Unspoken Sermons, Series I., II., and III.MacDonald, George
Religion
Unspoken Sermons, Series I., II., and III.
MacDonald, George
Sermons, English -- 19th century
What! shall a man love his neighbour as himself, and must he be content
not to know him in heaven? Better be content to lose our consciousness,
and know ourselves no longer. What! shall God be the God of the
families of the earth, and shall the love that he has thus created
towards father and mother, brother and sister, wife and child, go
moaning and longing to all eternity; or worse, far worse, die out of
our bosoms? Shall God be God, and shall this be the end?
Ah, my friends! what will resurrection or life be to me, how shall I
continue to love God as I have learned to love him through you, if I
find he cares so little for this human heart of mine, as to take from
me the gracious visitings of your faces and forms? True, I might have a
gaze at Jesus, now and then; but he would not be so good as I had
thought him. And how should I see him if I could not see you? God will
not take you, has not taken you from me to bury you out of my sight in
the abyss of his own unfathomable being, where I cannot follow and find
you, myself lost in the same awful gulf. No, our God is an unveiling, a
revealing God. He will raise you from the dead, that I may behold you;
that that which vanished from the earth may again stand forth, looking
out of the same eyes of eternal love and truth, holding out the same
mighty hand of brotherhood, the same delicate and gentle, yet strong
hand of sisterhood, to me, this me that knew you and loved you in the
days gone by. I shall not care that the matter of the forms I loved a
thousand years ago has returned to mingle with the sacred goings on of
God's science, upon that far-off world wheeling its nursery of growing
loves and wisdoms through space; I shall not care that the muscle which
now sends the ichor through your veins is not formed of the very
particles which once sent the blood to the pondering brain, the
flashing eye, or the nervous right arm; I shall not care, I say, so
long as it is yourselves that are before me, beloved; so long as
through these forms I know that I look on my own, on my loving souls of
the ancient time; so long as my spirits have got garments of revealing
after their own old lovely fashion, garments to reveal themselves to
me. The new shall then be dear as the old, and for the same reason,
that it reveals the old love. And in the changes which, thank God, must
take place when the mortal puts on immortality, shall we not feel that
the nobler our friends are, the more they are themselves; that the more
the idea of each is carried out in the perfection of beauty, the more
like they are to what we thought them in our most exalted moods, to
that which we saw in them in the rarest moments of profoundest
communion, to that which we beheld through the veil of all their
imperfections when we loved them the truest?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account