By George MacDonald
The God who is ever uttering himself in the changeful profusions of nature; who takes millions of years to form a soul that shall understand him and be blessed; who never needs to be, and never is, in haste; who welcomes the simplest thought of truth or beauty as the return for seed he has sown upon the old fallows of eternity.
He who would thus live must, as a mirror draws into its bosom an outward glory, receive into his ‘heart of heart’ the inward glory of Jesus Christ, the Truth.
Our mirroring of Christ, then, is one with the presence of his spirit in us.
Thy fishes breathe but where thy waters roll; Thy birds fly but within thy airy sea; My soul breathes only in thy infinite soul; I breathe, I think, I love, I live but thee.
He is utterly true and good to us, nor shall anything withstand his will.
The only free man, then, is he who is a child of the Father.
Thou dost demand our love, holy Lord Christ, And batest nothing of thy modesty; Thou know’st no other way to bliss the highest Than loving thee, the loving, perfectly.
When we are least worthy, then, most tempted, hardest, unkindest, let us yet commend our spirits into his hands.
When he thinks he has attained, then is he in danger.
When he finds the mountain he has so long been climbing show suddenly a distant peak, radiant in eternal whiteness, and all but lost in heavenly places, a peak whose glory-crowned apex it seems as if no human foot could ever reach—then is there hope for him.
These things cannot be loved. The best man hates them most; the worst man cannot love them.
To yield self is to give up grasping at things in their second causes, as men call them, but which are merely God’s means, and to receive them direct from their source—to take them seeing whence they come, and not as if they came from nowhere, because no one appears presenting them.
He is condemned for not coming out of the darkness, for not coming to the light, the living God, who sent the light, his son, into the world to guide him home.
Gloriously wasteful, O my Lord, art thou!
The Self is God’s making—only it must be the ‘slave of Christ,’ that the Son may make it also the free son of the same Father; it must receive all from him—not as from nowhere; as well as the deeper soul, it must follow him, not its own desires.
God, whose pleasure brought Man into being, stands away As it were, an handbreath off, to give Room for the newly-made to live. He has made us, but we have to be.
So are we sons when we begin to cry Father, but we are far from perfected sons.
The true name is one which expresses the character, the nature, the being, the meaning of the person who bears it.
It is the man’s own symbol, his soul’s picture, in a word, the sign which belongs to him and to no one else.
One hearty confession of wrong, and our enmity passes away; from each comes forth the brother who was inside the enemy all the time.
MannaScroll