Chapter II: Part 2

The next few years are a history of struggle, contempt, debt, care, family trials, dependence on the charity of the Elect, whose very cast-off clothing he and his children wore. But the greatest experience of his regenerate life was at hand—the Word which was to send him out of his native and familiar Kent into unknown Sussex, carrying his Gospel to the Gentiles. The call came to him as it had come to the Apostle Paul from the Man of Macedonia—“Come over and help us.” The Man of Sussex was a “miller in Ticehurst, a perfect stranger to me,” whom he met on the Headcorn Road. “He had passed but a few rods, when these words were powerfully impressed upon my mind—‘that man comes out of Sussex to invite you to go down there to preach.’ At which I immediately said ‘Dear Lord, I am not fit to go into Sussex.’” However, he dared not refuse so imperative a summons, enforced through the continual impression on his mind of the words “I will send thee far hence to the Gentiles.” To the Gentiles he went, the barbarians of Shovers Green, from whom soon afterwards came a definite call. He went in the greatest agony of mind, full of doubts and fears and distresses, but in spite of this his preaching was found acceptable to the little knot of believers at the cross-roads beyond Bantony. Here he continued going once a fortnight for some time, though in due course opposition arose—he was accused of being “an Antinomian, a Huntingtonian, a High Calvinist, a Beemanite,” and a large party withdrew from the chapel, though as others came from surrounding parishes, he still had a good congregation. However, in time the disaffected party got the upper hand, and there seems to have been a sort of riot—“an unusual concourse of people in the public road, with loud hollowings and shouts of Horrible! ‘Bominable! Stuff!” In the end, Weller’s career as an apostle of the Gentiles came to rather a tame conclusion in his being dismissed by the Deacon, who paid him his salary and told him that his services would be no further required.

However, his work was only apparently ended. Soon afterwards he received a call to Mayfield, with occasional returns to Frittenden and Smarden, and finally he detached himself altogether from Kent and became a regular preacher at Burwash, whither followed him the loyal part of his congregation at Shovers Green. The story of his life at Burwash is his usual mixture of good works and bad debts; however, his circumstances both spiritual and material, seem to have grown more stable. His ministry was becoming famous among the farms, and in 1842 a friend at Robertsbridge offered to “give me a house to turn into a chapel, with a lease of fifty years and ten pounds per annum towards the support of the cause. This gave me fresh reasons for prayer.” The offer was accepted, and the foundation stone was laid in November 1842, the opening taking place in January of the next year. Preachers came respectively from London and the Upper Dicker, and “were much favoured in their own souls; but as for myself, I was sorely tried the whole of the day with my own debts and those of the chapel.”

So ends the story of the “Wonders of Free Grace.” Weller did not long enjoy his more established existence, for he died five years after coming to Robertsbridge. But his Bethel and his book remain, both akin in their ugliness and humility. One reads the book with much the same feelings as one looks at the Bethel. It is written entirely without art—a wordy stammering narrative, mixed with minute reports of dreams, spiritual experiences, marvellous conversions, digests of sermons and Calvinistic arguments. It is all obscure, voluble, earnest and naive.

A remarkable and poignant thing is his utter blindness to the beauty spread round him in the fields of Sussex and Kent. He seems to have tramped the Kentish lanes, gone to and fro among the red villages of the Sussex weald, crossed the still, sweet valleys of the Rother and the Glotten Brook, without a thought for their loveliness. This exile in darkest Geneva was blind to all beauty save that which reached him in occasional, tortured flashes from the Thick Darkness where God was. The coloured, wooded country round Sissinghurst, the brooding, merging greens of the Rother Marshes, the farm-patched mound of the Isle of Oxney, the flushed hillock of ancient Rye had no voice for the messenger of Grace. Even the coming of Spring, to be to the earth what conversion is to the man, to do yearly for the Benenden meadows what Free Grace had done once for James Weller, brought no sympathetic thrill to the heart which saw only its own Particular mercies. As he groped and stumbled on his way, nature walked beside him through her mysteries, from the Spring Annunciation to the Falling Asleep of December. He might have had the comfort of her beauty, the fellowship of her experience, but he went aloof—the Protestant, the individualist, his eyes cast down up the narrow lane of his salvation where his footsteps were marked in blood.

