FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   35   36   37   38   39   40   41   42   43   44   45   46   47   48   49   50  
51   52   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   60   61   62   63   64   65   66   67   68   69   70   71   72   73   74   75   >>   >|  
word! See how he goes from the house for a while, and returning with fresh power, takes what shape he pleases, walks through its closed doors, and goes up and down its invisible stairs! All his life he was among his father's things, either in heaven or in the world--not then only when they found him in the temple at Jerusalem. He is still among his father's things, everywhere about in the world, everywhere throughout the wide universe. Whatever he laid aside to come to us, to whatever limitations, for our sake, he stooped his regal head, he dealt with the things about him in such lordly, childlike manner as made it clear they were not strange to him, but the things of his father. He claimed none of them as his own, would not have had one of them his except through his father. Only as his father's could he enjoy them;--only as coming forth from the Father, and full of the Father's thought and nature, had they to him any existence. That the things were his fathers, made them precious things to him. He had no care for having, as men count having. All his having was in the Father. I wonder if he ever put anything in his pocket: I doubt if he had one. Did he ever say, 'This is mine, not yours'? Did he not say, 'All things are mine, therefore they are yours'? Oh for his liberty among the things of the Father! Only by knowing them the things of our Father, can we escape enslaving ourselves to them. Through the false, the infernal idea of _having_, of _possessing_ them, we make them our tyrants, make the relation between them and us an evil thing. The world was a blessed place to Jesus, because everything in it was his father's. What pain must it not have been to him, to see his brothers so vilely misuse the Father's house by grasping, each for himself, at the family things! If the knowledge that a spot in the landscape retains in it some pollution, suffices to disturb our pleasure in the whole, how must it not have been with him, how must it not be with him now, in regard to the disfigurements and defilements caused by the greed of men, by their haste to be rich, in his father's lovely house! Whoever is able to understand Wordsworth, or Henry Vaughan, when either speaks of the glorious insights of his childhood, will be able to imagine a little how Jesus must, in his eternal childhood, regard the world. Hear what Wordsworth says:-- Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our lif
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   35   36   37   38   39   40   41   42   43   44   45   46   47   48   49   50  
51   52   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   60   61   62   63   64   65   66   67   68   69   70   71   72   73   74   75   >>   >|  



Top keywords:

things

 

father

 
Father
 
regard
 
Wordsworth
 

childhood

 

imagine

 

blessed

 

eternal

 

possessing


tyrants

 

infernal

 

relation

 

brothers

 

forgetting

 
pleasure
 

disturb

 
suffices
 

pollution

 
Through

disfigurements

 

caused

 
Whoever
 

defilements

 

retains

 

understand

 

lovely

 

insights

 

grasping

 

misuse


vilely

 
glorious
 

speaks

 

landscape

 

Vaughan

 

knowledge

 

family

 

universe

 

Whatever

 

temple


Jerusalem

 

stooped

 

limitations

 

heaven

 

returning

 

pleases

 
invisible
 
stairs
 
closed
 

lordly