to Journey in eternity and time and in her own intelligence, so on the ebb does she return ; as God the soul flows back again, without exertion. God returns to himself as little mindful of his own as though they were not. And the soul shall do the same. She shall grasp with her manhood the Person of the Son, and with the Person of the Son she shall apprehend the Father and the Holy Ghost in both, and them both in the Holy Ghost ; and with the Person of the Father she shall apprehend his simple essence, and with the essence the abyss, and shall sink into the void without matter and without form. Matter and form, being and knowledge, she loses in this unity, for she herself has come to naught. God does all her work, he preserves her in his being and leads her in his power into his very Godhead where she flows with deity itself into all God flows into. She is all things’ place and has herself no place. This is the most eternal wisdom, which has neither heart nor thought. So nigh soul flows to God that many are deceived ; but what she is she is by grace, and where she is she is by another’s power. Yet she approaches near enough to God to be, in the power of the Father, invested with divinity by grace the same as the Father is by nature. St Paul says: ‘In the same image we shall go from one glory to another,’ meaning, we shall receive divinity in its perfection and all that is consequent thereon. Therein she shall conceive divinity as it conceives itself and her will and God’s will shall be one : whatever God may be we shall be with God. No one can attain it in this body, but when God gives the soul his final gift, the vision of his Godhead, the soul is raised up inthe Trinity. May we attain to this, SohelpusGod. Amen.
The Hour Cometh and Now Is
Mulier, venit hora et nunc est, quando veri adoratores adorabunt patrem in spiritu et veritate (Joh. 4,3). This comes from St John’s Gospel. I take one sentence from a long discourse. Our Lord said: ‘Woman, the hour cometh and now is, when true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth and
the Father seeketh such.’
Taking the opening words: ‘The hour cometh and now is.’ He who would worship the Father must betake himself into eternity in his desires and hopes. There is one, the loftiest, part of the soul which stands above time and knows nothing of time or of body. The happenings of a thousand years ago, days spent ‘millenniums since, are in eternity no further off than is this moment I am passing now ; the day to come a thousand years ahead or in
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as many years as you can count, is no more distant in eternity than this very instant I am in.
He says, “true worshippers worship the Father in spirit and in truth.’ What is truth? The truth is a most noble thing. If God were able to backslide from truth I would fain cling to truth and let God go. But God is truth, and things in time, the things that God created, are not truth.
He says, ‘they worship the Father.’ Alas, how many worship creatures and saddle themselves with them, fools that they are. As sure as thou dost pray to God for creatures thou prayest for thine own undoing, for no sooner is creature creature than hey for trouble and bitterness, wrong and distress. They get their deserts, do these folk, with their wrongs and their bitterness. For why ? They prayed for it.
I have sometimes said, whoso goes seeking God and seeking aught with God does not find God; but he who seeks God by himself in truth does not find God alone: all God affords he finds as well as God. Art thou looking for God, seeking God with a view to thy personal good, thy personal profit ? Then in truth thou art not seeking God. ‘True worshippers worship the Father,’ he says, and he says right well. If a virtuous man is asked, ‘Why dost thou seek God?’ he answers: ‘ Because he is God.’-—‘* Why dost thou seek truth ? ’—* Because it is truth.’ — Why dost thou seek right ? ’—* Because it is right,’ and with such all is well. Things here in time have each their cause. Ask a man why he eats? ‘For strength,’ he says. Why he sleeps ? ‘For the very same reason.’ And so with everything in time. But ask a good man, ‘Why dost thou love God ? ’—He says: ‘I know not ; for God’s sake.‘ Why dost thou love the truth ?’
—‘For the truth’s sake.—‘ Why dost thou love right ? —
‘For righteousness’ sake.’—' Why dost thou love good ? ’—
‘For good’s sake.’—* Why dost thou live? ’—‘I faith, I
know not! I like living.’
A philosopher says: ‘He who has once been touched by truth, by right, by good, though it entailed the pangs of hell, that man could never turn therefrom, not for an instant.? The man, whoe’er he be, moved by these three—truth, righteousness and goodness—can no more quit these three than God can quit his Godhood.
A philosopher says that goodness has three branches. The first is use, the second is enjoyment and the third is seemliness. Con- cerning his words, ‘ they worship the Father.’ Why does he say “the Father’? Seek God alone and thou shalt find with God all that he gives. It is the positive truth, true of necessity, a written axiom though no less true unwritten, that if God had more
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he could not keep it from thee, he would have to show it thee, to give it thee, and, as I sometimes say, he gives it to thee as a birth.
Philosophers say the soul is double-faced, her upper face gazes at God all the time and her lower face looks somewhat down, informing the senses ; and the upper face, which is the summit of the soul, is in eternity and has nothing to do with time : it knows nothing of time or of body. Elsewhere I have explained how in this lies hid the fount as it were of all good, as a shining light that is always shining, a burning brand that is always burning, which brand is none other than the Holy Ghost.
