Sermons, English -- 19th century; Theology -- Sermons
forbid I should mean _other!_ I mean the same bliss, divinely enlarged
and divinely purified--passed again through the hands of the creative
Perfection. The Lord knew all the history of love and loss; beheld
throughout the universe the winged Love discrowning the skeleton Fear.
God's comfort must ever be larger than man's grief, else were there gaps
in his Godhood. Mere restoration would leave a hiatus, barren and
growthless, in the development of his children.
But, alas, what a pinched hope, what miserable expectations, most who
call themselves the Lord's disciples derive from their notions of his
teaching! Well may they think of death as the one thing to be right
zealously avoided, and for ever lamented! Who would forsake even the
window-less hut of his sorrow for the poor mean place they imagine the
Father's house! Why, many of them do not even expect to know their
friends there! do not expect to distinguish one from another of all the
holy assembly! They will look in many faces, but never to recognize old
friends and lovers! A fine saviour of men is their Jesus! Glorious
lights they shine in the world of our sorrow, holding forth a word of
darkness, of dismallest death! Is the Lord such as they believe him?
'Good-bye, then, good Master!' cries the human heart. 'I thought thou
couldst save me, but, alas, thou canst not. If thou savest the part of
our being which can sin, thou lettest the part that can love sink into
hopeless perdition: thou art not he that should come; I look for
another! Thou wouldst destroy and not save me! Thy father is not my
father; thy God is not my God! Ah, to whom shall we go? He has not the
words of eternal life, this Jesus, and the universe is dark as chaos! O
father, this thy son is good, but we need a greater son than he. Never
will thy children love thee under the shadow of this new law, that they
are not to love one another as thou lovest them!' How does that man love
God--of what kind is the love he bears him--who is unable to believe
that God loves every throb of every human heart toward another? Did not
the Lord die that we should love one another, and be one with him and
the Father, and is not the knowledge of difference essential to the
deepest love? Can there be oneness without difference? harmony without
distinction? Are all to have the same face? then why faces at all? If
the plains of heaven are to be crowded with the same one face over and
over for ever, but one moment will pass ere by monotony bliss shall have
grown ghastly. Why not perfect spheres of featureless ivory rather than
those multitudinous heads with one face! Or are we to start afresh with
countenances all new, each beautiful, each lovable, each a revelation of
the infinite father, each distinct from every other, and therefore all
blending toward a full revealing--but never more the dear old precious
faces, with its whole story in each, which seem, at the very thought of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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