Rufus M. Jones

“ The soul, Boehme says in substance, hath heaven or hell in itself. Heaven is the turning of the will into God's love; hell is the turning of the will into hate. Now when the body falls away the heavenly soul is thoroughly penetrated with the Love and Light of God, even as fire penetrates and enlightens white-hot iron, whereby it loses its darkness—this is heaven and this is the right hand of God. The soul that dwells in falsehood, lust, pride, envy, and anger carries hell in itself and cannot reach the Light and Love of God. ”

“ We have within the scope of our vision a mountain whose name is accepted as a word of beauty, a valley of great natural fertility, and the arena of mighty deeds done by men whose record is found in the "Book of books," and whose God is the Lord. Here young Jordan springs into life and links its destiny with the waters of Merom, and onward the eye stretches to that now placid sheet where in a dark and stormy night the chosen band were troubled, and where a compassionate Saviour allayed their fears. ”

“ They say that the only thing that matters is to be master of your own spirit and not to be conquered by anything in the world. If I should lose all my goats and all my tent-cloth, and if all my looms should burn up, I could still be a brave man and start again just as though nothing had happened, but if I lost my spirit and began to whine and lament, nobody could cure me of that. Then I should be beaten and defeated. We Stoics try to be citizens, not only of our own city but of the whole world. We love our own people. We are proud of our own race, but we want more than that. ”

“ And yet few words have ever so truly revealed the nature of prayer. It is, one sees, no easy, lazy way to blessings. Once more, it is co-operation. Forgiveness is not a gift which can fall upon us from the skies, in return for a capricious request. The blessing depends on us as much as it does on God. A cold, hard, unforgiving heart can no more be forgiven than a lazy, slipshod student can have knowledge given to him. Like all spiritual things, forgiveness can come only when there is a person who appreciates its worth and meaning. ”

“ The dark Principle is not annihilated, is not suppressed, but the Heart of God moves ever on in a steadily growing triumph, binding soul after soul into the divine Igdrasil Tree of the Light Universe, in a unity that is not now the unity of negation and undifferentiation—an Abyss that swallows up all that is in it,—but a unity of many wills united in a spirit of concord and love, many persons formed by holy desire into one unbroken symphony as harps of God. ”

“ On the other hand, all that is sweet, delightful and amiable in the world, in the serenity of air, the fineness of seasons, the joy of light, the melody of sounds, the beauty of colours, the fragrance of smells, the splendour of precious stones, is nothing else but heaven breaking through the veil of this world, manifesting itself in such a degree and darting forth in such variety so much of its own nature. ”

“ Last of all there rises the cry for deliverance from the power of evil. Once more we realize that this is not an occasion for magical interference, no call for a fiery dart out of the sky to pierce a black demon who is pushing us into sin. The drama is an inward one and the enemy, called of many names, is a part of our own self. Each soul has its own struggle with the immemorial tug of brute inheritance—the sag of lower nature. ”

“ First of all they would wipe out the old Augustinian cleavage which had carried its sharp dualism wherever it ran. They would no longer recognize the double world scheme—a divine realm set over against an undivine realm, the "sacred" set over against the "secular," the spiritual set over against the natural, the Church set against the world, faith set in contrast to reason, the spirit pitted against the flesh, "the other world" put in such light that "this world" by contrast lay dull in the shadow. ”

“ We seek deliverance not from penalty and debt—but deliverance [63] from the life of sin into a life of holy will.
There is still another aspect to sin which must be considered before we can fully appreciate the way of salvation which the Gospel reveals. Sin not only spoils the sinner’s life and drags him into slavery. It separates him from God. It opens a chasm between him and his heavenly Father, or to vary the figure it casts a shadow on God’s face. God seems far away and stern. The sense of warmth and tenderness vanishes. The sinner can see God only through the veil of his sins. ”

“ This, too, is both outer and inner; a law of the physical world and a tendency of spirit. There is nothing in nature that is not ceaselessly moved, and there is no life without its restlessness and anguish, its inward strain and stress, its tension and its problem, its dizzy wheel of life—the perpetual pursuit of a goal which ends at the starting-point as an endless circular process. ”

“ The artist may not force some personal caprice into his creation. He must make himself the organ of a universal reality which is beautiful not simply for this man or that, but for man as man. If there is, as I believe, an inner kingdom of spirit, a kingdom of love and fellowship, then it is a fact that a tiny being like one of us can impress and influence the Divine Heart, and we can make our personal contribution to the Will of the universe, [110] but we can do it only by wanting what everybody can share and by seeking blessings which have a universal implication. ”

