In proportion as the union is
incomplete, the derived life is imperfect. And no man can be one with
neighbour, child, dearest, except as he is one with his origin; and he
fails of his perfection so long as there is one being in the universe he
could not love.
Of all men he is bound to hold his face like a flint in witness of this
truth who owes everything that makes for eternal good, to the belief
that at the heart of things and causing them to be, at the centre of
monad, of world, of protoplastic mass, of loving dog, and of man most
cruel, is an absolute, perfect love; and that in the man Christ Jesus
this love is with us men to take us home. To nothing else do I for one
owe any grasp upon life. In this I see the setting right of all things.
To the man who believes in the Son of God, poetry returns in a mighty
wave; history unrolls itself in harmony; science shows crowned with its
own aureole of holiness. There is no enlivener of the imagination, no
enabler of the judgment, no strengthener of the intellect, to compare
with the belief in a live Ideal, at the heart of all personality, as of
every law. If there be no such live Ideal, then a falsehood can do more
for the race than the facts of its being; then an unreality is needful
for the development of the man in all that is real, in all that is in
the highest sense true; then falsehood is greater than fact, and an idol
necessary for lack of a God.
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