died in the mountains of hunger, and I began to make up my mind to meet the worst. I had not yet learned that the approach of any fate is just the preparation for that fate. I troubled myself with the care of that which was not impending over me. . . . Had I been wearier and fainter, it would have appeared less dreadful. [ 292 ] The Birth of Persecution Clara's words appeared to me quite irreverent . . . but what to answer here I did not know. I almost began to dislike her; for it is often incapacity for defending the faith they love which turns men into persecutors. [ 293 ] Daily Death We die daily. Happy those who daily come to life as well. [ 294 ] On Duty to Oneself "But does a man owe nothing to himself?"-"Nothing that I know of. I am under no obligation to myself. How can I divide myself and say that the one half of me is indebted to the other? To my mind, it is a mere fiction of speech."-"But whence, then, should such a fiction arise?"-"From the dim sense of a real obligation, I suspect-the object of which is mistaken. I suspect it really springs from our relation to the unknown God, so vaguely felt that a false form is readily accepted for its embodiment. . [ 295 ] A Theory of Sleep It may be said of the body in regard of sleep as well as in regard of death, "It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. . . ." No one can deny the power of the wearied body to paralyze the soul; but I have a correlate theory which I love, and which I expect to find true-that, while the body wearies the mind, it is the mind that restores vigor to the body, and then, like the man who has built him a stately palace, rejoices to dwell in it. I believe that, if there be a living, conscious love at the heart of the universe, the mind, in the quiescence of its consciousness in sleep, comes into a less disturbed contact with its origin, the heart of the creation; whence gifted with calmness and strength for itself, it grows able to impart comfort and restoration to the weary frame. The cessation of labor affords but the necessary occasion; makes it possible, as it were, for the occupant of an outlying station in the wilderness to return to his Father's house for fresh supplies. . . . The child-soul goes home at night, and returns in the morning to the labors of the school. [ 296 ] Sacred Idleness Work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected. [ 297 ] The Modern Bane Former periods of the world's history when that blinding self-consciousness which is the bane of ours was yet undeveloped. . . [ 298 ] Immortality To some minds the argument for immortality drawn from the apparently universal shrinking from annihilation must be ineffectual, seeing they themselves do not shrink from it. ... If there is no God, annihilation is the one thing to be longed for, with all that might of longing which is the mainspring of human action. In a word, it is not immortality the human heart cries out after, but that immo