gladly would he free them from their misery—­but he knows only one way:  he will teach them to be like himself, meek and lowly, bearing with gladness the yoke of his father’s will.  This is the one, the only right, the only possible way of freeing them from their sins, the cause of their unrest.  With them the weariness comes first; with him the sins:  there is but one cure for both—­the will of the Father.  That which is his joy will be their deliverance!  He might indeed, it may be, take from them the human, send them down to some lower stage of being, and so free them from suffering—­but that must be either a descent toward annihilation, or a fresh beginning to grow up again toward the region of suffering they have left; for that which 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