Rufus M. Jones

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Relief from penalty, forgiveness alone, might spoil us, and make us think too lightly of our own sin. No, it is not a judicial relief which our panting, sin-defeated hearts cry out for. We want more than the knowledge that the past is covered and will not count on the books against us. We want blackness replaced by whiteness, we want weakness replaced by power, we want to experience a new set of our innermost nature which will make us more than conquerors. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This slow unveiling of the ideal, of the goal, is, I believe, the divine method of making man, and it makes us feel at once how nearer than near God is and how all the way on and up He is in the very tissue and fabric of our lives—no foreign creator who moulded us out of clay and left us to run, or to run down, like a clock. ”

“ The edge of the self is always touching [102] a circle of life beyond itself to which it responds. The human heart is sensitive to God as the retina is to light waves. The soul possesses a native yearning for intercourse and companionship which takes it to God as naturally as the home instinct of the pigeon takes it to the place of its birth. There is in every normal soul a spontaneous outreach, a free play of spirit which gives it onward yearning of unstilled desire.
It is no mere subjective instinct—no blind outreach. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The universal sweep of Divine ends does not swallow up, or miss, the needs of the concrete individual. While the spiritual universe is building, men must have daily bread and they must constantly face the actual present with its routine and monotony. Here again prayer is no miraculous method of turning stones into bread. It is no easy substitute for toil. It is the joyous insight that in the avenues of daily toil, God and man are co-operating and that in very truth the bread for the day is as much God given as it is won by the sweat of brow. ”

“ We must make men feel again the reality of the atonement and the reality of prayer. That is the task which lies before those of us who believe. The day for dogmatic assertion is past. It rolls off most minds now as water rolls from oiled silk. The truths which march with power are the truths which are verified by, and buttressed with, facts. We must, then, learn how to carry the laboratory method into our religious teaching and ground our message in actual reality.
This slender book is an attempt to approach these two subjects—atonement and prayer—in this spirit and by this method. ”

“ The drama will not be in some foreign realm, apart from human consciousness, it will rise in our thought into the supreme drama of history—the [84] tragedy of the spiritual universe—the battle of holiness with sin—the blood and tears which tell the cost of sin and create in response a passion for the Divine Lover who is our Father. It will stop at no fictitious righteousness which is counted unto us, as though it were ours. We shall demand an actual redemption of the entire self which has become righteous, because it lives, in Christ’s power, the life which He lived. ”

“ The least human person who poured his life out into those about him—who loved and suffered for the sake of another—would be a higher being than an infinite God shut up in the closed circle of His own self life. ”

“ Each human being is thus a half—a tally—and love is the longing to be united. The two halves are seeking to be joined again in the original whole. Such in briefest compass is the myth.
But as the dialogue advances love is traced to a higher source. It is discovered to be a passion for the eternal, a passion which rises in the soul at the sight of an object which suggests the eternal, from which the soul has come into the temporal. The soul is alien here and its chief joy in the midst of the shows of sense is joy at the sight of something which reminds it of its old divine home. ”

“ It is immediate spiritual fellowship. Even if science could demonstrate that prayer could never effect any kind of utilitarian results, still prayer on its loftier side would remain untouched, and persons of spiritual reach would go on praying as before. If we could say nothing more we could at least affirm that prayer, like faith, is itself the victory. The seeking is the finding. The wrestling is the blessing. It is no more a means to something else than love is. It is an end in itself. It is its own excuse for being. It is a kind of first fruit of the mystical nature of personality. ”

“ As soon as God is known as Father, as soon as we turn to Him as identical in being with our own humanity, as suffering with us and loving us even in our imperfection, this communion grows defined and becomes [105] actual social fellowship which is prayer at its best. Paul’s great prayers of fellowship rise to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God whom we know, because He has been humanly revealed in a way that fits our life. We turn to Him as the completeness and reality of all we want to be, the other Self whom we have always sought. ”

