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 would feel that the truth of his being and nature was not yet revealed to his consciousness. He would remain unsatisfied, because there was in him the deepest, closest, strongest relation which had not yet come into live fact, which had not yet become a truth in him, toward which he was not true, whereby his being remained untrue, he was not himself, was not yet ripened into the divine idea, which alone can content itself. A child with a child’s heart who does not even know that he has a father, yet misses him. This relation has not yet so far begun to be fulfilled in him, as that the coming blossom should send before it patience and hope enough to enable him to live by faith without sight. When the flower begins to come, the human plant begins to rejoice in the glory of God not yet revealed, the inheritance of the saints in light; with uplifted stem and forward-leaning bud expects the hour when the lily of God’s field shall know itself alive, with God himself for its heart and its atmosphere; the hour when God and the man shall be one, and all that God cares for shall be the man’s.
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