God makes us to know him, and his knowing is his being, and his making me know is the same as my knowing, so his knowing is mine: just as, in the master, what he teaches is the same as, in the pupil, the thing that he is taught. And because his knowing is mine, and his knowing is his substance and his nature and his essence, it follows that his substance and his nature and his essence are mine. And his substance, his nature and his essence being mine, therefore I am the Son of God. Behold, brethren, what manner of love God hath bestowed upon us that we should be called and should be the Son of God !
Mark whereby we are sons of God : by having the same nature as the Son of God.—How can one be the Son of God, or know it, seeing that God is not like anybody ?—True, Isaias says, ‘ To whom will ye liken God or what likeness will ye compare unto him ?’ Since it is God’s nature to be not like anyone, we must needs not
* be so to be the same as he is. When I contrive to see myself in - naught and to see naught in me ; when I succeed in rooting up and casting out everything in me, then I am free to pass into the naked being of the soul. Likes must be ousted ere I can be trans- planted into God and be the same as he is: same substance, same essence, same nature and the Son of God. Once this happens, there ‚is nothing hid in God that is not revealed, that is not mine. I am _ wise and mighty just as he is, and one and the same with him. Then Sion is a true beholder, true Israel, a seer: God, since nothing: in the Godhead is concealed from him. Man is turned into God. But that nothing may be concealed from me, everything revealed, there must appear in me no like, no image, for no image can show us God’s nature nor his essence. While there abideth in thee any image or like thou art never the same as God. To be the same as "God there must be nothing in thee, latent or defined, nothing covered in thee that is not discovered and cast out. 2
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Mark what sin is. It is born of negation. Negation’s brood must be exterminated in the soul; while there is not in thee thou art not the Son of God. We weep and lament for want of some- thing. The minus quantity must go, be cancelled out, if man is to become the Son of God and weep and wail no more. Manisnot wood nor stone: imperfection and naught. We shall not be like him until this minus is made good and we are all in all as God is all in all.
There are two births of man: one in the world, the other one out of the world and ghostly, in God. Wouldst know if thy child is born and if he is naked ? Whether, that is to say, thou hast been made God’s Son? If thy heart is heavy, except for sin, thy child is not born. In thine anguish thou art not yet mother: thou art in labour and thine hour is nigh. Doubt not, if thou art travailing for thyself or for thy friend no birth has taken place though birth be close at hand. The birth is not over till thy heart is free from care: then man has the essence and nature and substance and wisdom and joy and all that God has.. Then the very being of the Son of God is ours and in us and we attain to actual Deity.
Christ says: ‘If any will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.’ That is: cast away care and let perpetual joy reign in your heart. Thus the child is born. And when the child is born in me, the sight of friends, of father, dead there before my eyes will leave my heart untouched. Were my heart moved thereby the child would not be born in me, though peradventure its nativity is nigh. I maintain that God and his angels take such keen delight in every act a good man does, that there is no joy like it. And accordingly, I say, the birth of this child in thee brings thee most keen delight in all good deeds done in this world, thy joy being so continuous as to be never- ending. Hence the words: ‘ Your joy no man taketh from you.’ When I am transported into God, then God is’mine and all he has. ‘I am the Lord thy God,’ he says. Then I have real delight which neither pain nor sorrow can take from me, for then I am installed in God where sorrow has no place. We shall see that in God is no anger nor sadness, but only love and joy. Though he seem sometimes to be wrathful with sinners it is not really wrath, it is his kindness, the effect of his great love: ‘ Whom he loveth he chasteneth,’ for he is love, the Holy Ghost. God’s anger springs from love; he chides us with dispassion. When nothing is grievous or hard, when all is pure joy, then verily thy child is born. Strive that this child shall be not nascent merely but be born in thee, even as in God his Son is ever being born and is ever born. May this betide, So help us God. Amen. _
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VOII THE CASTLE OF THE SOUL
Intravit Jesus in quoddam castellum et mulier quedam excepit illum etc. (Luc. 10,,). I quote first in Latin this text from the gospel. The translation reads: ‘Our Lord Jesus Christ went up into a certain fastness and was received by a certain virgin who was a wife.’
Mark the term. Needs must it-be a virgin by whom Jesus is received. Virgin is, in other words, a person void of alien images, free as he was when he existed not. It may be questioned: Man born and launched on rational life, how can he be as free from images as he was when he was not, he knowing a variety of things, images all of them: how can he possibly be void thereof ?
