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 condition of their acceptance with him.  They delay setting their foot on the stair which alone can lead them to the house of wisdom, until they shall have determined the material and mode of its construction.  For the sake of knowing, they postpone that which alone can enable them to know, and substitute for the true understanding which lies beyond, a false persuasion that they already understand.  They will not accept, that is, act upon, their highest privilege, that of obeying the Son of God.  It is on them that do his will, that the day dawns; to them the day-star arises in their hearts.  Obedience is the soul of knowledge.

By obedience, I intend no kind of obedience to man, or submission to authority claimed by man or community of men.  I mean obedience to the will of the Father, however revealed in our conscience.

God forbid I should seem to despise understanding.  The New Testament is full of urgings to understand.  Our whole life, to be life at all, must be a growth in understanding.  What I cry out upon is the misunderstanding that comes of man’s endeavour to understand while not obeying.  Upon obedience our energy must be spent; understanding will follow.  Not anxious to know our duty, or knowing it and not doing it, how shall we understand that which only a true heart and a clean soul can ever understand?  The power in us that would understand were it free, lies in the bonds of imperfection and impurity, and is therefore incapable of judging the divine.  It cannot see the truth.  If it could see it, it would not know it, and would not have it.  Until a man begins to obey, the light that is in him is darkness.

Any honest soul may understand this much, however—­for it is a thing we may of ourselves judge to be right—­that the Lord cannot save a man from his sins while he holds to his sins.  An omnipotence that could do and not do the same thing at the same moment, were an idea too absurd for mockery; an omnipotence that could at once make a man a free man, and leave him a self-degraded slave—­make him the very likeness of God, and good only because he could not help being good, would be an idea of the same character—­equally absurd, equally self-contradictory.

But the Lord is not unreasonable; he requires no high motives where such could not yet exist.  He does not say, ’You must be sorry for your sins, or you need not come to me:’  to be sorry for his sins a man must love God and man, and love is the very thing that has to be developed in him.  It is but common sense that a man, longing to be freed from suffering, or made able to bear it, should betake himself to the Power by whom he is.  Equally is it common sense that, if a man would be delivered from the evil in him, he must himself begin to cast