Part 5 (1/2)
The buds 'feeling' after each other--new life and resurrection life--a type, a pledge of fuller resurrection, of Easter life--nay, the same Life--'I am the Resurrection and the Life'--working in trees and flowers and man. What a glorious thing to live in a world which has been united with its Maker--a world of perfect law and order--a world where every infraction of law must and will be punished--a world where Love is Law and Law is Love--a world where a great thought is being realised, and will be realised in and for us! You use 'Theology'
loosely--'Theology' is _the_ thing and 'Religion' is not, I think, nearly such a fine word. Theology is the Learning, Knowing, Studying G.o.d. I am sorry I have said nothing about Jewish sacrificial law. I meant to. That expresses a great fact. It dimly hints (as sacrificial law in other nations does) at the fact that the ground of the universe is self-sacrifice--that the ground of all human, whether family or national, life is a filial sacrifice. I think other nations besides Jews regarded _all_ law as coming from G.o.d; nay, I think all nations did in part at least.
{68}
_To E. N. L., on the occasion of the death of his brother, who was killed by lightning at Cambridge._[1]
June 18, 1892.
. . . I do feel for you, and could do a great deal to help you. I can only tell you what I have felt to be the only thing which makes life endurable at a time of real sorrow--G.o.d Himself. He comes unutterably near in trouble. In fact, one scarcely knows He exists until one loves or sorrows. There is no 'getting over' sorrow. I hate the idea. But there is a 'getting into' sorrow, and finding right in the heart of it the dearest of all human beings--the Man of Sorrows, a G.o.d. This may sound as commonplace, but it is awfully real to me. I cling to G.o.d. I believe He exists. If He does not, I can explain nothing. If He does, all whom we love are safer with Him than with us. If we can only get nearer ourselves to G.o.d, we shall get nearer to those whom we love, for they too are in G.o.d.
We shall be one, ever more and more really one, the nearer and the liker we get to G.o.d. . . . My dear friend, words are poor comfort at a time like this, when we see into eternity. A Person is our only hope, and that Person is G.o.d. G.o.d often takes those whom He loves best home to Himself as soon as He can. In the process of their development they break through the bonds of s.p.a.ce and time. He has taken your brother, but not taken him away from you. We are {69} all in the same home--praying for, knowing, loving each other. . . I believe in the communion of saints--I believe that those who began to know G.o.d here, and whom we call dead, are not dead. They are just beginning to live, because they are finding out G.o.d: they are just beginning to know us, because they see us as we are--they see us in G.o.d. They are with Jesus, and Jesus is a human being. Because they are with a human being, a man, _the_ man, the Son of man, they must, they do, take a deep interest in the affairs of the sons of men, and--may we not believe?--in us, whom they knew below. . . . These are truths which sorrow helps me to make my own. I pray that you may never, never 'get over' the sorrow, but get through it, into it, into the very heart of G.o.d.
[1] Writing to another friend at this time he says, 'He was walking with a friend, and in a moment, without any apparent pain, ”G.o.d's finger touched him and he slept.”'
_To A. W. G._
Blackheath: June 27, 1892.
I have more and more come to the conclusion for some time past that the only reality underlying and explaining the world must be personal. I know that I am a person, and that it is persons--especially a few particular persons--not things, who have influenced me and had a power in my life. All my ideas of justice and purity and goodness are inseparably bound up with persons. At last I have come to the conclusion that nothing exists except the personal, and that below all is One who is personal. That means to say that the world and things in it are only real in so far as they are thoughts of G.o.d. We are real only in so far as we are thoughts of G.o.d. A {70} Roman Catholic poet, speaking of the Virgin Mary, says:
If Mary is so beautiful, What must her Maker be?
I look round the world and I see persons who attract me in a wonderful way--persons who are more gracious and simple than I am; and then I cannot help feeling that they all are a kind of faint picture of One who is better than all of them, One in whose image they are made. I like, I cannot help liking, intensely some of them; and from them I am led on to Him who made them and who therefore must--if I only knew Him--be more attractive even than they are. I believe that we are intended to rise from them to Him who made them, that if we stop short with the creature, we lower ourselves--we become idolaters. We wors.h.i.+p beauty or intellect or goodness as though they belonged to the creature; we thereby lower ourselves and the persons whom we wors.h.i.+p.
If, on the contrary, we rise from them to the Personal Being, we see more in them than we ever saw before, and we get nearer to them than we ever got before. For life is a circle whose centre is G.o.d. Each of us is unconnected with his neighbour, but connected with the centre from whom he comes. The nearer the centre, the nearer we get to each other.
When we get to the centre, we really become united with each other. To die is to get a step nearer the centre. The closer we are connected with the centre, the nearer we are to those whom we call dead. Our communion with them is spiritual, because 'G.o.d is spirit' and they are in Him. But the {71} spiritual is not the unsubstantial, the nebulous, the gaseous; it is the personal--to my mind the awful--reality. The more truly we understand persons, the more we shall find they are spirits.