“ Not only in a primitive Eden, but in the world as we know it, with its black and white, man always bears within himself the mark of a heavenly origin, and has the quickening Seed of God in the depth of his soul: "The Image of God is seated in the lineaments of the soul." Man is the greatest of all miracles; he is "a mirror of all Eternity." ”

“ Man—lost, fallen, sin-blasted and utterly helpless—is by a divine and heavenly creative movement made a new Adam. For Franck, the soul has never lost the divine Image, the pearl of supreme price, the original element which is God Himself in the soul. We are all, in the deepest centre of our being, like Adam, possessed of a substantial essence, not of earth, not of time and space, not of the shadow but of the eternal, spiritual, and heavenly type. ”

“ Behind curtains which hang suspended from nowhere and stretch across the universe, dividing the visible from the invisible, the world of Nature from the world of holy mystery, the infinite, immeasurable and abysmal God is pictured as defined and personal in the face and figure of a little Child, in which the artist suggests in symbolism the infinite depth and joy and potency of Divinity breaking forth out of mystery into form. ”

“ Thus a good man may walk up and down the world as in a Garden of Spices and suck a Divine Sweetness out of every flower. There is a twofold meaning in every Creature: a Literal and Mystical; a good man says of everything that his Senses offer to him: it speaks to his lower part but it points out something above to his Mind and Spirit. . . . True Religion never finds it self out of the Infinite Sphere of Divinity and wherever it finds Beauty, Harmony, Goodness, Love, Ingenuity, Wisdom, Holiness, Justice, and the like, it is ready to say: Here is God. ”

“ It is the dawn and beginning of the triumphing spirit of freedom which wills to draw all things back to one centre, one harmony, one unity, in which wild will and selfish passion and isolating pride, and all that springs from the dark fire-root are quenched, and instead the central principle of the spiritual world—Love—comes into play. ”

“ There is, on the other hand, the genius who understands his own age like an open book. He is almost hypersensitive to the movings of his time. He feels the silent yearnings and strivings of the dumb multitudes about him; he anticipates in his thought what the rest are incipiently thinking—he is the clear voice and oracle of the spirit of his age. He knows to a nicety how far his contemporaries will allow themselves to be carried. {15} He will not over-hurry, he will not outrun their possible speed, and he will sacrifice everything to carry his epoch with him toward the goal which he sees. ”

“ To live for the flesh instead of for the spirit, to pursue the aims of a narrow private self where they conflict with the spirit of universal love, to turn from the Word of God in the soul to follow the idle voices of the moment—that is the very essence of sin. It is not inherited, it is self-chosen, and yet there is something in our disposition which sets itself in array against the divine revelation within us. The Adam-story is a genuine life-picture. It is a chapter out of the book of the ages, the life of humanity. We do not sin and fall because he did ”

“ This only is our comfort that the Divine Will, which is Love itself in its perfection, as a Hand put forth from Heaven thorow a Cloud, at our Birth put us into this Waggon and governs us all the day. In the evening of our life, at the end of the day, Death is the same Divine Will as a naked Hand of pure Love, shining forth from an open Heaven of clear light and glory, taking our Soul and Body out of the Waggon and Traces of this fleshly Image and leading them immediately into their Inn. ”

“ But nowhere else in the universe—above us or within us—has the moral significance of life come so full into sight, or the reality of actual divine fellowship, whether in our aspirations or in our failures, been raised to such a pitch of practical certainty as in the personal life and death and resurrection and steady historical triumph of Jesus Christ. He exhibits in living fulness, with transforming power, a Life which consciously felt itself one with the heart and will of God. He reveals the inherent blessedness of Love—even though it may involve suffering and pain and death. ”

“ The world is a mirror of infinite beauty, yet no man sees it. It is a Temple of Majesty, yet no man regards it. It is a region of Light and Peace, did not men disquiet it. It is the Paradise of God. It is more to man since he is fallen than it was before. ”

“ Reason compels us to recognize One who is First and Best, the All in all; the written word cries in our ears that God is Love; but above these voices there is a Principle within our own souls by which "God propagates His Life" in us, and he who, in this love-way, has become a son knows God as Abba-Father. [65] We pray now with power, when this new Life of the Spirit has come into us, and we pour our spirits out in self-forgetfulness, "as a River pours itself into the sea, where it loseth its own name and is known only as the waters of the Sea." ”