“ It is the tragedy of human life that we must suffer through the sin of others, and we must suffer also if we would carry goodness or holiness into other lives. Every bit of goodness which ever prevails anywhere in this world has cost somebody something.
This principle of vicarious suffering is no late arrival; it appears at every scale of life, heightening as we go up—becoming less blind and more voluntary. It was a central truth of Christ’s revelation that this principle does not stop with man ”

“ May it not be, that we are never again to fuse the skirts of self and merge into a union of oblivion, but rather that we are to rise to a love-union in which His will becomes our will—a union of conscious co-operation? So at any rate I believe. But this little book is not a book of speculation. It is not written to urge some fond belief.
We have learned, I say, that life reveals a double search. Man’s search for God is as plain a fact as his search for food. ”

“ But if we are conjunct, as our own self-consciousness implies, then an incarnation, a complete manifestation in Personality, or as Paul puts it, “in the face of Jesus Christ,” is merely the crown and pinnacle of the whole divine process.
If we are wise we shall not bother ourselves too much over the metaphysical puzzles which the schoolmen have formulated. We no longer have the puzzle which was so urgent with them, how two natures, pole-wide apart, could be united in one Person, for we now know that divinity and humanity are not pole-wide apart. ”

“ We are no longer in the net of blind fate, in the realm of impersonal force, we are in a love-system where the aspiration of one member heightens the entire group, and the need of one—even the least—draws upon the resources of the whole—even the Infinite. We are in actual Divine-human fellowship. ”

“ They all move in the realm of law rather than in the domain of personality. They are all, more or less, vitiated by abstract and mathematical reasoning, while sin and salvation are always affairs of the inward life, and are of all things personal and concrete. The first step to a coercive [60] conception of the atonement is to get out of the realm of legal phrases into the region of personality.
Sin is no abstract dogma. It is not a debt which somebody can pay and so wash off the slate. Sin is a fact within our lives. It is a condition of heart and will. There is no sin apart from a sinner. ”

“ There is no little demon, there is no tall, bright angel, who holds back the shower or who pushes the cloud before him; no being, good or bad, who will capriciously alter the march of molecules because it suits our fancy to ask that the chain of causes be interrupted. What is true of the weather is true in every physical realm. Our universe has no caprice in it. Every thing is linked, and the forked lightning never consults our preferences, nor do cyclones travel exclusively where bad men live. ”

“ The procession of the Holy Ghost is a continuous revelation and exhibition of Christ within men. Whether we use the expression Holy Spirit or Christ within or spiritual Christ, we mean God operating upon human spirits and consciously witnessed and appreciated in them. “The Lord is the Spirit,” cries Paul when, with unveiled face, he discovers that he is being transformed into His image from glory to glory. ”

“ Here we discover—it is the main miracle of the Gospel—that the original movement to bridge the chasm comes from the Divine side. What man hoped to do, but could not, with his bleating lamb and timid dove, God Himself has done. He has reached across the chasm, taking on Himself the sacrifice and cost, to show the sinner that the only obstruction to peace and reconciliation is in the sinner himself. ”

“ No one of us can interpret his own longings or purposes until he reads them off in the light of some loftier type of personality. That person understands himself best who grows intimate in fellowship with some noble character. And any man who wishes to discover the meaning of the inward voice and to interpret the divine breathings which come to human souls needs to be informed and illuminated by the supreme revelation of the ages. ”

“ The other side of “the divide,” evolution had been physical,—body, and body function had been the goal. This side “the divide,” it was spiritual and social, and the goal was the evolution of the man within man. The things which mattered now were love, sacrifice, service, goodwill rather than “tooth and claw.” Before, nature’s goal had been along the line of least resistance. Now, the line of march set straight against instinct and along the line of greatest resistance. There could be advance on [30] this side “the divide,” only as the ideal became clearer and its sway more coercive. ”