And how
can I believe in him, if there is nothing in him which I can know;
nothing which is like man--nothing, to speak plainly, like Christ,
who was perfect man as well as perfect God? If that be so, if man
can know nothing really of God, he is indeed most miserable of all
the beasts of the field, for I will warrant that he can know nothing
really of anything else. And what is left for him, but to remain
for this life, and the life to come, in the outer darkness of
ignorance and confusion, misrule and misery, wherein is most
literally--as one may see in the history of every heathen nation
upon earth--wailing and gnashing of teeth.
'If God's goodness be not like man's goodness, there is no rule of
morality left, no eternal standard of right and wrong. How can I
tell what I ought to do; or what God expects of me; or when I am
right and when I am wrong, if you take from me the good, plain, old
Bible rule, that man CAN be, and MUST be, like God? The Bible rule
is, that everything good in man must be exactly like something good
in God, because it is inspired into him by the Spirit of God
himself. Our Lord Jesus, who spoke, not to philosophers or Scribes
and Pharisees, but to plain human beings, weeping and sorrowing,
suffering and sinning, like us,--told them to be perfect, as our
Father in heaven is perfect, by being good to the unthankful and the
evil.
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