vigorously as well as hunger eagerly after righteousness. Love is the
father of righteousness. It could not be, and could not be hungered
after, but for love. The lord of righteousness himself could not live
without Love, without the Father in him. Every heart was created for,
and can live no otherwise than in and upon love eternal, perfect, pure,
unchanging; and love necessitates righteousness. In how many souls has
not the very thought of a real God waked a longing to be different, to
be pure, to be right! The fact that this feeling is possible, that a
soul can become dissatisfied with itself, and desire a change in itself,
reveals God as an essential part of its being; for in itself the soul is
aware that it cannot be what it would, what it ought--that it cannot set
itself right: a need has been generated in the soul for which the soul
can generate no supply; a presence higher than itself must have caused
that need; a power greater than itself must supply it, for the soul
knows its very need, its very lack, is of something greater than itself.

But the primal need of the human soul is yet greater than this; the
longing after righteousness is only one of the manifestations of it; the
need itself is that of _existence not self-existent_ for the
consciousness of the presence of the causing Self-existent. It is the
man's need of God. A moral, that is, a human, a spiritual being, must
either be God, or one with God. This truth begins to reveal itself when
the man begins to feel that he cannot cast out the thing he hates,
cannot be the thing he loves. That he hates thus, that he loves thus, is
because God is in him, but he finds he has not enough of God. His
awaking strength manifests itself in his sense of weakness, for only
strength can know itself weak. The negative cannot know itself at all.
Weakness cannot know itself weak. It is a little strength that longs for
more; it is infant righteousness that hungers after righteousness.