“ By a shift of view, as revolutionary as that from Ptolemaic astronomy to the verifiable insight of Copernicus, they passed over from the dogma of a Christ who came to appease an angry God, and to found a Church as an ark of safety in a doomed world, to the living apprehension of a Christ—verifiable in experience—who revealed to them, in terms of His own nature, an eternally tender, loving, suffering, self-giving God, and who made them see, with the enlightened eyes of their heart, the divine possibilities of human life. ”

“ Dost Thou command that those who do not understand Thy ordinances and commandments as those over us require, should be drowned, or drawn and quartered, and burned at the stake!"
The Christian world holds this view now. It is a part of the necessary air we breathe. But at this crisis in modern history it was unforgivably new. [7] One man's soul had the vision, one man's entire moral fibre throbbed with passion for it, and his rich intellectual nature pleaded for it as the only course of reason: "To burn a man is not to defend a doctrine, it is to burn a man!" ”

“ But we must not make the common blunder of supposing that Boehme means that before God expressed Himself and unfolded Himself in the infinite processes of revelation and creation, He existed apart, as this undifferentiated One, this unknowable Abyss, this incomprehensible Matrix. There is no "before." Creation, revelation, manifestation is a dateless and eternal fact. God to be a personal God must go out of Himself and find Himself in something that mirrors Him. He must have a Son. He must pour His Life and Love through a universe. ”

“ But in every case, whether it be Adam's or that of the last man who sinned, it is always an act of free-will—"even in its most haggish shapes sin is the act of free-will." Some strange contrary principle in us, something from a root alien to the divine Root, makes civil war within us, [58] and though the Word of God's eternal Love is ringing in our ears and though the gleams of divine Beauty are shining in our eyes, we still walk away into "the barren dessert of the world and forsake our proper habitation in the paradise of God." ”

“ In a very fine passage, in the noble discourse on "True Religion," Smith says: "I wish there be not among some such a light and poor esteem of Heaven, as makes them more to seek after Assurance of Heaven onely in the Idea of it as a thing to come than after Heaven it self; which indeed we can never be well assured of untill we find it rising up within ourselves and glorifying our own souls. When true Assurance comes, Heaven it self will appear upon the Horizon of our souls, like a morning light chasing away all our dark and gloomy doublings before it. ”

“ For most of us no one way of approach—no single type of religion—is quite sufficient for all the needs of our life. Most of us are fortunate enough to have at least moments when we feel in warm and intimate contact with a divine, enwrapping environment more real to us than things of sense and of arithmetic, and when the infinite and eternal is no less, but immeasurably more, sure than the finite and temporal. ”

“ When all legendary coverings are stripped away we have left an inner event of the first importance, a live idea bursting into consciousness like a new star on the field of vision. By processes much deeper and richer than those of logical argument, his mind leaped to the certainty of infinite grace and forgiving love in God as revealed in Christ. In a word, this baffled and despairing monk, striving in vain to heap up merits enough to win {6} divine favour, suddenly discovered a new God who filled his whole world with a new light and freedom and joy. ”

“ Religion, of this true and saving sort, never comes through hearsay knowledge, or along the channels of tradition, or by a head knowledge of texts of the written word. It comes only with inward experience of the Word of God, and it grows and deepens as the will of man lives by the Will of God, and as the kingdom of God comes, not in some far-away Jerusalem, or in some remote realm above the sky, but in a man's own heart. ”

“ When in my resolved zeal I made such an assault, storm, and onset upon God, as if I had more reserves of virtue and power ready, with a resolution to hazard my life upon it, suddenly my spirit did break through the Gate, not without the assistance of the Holy Spirit, and I reached to the innermost Birth of the Deity and there I was embraced with love as a bridegroom embraces his bride. My triumphing can be compared to nothing but the experience in which life is generated in the midst of death or like the resurrection from the dead. ”

“ He was by birth and spirit a child of the people—"ein Kind des Volkes"—and he seemed to be a prophet, divinely called to voice their dumb aspirations. He possessed, {5} like all great prophets, a straightforward moral honesty and sincerity, an absolute fearlessness, a magnetic and commanding personality, an unusual mastery of the vernacular speech, and an abundant power of pathos, humour, and satire. All the world loves a hero who can say in the face of real danger, "I would go forward to Worms if there were as many devils there as there are tiles on the roof!" ”