cannot be far from any one of us:  were we not in closest contact of creating and created, we could not exist; as we have in us no power to be, so have we none to continue being; but there is a closer contact still, as absolutely necessary to our well-being and highest existence, as the other to our being at all, to the mere capacity of faring well or ill.  For the highest creation of God in man is his will, and until the highest in man meets the highest in God, their true relation is not yet a spiritual fact.  The flower lies in the root, but the root is not the flower.  The relation exists, but while one of the parties neither knows, loves, nor acts upon it, the relation is, as it were, yet unborn.  The highest in man is neither his intellect nor his imagination nor his reason; all are inferior to his will, and indeed, in a grand way, dependent upon it:  his will must meet God’s—­a will distinct from God’s, else were no harmony possible between them.  Not the less, therefore, but the more, is all God’s.  For God creates in the man the power to will His will.  It may cost God a suffering man can never know, to bring the man to the point at which he will will His will; but when he is brought to that point, and declares for the truth, that is, for the will of God, he becomes one with God, and the end of God in the man’s creation, the end for which Jesus was born and died, is gained.  The man is saved from his sins, and the universe flowers yet again in his redemption.  But I would not be supposed, from what I have said, to imagine the Lord without sympathy for the sorrows and pains which reveal what sin is, and by means of which he would make men sick of sin.  With everything human he sympathizes.  Evil is not human; it is the defect and opposite of the human; but the suffering that follows it is human, belonging of necessity to the human that has sinned:  while it is by cause of sin, suffering is for the sinner, that he may be delivered from his sin.  Jesus is in himself aware of every human pain.  He feels it also.  In him too it is pain.  With the energy of tenderest love he wills his brothers and sisters free, that he may fill them to overflowing with that essential thing, joy.  For that they were indeed created.  But the moment they exist, truth becomes the first thing, not happiness; and he must make them true.  Were it possible, however, for pain to continue after evil was gone, he would never rest while one ache was yet in the world.  Perfect in sympathy, he feels in himself, I say, the tortured presence of every nerve that lacks its repose.  The man may recognize the evil in him only as pain; he may know little and care nothing about his sins; yet is the Lord sorry for his pain.  He cries aloud, ’Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’  He does not say, ’Come unto me, all ye that feel the burden of your sins;’ he opens his arms to all weary enough to come to him in the poorest hope of rest.  Right