I tell you what has been the greatest possible strength to me of late.
G.o.d is not merely a Person, He is Three Persons in One. I am always trying to get closer to those whom I love best, to know them more, to serve them better. Yet something is ever keeping us apart. I said 'something,' I mean 'some one,' for only a person can keep a person from another--only a malicious, a devilish person--yet I feel that some day I shall be able to love, and know them better. Then I look out on life and I see how again and again death, and some one worse than death, is separating us, misinterpreting motives, keeping men apart; men are struggling to be one, and cannot be; on earth persons long to be one, persons who love feel they ought to be, they must be one. In heaven Three Persons are really, perfectly, quite One. What we are trying to do has been done there. Men try to be one. G.o.d is One. And the comfort comes in when one knows that 'in the image of G.o.d made He man.' Our life is a copy; G.o.d's life is the original. Because G.o.d is One, we, whose life is a picture of His, shall some day be one, as He is. The unity of Deity is a pledge of the unity of humanity.
The more we make our life like the original the more shall we realise what we long to realise--truer, deeper, more eternal unity. But we are not simply _trying_ to be, we _are_ one. All we have to do, I believe, is to act as though we were one. We have {72} proofs of this unity.
We find ourselves doing an action which we should never have done unless we had known some one. That one lives over his life, or part of his life, again in us. So too we are living over our lives in other people, perhaps in some who have pa.s.sed into other worlds of fuller activity than this. In living our lives over in each other, we show that we are more than we thought; and it is grand to think how big our lives may become in this way, for those whom we _influence_--into whom our life _flows in_--in turn may influence others. When I get quite quiet, and my mind is sane, and my conscience at rest, when I almost stop thinking, and listen, I am quite sure that a Personal Being comes to me, and, as He comes, brings some of His own life to flow into my life. I am also sure that with Him come those who live in Him, that all whom I have known or know, and longed or long to know better, who were _worth_ knowing, are near me, are, if I let them, living their lives in my life, making me what I should not be without them. (These are facts, of which I think I may say I have more certainty in the best moments of my life than I have now that Switzerland exists. But I may be exaggerating. Perhaps as regards the second fact--of the other persons with Him--I may have spoken too strongly as regards my certainty. It is so hard to say _exactly_ what one means.)
I don't know that these thoughts will be of much use to you. They may sound somewhat too philosophical. But I have more or less purposely put them in a philosophical form, because we are not thus so {73} easily led astray into vague pleasant feelings, which we sometimes get from rhetoric. But I do wish I could put a little more of my feelings into this cold paper, and cruel, unsympathetic ink. For what I have written is not a mere philosophy of life; it is the only thing that makes life tolerable for a moment to me; it is the one thing which I intensely long to realise. To my mind life is love, and love is life.
Love is not sentimental affection, simply the readiness to die for a person. But love is the laying down of life for a person, absolutely renouncing your life for another. It means living the best life you can conceive of for the sake of one you love; knowing for certain that your life is flowing into that other person, though you may never see him again in this world. Love is purifying yourself that another may be pure. Love for one person, if it be true love, leads you at once to G.o.d, for 'G.o.d is Love.' I do not know what that means, but I do know that the little meaning I can see in it explains everything. As we love, G.o.d is there; we see G.o.d, we are in G.o.d. So we are led on from unselfish love on earth to that unselfish family life of Three in One in heaven; we are led on to Him in whose image we are made, and whose image we never so clearly reflect as when we love most. I could go on talking on this subject almost for ever, but I think I had better not tax your patience.
{74}
_To W. A. B._
Christ's College, Cambridge: July 5, 1892.
How very jolly for you to get out right away into the country! I hope some day to be able to do the same. But I think, on the whole, _I_ am better suited for retiring from the world than you are! If it were right to wish it, I might almost wish to exchange places with you. But yet I don't. It is very curious--I dare say you have thought of it--how very, very few people, if any, you would deliberately wish to change into, if you could. One admires many people, and would like to have their goodness, their intellect, or their beauty or strength--but how few of them one would really be: to cease at once to be yourself, and suddenly to be some one else--to look at life with _their_ eyes, to have _their_ past, _their_ hopes for the future, _their_ sins, _their_ inmost thoughts, _their_ anxieties. There is only about one man in the world, whom I know, whom I would like to be--and even of that I am not sure. It is the wonderful sense of personality. We abuse 'me'; we often vaguely say we would rather be some one else; yet very few of us wish to lose 'me': and most of us perhaps never will.
Liddon is, I should think, somewhat stiff and uninteresting. Gore's Bampton Lectures on much the same subject are far more interesting to my mind, far more human. Lectures IV, V, VI of Gore would perhaps interest and educate you on the subject.