Provides Perfection
*’ Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, who have not seen Thy face, By faith, and faith alone, embrace. Believing where we cannot prove.
“Thine are these orbs of light and shade; Thou madest Life in man and brute; Thou madest Death: and lo, Thy foot Is on the skull which Thou hast made.
*’ Thou wilt not leave us in the dust: Thou madest man, he knows not why, He thinks he was not made to die; And Thou hast made him: Thou art just.
‘* Thou seemest human and divine.
The highest, holiest manhood, Thou; Our wills are ours, we know not how; Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.” Tennyson (“In Memoriam”).
In considering the threefold demand dealt with in the last chapter, we come first in order to the demand for perfection. The answer of the Will of God to that demand may be briefly stated.
God’s Will is perfect, because by Him man was created, and He, therefore, is alone able to make such laws as shall ensure man’s perfection. This is coming down to a statement of the simplest kind. We all profess to believe that God has given us our being, and in a deep conviction of that truth lies the reason why we should yield our- 67 selves wholly to His government in order that we may attain perfection of being.
Perhaps it is necessary to emphasize this initial fact, for oftentimes the teacher’s greatest difficulty is to get men to accept the truth of the truth they accept. When Daniel, as the interpreter of the Divine message to Belshazzar, named the sin of that monarch which was about to be punished, he did not mention the sins of impurity, drunkenness, or sacrilege, though of all these he had been guilty. He declared the sin which lies at the root of all sins, because it has to do with man’s relation to God — “The God in Whose hand thy breath is, and Whose are all thy ways, hast thou not glorified” (Dan. V. 23). In that charge we are reminded of the fact that our very being, in all its powers and possibiHties, is of Divine origin.
Paul, preaching to the Athenians on Mars’ Hill, makes the same statement, in terms, if possible, more explicit — “In Him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts xvii. 28). We are the creation of God. Spirit, soul, and body, each in its own possibility; and the one being, resulting from the union, is the result of Divine conception and creation. Every human being is a concrete thought of God. God therefore knows the potentiality of each of us, and the line of our development, and it is only as we are able to discover His Will and obey it, that we shall move along the one to the full realization of the other.
The folly of conditioning conduct by the thoughts or wishes of other human beings is apparent in the light of this fact. To the declaration of John that “No man hath seen God at any time” 69 (John i. 18), we all agree. Not so readily do we assent to the assertion that no man hath seen man at any time, yet it is equally true. The outward form and tone of voice are familiar, but my essential friend who tabernacles in the body I touch, and conveys his thought through the medium of the speech I hear, I have never yet seen. No man knows perfectly and completely his fellow-man. The mother that bore me, the wife of my heart, the children of my love, do not know me. They are all familiar with the sound of my voice, the touch of my hand, and the fall of my foot on the stair; but all the deeps that lie behind, held for ever sacred from the possibility of intrusion, of these they have no final and complete knowledge.
And yet, forsooth, we are perpetually in danger of taking our law of life from 70 the opinion of some mortal who has no adequate knowledge of the perils and possibiHties of our complex nature. Oh, the folly of it! As well let the blacksmith repair our watch, or the collier tune our harp, as allow man, ignorant of the essence and intention of our complex life, to arrange for its conduct. The interference of a human being between another and God is an impertinence and a blasphemy, whatever the name by which the interferer is called, whether it be priest, or teacher, or friend.
Equally foolish is man’s attempt to govern himself, for it is equally true that no man has seen himself, neither does any man know himself. The old Greek philosopher said his last and best thing when he said, ‘’ Man, know thyself,” because he thus brought man face to face with the impossible; and when a man is 71 brought there, he is in the place where it is possible for him to acquaint himself with God and be at peace.
In our younger days we imagine that we know the possibilities of our being, and are able to plan and arrange the whole line of progress. The years are startling revealers. As they pass, we discover new powers for good and evil that had lain dormant within, and of which we had absolutely no consciousness until some crisis aroused and called forth to action the sleeping forces. How we trembled when we found that there was the power of murder lying hidden in our heart! How we suffered when we came to know of a surety that, in spite of all our earlier boasting, we too had the making of the traitor within, and might have kissed the Master to His death!
Ah, those days of time-tables, and 72 programmes, and pledges, and promises, when we proudly said we were masters of ourselves. Through what disappointments, and agonies, and wounds, some of us have come to our first real knowledge, that we are ignorant of ourselves, and cannot therefore govern ourselves.
This drives us to one conclusion. Our demand for perfection can only be met by our living, and moving, and having our being wholly within the Will of God. Our neighbour’s law fails through the limitation of his knowledge. Our own programme collapses because of our ignorance. The Will of God moving within the realm of His perfect knowledge leads us on to perfection, and will at last set us in His presence unafraid.