"...in the face of the Lord himself, the childhood will be triumphant—all his wisdom, all his truth upholding that radiant serenity of faith in his father..."
What is the kingdom of Christ? A rule of love, of truth—a rule of service. The king is the chief servant in it. “The kings of the earth have dominion: it shall not be so among you..... It is like king, like subject in the kingdom of heaven. No rule of force, as of one kind over another kind. It is the rule of kind, of nature, of deepest nature—of God.
Every one of us is something that the other is not, and therefore knows some thing—it may be without knowing that he knows it—which no one else knows; and that it is everyone’s business, as one of the kingdom of light, and inheritor in it all, to give his portion to the rest; for we are one family, with God at the head and the heart of it, and Jesus Christ, our elder brother, teaching us of the Father, whom he only knows.
If you think of ten thousand things that are good and worth having, what is it that makes them so but the God in them? ......The faces of some flowers lead me back to the heart of God; and, as his child, I hope I feel, in my lowly degree, what he felt when, brooding over them, he said, “They are good;” that is, “They are what I mean.”
...the moment that the sole adequate punishment, a vision of himself, begins to take true effect upon the sinner, that moment the sinner has begun to grow a righteous man, and the brother human whom he has offended has nothing left him but to take the offender to his bosom—the more tenderly that his brother is repentant, that he was dead and is alive again, that he was lost and is found.
Do not imagine Judas the only man of whom the Lord would say, “Better were it for that man if he had never been born!” Did the Lord speak out of personal indignation, or did he utter a spiritual fact? Did he speak in anger at the treachery of his apostle, or in pity for the man that had better not have been born? Did the word spring from his knowledge of some fearful punishment awaiting Judas, or from his sense of the horror it was to be such a man?
What a waking, into the full blaze of fact and consciousness, of truth and violation! Or think what it must be for a man counting himself religious, orthodox, exemplary, to perceive suddenly that there was no religion in him, only love of self; no love of the right, only a great love of being in the right! What a discovery—that he was simply a hypocrite—one who loved to appear, and was not!