But more than the sinner wants to be free does he want to be kept.
Along with the passion for liberty is the desire for surrender. Again,
then, he wants something outside himself, some Being so far above the
world he lives in that it can take him, the whole of him, break his
life, shake it to its foundations, then pacify, compose it, make it
anew. He is so tired of his sin; he is so weary with striving; he
wants to relinquish it all; get far away from what he is; flee like
a bird to the mountain; lay down his life before the One like whom he
would be. So he wants power, he wants peace. He would be himself, he
would lose himself. He prays for freedom, he longs for captivity.
Now, out of these depths of human life, these vast antinomies of the
spirit, has arisen man's belief in a Saviour-God. Sublime and awful
are the sanctions upon which it rests. Out of the extremity and
definiteness of our need we know that He must be and we know what He
must be like. He is the One to whom all hearts are open, all desires
known, from whom no secrets are hid. Who could state the mingling of
desire and dread with which men strive after, and hide from, such
a God? We want Him, yet until we have Him how we fear Him. For that
inclusive knowledge of us which is God, if only we can bear to come to
it, endows us with freedom. For then all the barriers are down, there
is nothing to conceal, nothing to explain, nothing to hold back. Then
reality and appearance coincide, character and condition correspond.
I am what I am before Him. Supreme reality from without answers and
completes my own, and makes me real, and my reality makes me free.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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