Consuming Fire Daily Devotional
The highest truth to the intellect is the relation in which man stands to the source of his being—his love to the love that kindled his power to love, his intellect to the intellect that lighted his. If a man deal with these things only as ideas to be analyzed, he treats them as facts and not as truths, and is no better—probably much the worse—for his converse with them, for he is false to all that is most worthy of his faithfulness...
Suppose a man did everything required of him, fulfilled all the duties of his relations with this fellows—was toward them at least, a true man; he would yet feel that something was lacking to his necessary well-being. Like a live flower, he would feel that he had not yet blossomed, and could not tell what the blossom ought to be. In this direction the words of the Lord point, when he says to the youth, “If thou wouldst be perfect..."
The man who recognizes the truth of any human relation, and neglects the duty involved, is not a true man. The man who takes good care of himself, and none of his brother and sister, is false. A man may be a poet, aware of the highest truth of a thing, he may be a man who would not tell a lie, or steal, or slander—and yet he may not be a true man...
The truth of a thing is the blossom of it, the thing it is made for, the topmost stone set on with rejoicing; truth in a man’s imagination is the power to recognize this truth of a thing; and wherever, in anything that God has made, in the glory of it, be it sky or flower or human face, we see the glory of God, there a true imagination is beholding a truth of God...
What is the truth of water? Is it that it is formed of hydrogen and oxygen? Is oxygen and hydrogen the divine idea of water? Or has God put the two together only that man might separate and find them out? He allows his child to pull his toys to pieces; but he were a child not to be envied for whom his inglorious father would make toys to such an end...
If we understand, if we love the flower, we have that for which the science is there, that which alone can equip us for true search into the means and ways by which the divine idea of the flower was wrought out to be presented to us. The idea of God is the flower; his idea is not the botany of the flower.
Ask a man of mere science, what is the truth of a flower: he will pull it to pieces, show you its parts, explain how they operate, how they minister each to the life of the flower; he will tell you what changes are wrought in it by scientific cultivation; and many more facts about it. Ask the poet what is the truth of the flower, and he will answer: “Why, the flower itself, the perfect flower, and what it cannot help saying to him who has ears to hear it...”
We shall know one day just how near we come in the New Testament to the very words of the Lord. That we have them with a difference, I cannot doubt. For one thing I do not believe he spoke in Greek. That the thoughts of God would come to the heart of Jesus in anything but the mother-tongue of the simple men to whom he spoke, I cannot think....
Perhaps the Son is saying to the Father, “Thy little ones need some wind and rain: their buds are hard; the flowers do not come out. I cannot get them made blessed without a little more winter weather.” Then perhaps the Father will say, “Comfort them, my son Jesus, with the memory of thy patience when thou wast missing me.”...
When a man truly and perfectly says with Jesus, “Thy will be done,” he closes the ever-lasting life circle; the life of the Father and the Son flows through him; he is a part of the divine organism. Then is the prayer of the Lord in him fulfilled: “I in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one.” The Christ in us is the spirit of the perfect child toward the perfect father, our own true nature made to blossom in us by the Lord, whose life is the light of men that it may become the life of men; for our true nature is childhood to the Father....
