that matters, the wrath that is wrong and that must be put away before
we can love God or our neighbour as ourself, for the fruit of the Spirit
is love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith,
meekness, temperance.
When we understand that the object of life and of education is the
creation of a spirit and not the doing of things, we are freed from the
tyranny of results in this world as a final test and come to realize
that judgment belongs only to God Who as a Spirit judges the effort.
Of course this does not mean that we are freed from the moral law, that
certain evil things in ourselves and in others are not always the
results of an evil spirit, but rather that in addition to avoiding and
shunning those things which are obviously evil, we must with equal care
avoid doing even good things in a bad spirit. The commandments still
stand, the moral law is abated not one jot, but in Christianity and in
Christianity alone are we given power to fulfill the law and to add the
new commandment, the summing up of them all, of love to God and man. No
human soul comes into the world without some desire to be good, because
each human soul is a child of God. To each one, not blinded by pride
(and surely it should be easy in these days to be humble) comes, sooner
or later, the realization of his own inability of himself to do what he
would, the need for a power outside himself, the power which is
available and of which we have heard "I am come that ye might have life
and more abundantly." Let us examine how the apostles set about living
this abundant life. In Dr. Genung's "The Life Indeed" we read, "One and
all they made it a matter of the spirit that is the man, but the spirit
they recognized was not an abstraction, or a theory, but a present
Person and helper who was witnessing with their spirits. St. John makes
the matter equally definite: 'The Son of God,' he says, 'was manifest
that he might destroy the works of the Devil,' and St. Paul, mindful of
the inner subtleties of the conflict, warns his readers that Satan has
changed his tactics and has transformed himself into an angel of light.
I am not sure that we have gained greatly by letting our notions of
spiritual life grow dim and abstract. Perhaps for this very reason the
rebellious, negative, designing spirit that is so prone to invade the
hearts of us all is the more free to gain a foot-hold and go about
controlling the tone of our life. There is real advantage in bringing
the large issues of life to a point where not only our mind but, as it
were, our senses, can lay hold on them. It is the impulse of
simple-minded men like those early disciples, and if we continue
straight-seeing we do not outgrow it. What makes these views of life so
deep is not that they are less simple than those of others, but that
they are more simple. To St. John the reality that has come to win the
world is not the promise of salvation, or prophecy of an eventual life
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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