Doctors declare this will is free in the sense that none can bind it excepting God alone. God does not bind the will, he sets it free, free to choose naught but God himself, and this is real freedom. For the spirit to be incapable of willing aught other than God’s will is not its bondage but its true liberation. Some people say, If I have God and the love of God then I am at liberty to follow my own will. They labour under a mistake. So long as thou art capable of anything against the will of God and against his law thou hast no love of God though thou cozen the world that thou hast it. One who is in God’s will and in God’s love is fain to do the things God likes and leave undone the things God hates, and he can no more leave undone a thing that God wants done than he can do a thing that God abhors ; just like a man whose legs are tied together, he cannot stray and neither can he err who is in the will of God. Someone once said, ‘God may command me to do evil and shun virtue, but I am incapable of sin.’ No one loves virtue without being virtue. He who abandons himself and everything, who seeks not his own in any wise but does all he does
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for love and without why, that man being dead to all the world is alive in God and God in him,
Here someone may object, It is all very well for you to tell us these things, but we ourselves know nothing of them.— That I also rue. This knowledge is so noble and so common, it is not to be purchased for a farthing or a penny. A just mind and a free will, have but these, and it is thine. To abandon all things on this lower plane where they exist in mortal guise is to recapture them in God where they are reality. Everything that is dead here is life yonder and all that is dense matter here is spirit there in God. If you pour fresh water into a clean basin and, all being clear and bright, stand it in a quiet place, then, holding your face over it you see it at the bottom as it really is. That is because the water is free from impurity and still. It is the same with people who in a state of freedom and interior calm envisage God in peace and quiet, and when they are able to see him just as well in turmoil and disquiet there is perfect equanimity ; but if a man enjoys him less in trouble and unrest, that argues him not equable (unjust). St Augustine says, ‘ When the days are weary and the time is long a man should turn to God, where no such thing as long exists and things are all at rest.” The lover of justice is possessed with justice, and he is this virtue.
Our Lord said, ‘I have called you not servants, I have called you friends, for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth.’ And so may my friend know something that I ignore, yet have no
mind to tell me. But our Lord says, ‘ All that I have heard of
my Father I have made known unto you.’ I marvel how some priests, and these with pretensions to eminence and learning, allow themselves to be misled into interpreting these words to mean that he shows us of the path only the bare minimum needful to our happiness. That is not what I hold; there is no truth in it. _Why was God born man? That I might be born God himself. God died that I might die to the whole world and all created things. And it is in this sense that we must understand the saying of our Lord, ‘ All that I have heard of my Father I have revealed unto you.’ What does the Son hear of his Father? The Father can only beget ; the Son can only be gotten. All the Father has and that he is, the whole basis of God’s essence and God’s nature, he brings forth once for all in his one-begotten Son. This the Son hears from his Father, this he makes known unto us, we being this same Son. All the Son has he has from his Father: essence and nature, we are this only Son. No one has the Holy Ghost except he be the only Son. Father and Son expire their holy Breath, and once this sacred breath inspires a man it remains in him, for he is essential and pneumatic.
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True, thou mayst receive the gift of the Holy Ghost, the likeness of the Holy Ghost, but it abides not with thee ; it is impermanent. Just as a man may blush for shame, or blench, it is an accident and passes. But one by nature fair and ruddy is so always. So with this man, as being the only Son his holy Breath is of the nature of him. As it is written in the Book of Wisdom, ‘This day have I begotten thee in the reflection of my eternal light, in the fullness of the Godhead and the glory of all saints.’ He is begetting him now, to-day. There is childbed in the Godhead, there are they baptized in the Holy Ghost according to the promise of the Father. ‘ After these days which are not many,’ or a few, then comes the “fullness of the Godhead,’ where there is neither day nor night; where things a thousand leagues away are as near me as the ground whereon I stand: that is the fulfilment, the full enjoyment of Godhood ; that is oneness. While the soul sees any difference she is unjust ; as long as aught looks out, looks in, there is no unanimity. Mary Magdalene sought our Lord within the tomb; seeking one dead man she found two living angels, but still was unconsoled. Said the angel, “Why art thou cast down? Whom seekest thou, woman ?’ As though to say, ‘ Thou dost seek one dead and hast found two living.’ Whereto she might have answered, ‘ That is the burden of my discontent, that I find two where I sought one alone.’
