To find God is to have the scope of all our senses increased, but it is easily to be understood that our power of suffering increases also, because we are, as it were, flayed and laid bare to everything alike. But it increases our joys to so great a degree that for the first time in life joy is greater than pain, happiness is greater than sorrow, knowledge is greater than fear, and Good suddenly becomes to us so much greater than Evil that Evil becomes negligible. This increase, this wonderful addition to our former condition, might be partly conveyed by comparison to a man who from birth has never been able to appreciate music: for him it has been meaningless, a noise without suggestion, without delight, without wings, and suddenly by no powers of his own the immense charms and pleasures and capacities of it are laid open to him! These increases of every sense and faculty God will give to His lovers, so that without effort and by what has now become to us our own nature we are continually able to enter the Sublime.
Of the Two Wills
We have in us two wills. The Will to live, and the Will to love God and to find Him. The first will we see being used continually and without ceasing, not only by every man, woman, and child, but by every beast of the field and the whole of creation.
The Will to live is the will by which all alike seek the best for themselves, here gaining for themselves all that they can of comfort and well-being out of the circumstances and opportunities of life. This is our natural Will. But it is not the will which gains for us Eternal Life, nor does it even gain for us peace and happiness during this life. It is this Will to live which in Christ's Process we are taught to break and bruise till it finally dies, and the Will to love, and gladly and joyously to please God is the only Will by which we live.
Our great difficulty is that we try at one and the same time to hang to God with the soul and to the world with our heart. What is required is not that we go and live in rags in a desert place, but that in the exact circumstances of life in which we find ourselves we learn in everything to place God first. He requires of us a certain subtle and inward fidelity—a fidelity of the heart, the will, the mind. The natural state of heart and mind in which we all normally find ourselves is to have temporary vague longings for something which, though indefinable, we yet know to be better and more satisfying than anything we can find in the world. This is the soul, trying to overrule the frivolity of the heart and mind and to re-find God. Our difficulties are not made of great things, but of the infinitely small our own caprices. Though we can often do great things, acts of surprising heroism, we are held in chains—at once elastic and iron—of small capricious vanities, so that in one and the same hour we may have wonderful, far-reaching aspirations towards the Sublime, and God; and yet there comes a pretty frock, a pleasant companion, and behold God is forgotten! The mighty and marvellous Maker of the Universe, Lord of everything, is placed upon one side for a piece of chiffon, a flattering word from a passing lover.
So be it. He uses no force. We are still in the Garden of Free-Will. And when the Garden closes down for us, what then? Will chiffon help us? Will the smiles of a long-since faithless lover be our strength? Now is the time to decide; but our decision is made in the world, and by means of the world and not apart from it, and in the exact circumstances in which we find ourselves.
Another difficulty we have, and which forms an insuperable barrier to finding God, is the ever-recurring—we may almost say the continual—secret undercurrent of criticism and hardness towards God over what we imagine to be His Will. We need to seek God with that which is most like Him, with a will which most nearly resembles His own. To be in a state of hardness or criticism, not only for God but for any creature, in even the smallest degree is to be giving allegiance to, and unifying ourselves with, that Will which is opposite to, furthest away from, and opposed to God. He Himself is Ineffable Tenderness.
Having once re-found God, the soul frequently cries to Him in an anguish of pained wonder, "How could I ever have left Thee? How could I ever have been faithless to Thine Unutterable Perfections?" This to the soul remains the mystery of mysteries. Was it because of some imperfection left in her of design by God in order that He might enjoy His power to bring her back to Him? If this were so, then every single soul must be redeemed—and not for love's sake, but for His Honour, His own Holy Name, His Perfection. If the soul left Him because of a deliberate choice, a preference for imperfection, a poisonous curiosity of foreign loves, then love alone is the cause and necessity of our redemption, and so it feels to be, for in experience we find that love is the beginning and the middle and the end of all His dealings with us.
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What is our part and what is our righteousness in all this Process of the Saviour? This—that we obey, and that we renounce our own will, accepting and abiding by the Will of God: and this self-lending, self-surrender, this sacrifice of self-will is counted to us for sufficient righteousness to merit heavenly life. But from first to last we remain conscious that we have no righteousness of our own, that we are very small and full of weaknesses, and remain unable to think or say, "This is my righteousness, I am righteous," any more than a man standing bathed in, or receiving the sunlight can say or think, "I am the sun." Is all this, then, as much as to say that we can sit down and do nothing; but, leaving all to Christ, we merely believe, and because of this believing our redemption is accomplished? No, for we have an active part to play, a part that God never dispenses with—the active keeping of the will in an active state of practical obedience, submission, humble uncomplaining endurance through every kind of test. What will these perhaps too much dreaded tests be that He will put us through? He will make use of the difficulties, opportunities, temptations, and events of everyday life in the world (which difficulties we should have to pass through whether we become regenerated or not) down to the smallest act, the most secret thought, the most hidden intention and desire. But through it all it is the Great Physician Himself who cures, and we are no more able to perform these changes of regeneration in heart and mind than we are able to perform a critical operation on our own body. So He takes our vanities and, one by one, strews them among the winds, and we raise no protest; takes our prides and breaks them in pieces, and we submit; takes our self-gratifications and reduces them to dust, and we stand stripped but patient; takes the natural lusts of the creature and transfigures them to Holy Love. And in all this pain of transition, what is the Divine Anaesthetic that He gives us? His Grace.