affirms, 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