Philosophers say that out of the summit of the soul there flow twin powers. The one is will, the other intellect, and her powers’ perfection lies in the sovran power of intellect. This never rests. It wants God not as Holy Ghost nor yet as Son; it flees the Son. It wants God not as God. And why? Because thus he has name ; were there a thousand Gods yet would it penetrate them all in the desire to get to where he has no name at all: it wants a nobler, better thing than God as having name. What would it, then ? It does not know: it would have him Father. ‘ Lord, show us the Father,’ Philip’ cries, ‘and we shall be content.’ It wants him as the quick of kindness ; it wants him as the marrow dripping fatness ; it wants him as the root, the main of goodness : thus he is simply Father.
Our Lord says: ‘No man knoweth the Father but the Son, nor the Son but the Father.’ In truth, to know the Father we must be the Son. I have laid down these three maxims which take like three bad grapes and drink thereafter. First, if we are Son, we must have the Father: none can say he is a son unless he has a father, nor father unless he has a son. His father dead, he says; ‘he was my father.’ His son being dead, he says, ‘he was my son.’ The son’s life hangs upon the father, and the father’s on the son, and therefore none can say: ‘I am the Son’ unless he have the Father and he is in truth Son whose every work is wrought for love therein.—Secondly, that which most makes man Son is equability. Being sick he would as soon be sick as sane, as sane as sick. His friend dies, ‘In God’s name!’ He has an eye out, ‘In God’s name! ’—Thirdly, it beseems the Son to bow the head to no one save the Father. Truly, a royal power ‘this, transcending time and without place! And by the fact of its transcending time it both contains all time and is the whole of time, and the least jot of that which transcends time makes a man rich indeed, for things at the antipodes are no more distant to this power than those present here. It is of these he says, ‘ the Father seeketh such.’
Look you, God loves us so, God importunes us so, because God
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cannot work till the soul is shelled and trimmed of ereatures, and the plain truth is that of necessity God is bound to cherish us just as though his Godhood were at stake, as in fact it is. God can no more do without us than we can without him, nay, even if we turned from God it would be impossible for God to turn his back on us. I vow I will not pray to God for gifts nor worship him because of gifts bestowed, but I will entreat him to make me worthy to receive and worship him for being of the essence and of the nature that must give. He who would spoil God of this would spoil him of his very life, of his very being. That we may thus in truth be Son, help us the truth of which I speak. Amen.
Contemplation, Hints and Promises?
When a man delights to read or hear tell about God, that comes of divine grace and is lordly entertainment for the soul. To entertain God in one’s thoughts is sweeter than honey, but to be sensible of God is teeming consolation to the noble soul, and union with God in love is everlasting joy which we relish here as we are fitted for it.
They are all too few who are fully ripe for gazing in God’s magic mirror. Precious few succeed in living the contemplative life at all here upon earth. Many begin, but fail to consummate it. Because they have not rightly lived the life of Martha. As the eagle spurns its young that cannot gaze at the sun, even so fares it with the spiritual child.
He who would build high must lay firm and strong foundations. “ The true foundation is the very way and pattern of our Lord Jesus Christ, who himself declared : ‘I am the way, the truth and the life.’
Dionysius says, ‘The soul shall follow God into the desert of his Godhead, so far as here the body follows Christ in outward willing poverty.’—‘ But that soul is idle.’ To which St Bernard answers: ‘ Waiting upon God is not idleness but work which beats all other work to one unskilled in it.” In order to find God, we must seek him in his Godhead. Christ says, ‘ If father and mother or anything else be a hindrance, quit them for good and serve God unhindered.’ The philosopher says, ‘ The soul which is moved by the power of the Prime Cause need seek no counsel from any human wisdom ; he is obeying what transcends wisdom, for he is moved by the latent primitive truth.’
Though we meditate upon the blessed works of our Lord’s poverty and his humility, yet coveting them not ourselves, the
1 See Proger, Zeitschr. f. hist. Theol., Bd. 36. 1866. (Two versions.)
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thoughts are useless. And to covet them is useless too, unless we diligently seek how we may acquire them.
We would fain be humble ;, but not despised. To be despised and rejected is the heritage of virtue. We would be poor too, but without privation. And doubtless we are patient, except with hardships and with disagreeables. And so with all the virtues.
The willing poor, unsolaced by corruptibles, descend into the valley of humility. They are pursued by insult and adversity, the best school of self-knowledge. And self-knowledge gets God- knowledge.
My children, ye who suffer insult, if the world reject you, do ye therewith likewise assail yourselves, helping to reject yourselves. Our Lord Jesus Christ said, ‘ The servant is not greater than his lord. Ifthe world hate you, know ye it hated me before it hated you.’