h is
not growing must at length die out of creation. The disobedient and
selfish would fain in the hell of their hearts possess the liberty and
gladness that belong to purity and love, but they cannot have them; they
are weary and heavy-laden, both with what they are, and because of what
they were made for but are not. The Lord knows what they need; they know
only what they want. They want ease; he knows they need purity. Their
very existence is an evil, of which, but for his resolve to purify them,
their maker must rid his universe. How can he keep in his sight a foul
presence? Must the creator send forth his virtue to hold alive a thing
that will be evil--a thing that ought not to be, that has no claim but
to cease? The Lord himself would not live save with an existence
absolutely good.

It may be my reader will desire me to say _how_ the Lord will deliver
him from his sins. That is like the lawyer's 'Who is my neighbour?' The
spirit of such a mode of receiving the offer of the Lord's deliverance,
is the root of all the horrors of a corrupt theology, so acceptable to
those who love weak and beggarly hornbooks of religion. Such questions
spring from the passion for the fruit of the tree of knowledge, not the
fruit of the tree of life. Men would understand: they do not care to
_obey_,--understand where it is impossible they should understand save
by obeying. They would search into the work of the Lord instead of doing
their part in it--thus making it impossible both for the Lord to go on
with his work, and for themselves to become capable of seeing and
understanding what he does. Instead of immediately obeying the Lord of
life, the one condition upon which he can help them, and in itself the
beginning of their deliverance, they set themselves to question their
unenlightened intellects as to his plans for their deliverance--and not
merely how he means to effect it, but how he can be able to effect it.
They would bind their Samson until they have scanned his limbs and
thews. Incapable of understanding the first motions of freedom in
themselves, they proceed to interpret the riches of his divine soul in
terms of their own beggarly notions, to paraphrase his glorious verse
into their own paltry commercial prose; and then, in the growing
presumption of imagined success, to insist upon their neighbours'
acceptance of their distorted shadows of 'the plan of salvation' as the
truth of him in whom is no darkness, and the one con