I answer that, were I sufficiently intelligent to have within me intellectually the sum of all the forms conceived by man and which subsist in God himself, I having no property in them and no idea of ownership, positive or negative, past or to come, but standing in the present now perfectly free in the will of God and doing it perpetually : then verily I were a virgin, unhandicapped by forms, just as I was when I was not.
Further, I hold that the fact of being virgin does not deprive a man at all of works that he has done: he is untrammelled, virgin- free of them in the sovran truth, even as Jesus is absolutely free and virgin in himself. According to the masters, likeness, likeness only, is the cause of union, so man must be maiden, virgin, to receive the virgin Jesus.
Now lay this fact to heart: the ever virgin is never fruitful.
To be fruitful the soul must be wife. Spouse is the noblest title _
_ of the soul, nobler than virgin. For a man to receive God within him is good and in receiving he is virgin. But for God to be fruitful in him is still better : the fruits of his gift being gratitude therefor, and in this newborn thankfulness the spirit is the spouse bearing Jesus back into his Father’s heart.
Many good gifts received in maidenhood are not brought forth in wifely fruitfulness, reborn in praise and thanks to God. Such gifts corrupt and come to naught, man being no better and no. happier for them. In this case his virginity is useless because to his virginity he does not add the perfect fruitfulness of wife. That is the mischief. Hence my text, ‘Jesus ascended. to a certain fastness and was received by a certain maid who was a wife,’ It must be so, as I have said. Dar
Wedded folks yield little more than one fruit yearly. But it is other wedded ones that I have now in mind: those whose hearts
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are wedded to praying, fasting, vigils or other outward discipline and mortifications of the fiesh. A predilection for this sort of thing, involving loss of freedom to wait instantly on God in the. here and now, and follow him alone in the light wherein he would fain show thee what to do and what to leave undone, moment by moment, fresh and clearly, as though thou hadst naught else, nor would nor could not: any such proclivity or preoccupation which constantly deprives thee of this freedom I call here a year, and thy soul yields no fruit till she is done with this work of thy affection nor hast thou any trust in God or in thyself till thou hast finished with thy predilection ; in other words, thou hast no peace. There is no fruit till thy own work is done. I reckon this a year and one whose yield is poor; the proceeds of affection not of freedom. And these folks I call wedded, yo!ked to their affections. Their crop is small and undersized at that, so I say, in God’s sight.
The virgin wife, free and unbound in her affections is ever as near God as to herself. She abounds in fruit and big withal, no more nor less than God is himself. This fruit, his birth, does that virgin bear who is a wife; daily she yields her hundred and her thousandfold, nay, numberless her labours and her fruits in that most noble ground, the very ground, to speak more plainly, wherein the Father is begetting his eternal Word: there she is big with fruit. For Jesus, light and shine of the paternal heart (according to St Paul he is the ‘ light and splendour ’ of the Father’s heart), this Jesus is atoned with her and she with him, she is radiant with him and shining as the one alone, as one pure brilliant light in the paternal heart.
Elsewhere I have declared, there is a power in the soul untouched by time and flesh, flowing from the Spirit, remaining in the Spirit, altogether spiritual. In this power is God, ever verdant, flowering in ail the joy and glory of his actual self. Such dear delight, such incon- ceivable deep joy as none can fully tell, for in this power the eternal Father is procreating his eternal Son without a pause, the power being big with child, the Father’s Son and its own self this self- same Son withal, in the unique power of the Father. Suppose a man absolute monarch, the sole possessor of all earthly goods ; suppose he gave up all for God and was the poorest of the poor ;
. and that God laid on him to boot a burden big as ever he did lay on mortal man, all which he bare down to his death and then God granted him one fleeting vision of his being in this power: so vehement would be his joy that poverty and suffering would be wiped out. Aye, though God gave him never any taste of heaven but this, yet would he have the guerdon of his passion, for God himself is in this power as in the eternal now. If a man’s spirit were always joined to God in this same power, he could not age
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For the now wherein God made the first man and the now wherein the last man disappears and the now I speak in, all are the same in God where there is but the now. Behold this man in the same light as God having in him no past nor yet to come, only one level of eternity. This man in truth has motion taken from him and all things stand intrinsic in him. Nothing new comes to him from future things nor yet by accident for he dwells in the now, ever new and unceasingly renewed. So dominant is God in this same power.