While anything created can make a clear impression on the soul she is disconsolate. I say, as I have often said before, so far as the soul’s created nature goes there is no such thing as truth. I declare that there is something beyond the soul’s created nature. But certain priests cannot understand how there can be anything so nearly kin to God, so much the same as he is. It has naught in common with naught. Anything made or created is naught, but this is alien and remote from the made and the created. It is something self-contained, taking nothing from outside. Our Lord departed to heaven, beyond all light, beyond all understanding, beyond all human ken. He who is thus translated beyond light of any kind dwells in the unity. As St Paul says, ‘ God dwells in the light that no man can approach unto,’ which is in itself the perfect one. A man then must be dead, must be dead indeed, devoid of any being of his own, wholly without likeness, like to none, to be really Godlike. For it is God’s character, his nature, to be peerless, incomparable. May we be the same in the oneness of God himself. So help us God. Amen.
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LXXV 1 ASCENSION DAY
Expedit vobis etc. vado parare vobis locum etc. (Joh. 16,,-14,). When he was about to depart from this world to his heavenly Father, Christ said to his disciples, ‘ It is expedient for you, it is for your good, that I should go, for while I am with you the Holy Ghost the Comforter will not come unto you.’ With these words our Lord consoled his disciples knowing full well that they were troubled because he had warned them of his ascension. Our Lord will not suffer his lovers to be troubled, for fear is painful. And St John says, ‘ Love casteth out fear.’ Love is incompatible with fear and pain, for the waxing of love is the waning of fear, and when love is perfect all fear is gone. But at the beginning of the virtuous life fear is of use to man, providing him a thoroughfare for love. As the bodkin or the awl makes a passage for the thread and the shoe is stitched with thread, not with the iron ; and as the bristle’s part towards the thread is to put it in as fastening while the bristle is withdrawn ; so, to begin with, fear makes room for love and love binds to God, whereas fear passes out.
Leaving now this argument we turn to the words of my Latin quotation, the words of our Lord, ‘ I go to prepare a place for you.’ Here we notice two things taught and proved by our Lord in his ascension. The first one is that the soul is by nature heir to heaven. God is her lawful heritage, for no one generates the soul but God. God made her without any intervention. Some doctors will maintain, perhaps, that the divine light pouring into the angels, the whole creaturely idea that God reflects into the angels before it is exemplified in divers creatures, that this divine light, this image in the angels, is what makes the soul. Notso. The soul does not permit of any meddling, any interference in God’s activity towards her, but fresh and pure as this flows out of God in one unbroken stream, so does the soul proceed from God. Most privily has God embarked and launched forth the soul, so that no one knows for certain what she is. One philosopher calls her a light, and that is well said; for like the light streaming out of the sun and shining into all creatures so is the soul sent straight from God. St Augustine says, Since the soul is emitted from God she is nowhere at rest except in God. Another master says she is a spirit, and this is true in a certain sense; God is a spirit, and the soul is made like to God, so she may well be called spirit, being to God as spirit to spirit. A third master dubs her a fire, speaking the truth in symbol, for fire is most lofty in its nature,
1 See also Wackernagel, No. 65.
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most theurgie in its. operation, and it never rests until it licks the heavens. It envelops all the elements for being much wider and higher than the air, or than water or the earth, it must be sur- rounding all the rest. It comes next of all to heaven and revolves therewith. The air goes with it, partially, because of being dense, while water, which is altogether grosser, is unable to keep pace and runs behind. The soul is called a fire because, in her desire, she does keep pace with God, like fire with the heavens, for the soul cannot rest except in God. Some souls which are rather dense follow haltingly, as air lags after fire, And some, again, being downright gross, are, like water, earth-bound and incapable of keeping up with God but run behind ; for seeing or hearing some- thing good will stir them with desire to be good, so they do follow after ; like water drifting to and fro without a change of level, so are these people moved while abiding of the same mind as before. A fourth doctor calls her a spark of God’s celestial nature, and this jumps with our theory of her heavenly origin. Where one clod falls, there, generally speaking, all earth would fall as well ; a single clod reveals the ground to be its resting-place. And whither one spark flies to from the fire, that place is revealed as the resting-place of fire.