* * * * *

To the Catholic Christian there is a special glamour about such stories as this of James Weller, of conversion and salvation outside the normal sphere of the Covenanted Mercies. They are like stories of men who win their way across uncharted seas in unseaworthy craft—of men who miss their way up a mountain, yet, somehow, arrive at the summit, bleeding and exhausted, by another path. So powerful is the Precious Blood that it can work its changes on mankind apart from the means appointed for its operation. Unlike the old life, the New Life is not bound by its own laws, and again and again it amazes us with miracles. “Behold, ye despisers, and wonder and perish....”

The normal channel of the Precious Blood as it flows from the Sacred Heart of Christ, making us all partakers of his divine humanity, is the sacramental system of his Church, which is his Body. But just as there can be contacts between mind and mind without the agency of the body—though such contacts must always be abnormal, uncertain and unsatisfactory—so there is contact between the New Life and human lives which as yet stand outside the body of its functioning. And as these telepathic unions between mind and mind have a special glamour about them which perhaps we do not find in ordinary human intercourse, so these uncovenanted graces of the New Life give us a new thrill as of power unguessed and unrealised.

It is true that there is always something a little terrible about the experiences of the separated saints. They are not quite natural, and therefore not quite spiritual. Where the conversion is not too subjective to last, the New Life often has to grow in an atmosphere of fear—fear of sin and fear of hell, or fear even of the homely shapes of earth, which the separated Saint sees unredeemed, as vessels of wrath.

It is for our sins that the Precious Blood does not flow in the veins of Christ’s Body only. As long ago on Calvary, it is still poured upon the ground. The spear of schism pierces his side, and thereout flows blood and water—the sacraments poured out in death. It is through our guilt that men such as James Weller obtain their Particular Mercies. We have pierced his heart, and it is because his heart is broken that there is grace not only for us but for all the children of God that are scattered abroad.

August
_Month of the Most Pure Heart of Mary_

The sun has set, but there is still colour in the sky and colour on the sea. Pale streaks of rose lie along the horizon, both on cloud and on water. The sea, where it meets the sky is a lightless pink, where it touches the land a lightless blue. It is strange, this lightless colour of the sea. Under all the riches of its summer twilight changes the sea seems lifeless. There is a deadness too in the sky now that the sun has gone. It is all like a painted memory of something once seen, a dream of something once alive. Then a wind goes over the waters, and suddenly a point of living light is kindled, as the first star shines out in the lifeless sky. The planet named long ago after the goddess of beauty is still the star of the sleeping August sea. It shines one tiny brilliant point of light in all that rose-blue lifelessness of sky and sea. Round it and beneath it clouds and water waken into darkness, so that by the time the other stars have kindled, and the moon has risen, the whole dead scene has come to life again in glowing depths of gold and blue.

* * * * *

The human race flowered in Mary. Sown in the garden of man’s universal dream, tended and watered by the Law of the chosen race, the Rose of Sharon bloomed to be fertilised by Godhead. Mary stands alone as the single perfect flower brought forth by that sad sowing of the human race. Rich was the soil and many were the gardeners, yet only one blossom opened perfectly to the sun.

So once again the adventure of life could be made, the suitable medium having been found. The medium of the natural life that first came wonderfully to an inorganic world was the sea, in which organic life arose—Aphrodite, beautiful and fertile, born of the sea-foam. The medium of the supernatural life that came wonderfully into nature was the pure will of Mary when she proclaimed herself the handmaid of the Lord. Her name signifies saltness, bitterness, in fact, the salt and bitter sea—there is no flowering in her name—but her perfect will is the star of the sea, which makes a guiding path across its mystery—the star which yet is not a star, but a planet blazing with reflected glory.

Thus she is the rose to symbolise that she is the flower of all life, the flower of the long growth of the ages; she is also the sea to proclaim that she is the virgin source of the New Life, of the ages yet to come; she is the star of the sea to show the guidance of her perfect will, perfect only in its reflection of the glories of the will of God. “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.” When Mary speaks these words a new star is kindled, and the dead world comes alive in the night.

The sanctified myths of Genesis point to the failure of the purpose of life through the corruption of a woman. This need not involve the belief that the first perversion of free will came through woman as distinct from man. Eve symbolises the feminine principle in things—the receiver, the reflector, the material, the medium. Through the wrong choice of the first human wills, the medium of creation was spoiled, and the human race became in its tendencies a part of nature rather than of supernature. Intended for the spouse of heaven, it turned instead to Adam—Edom—red earth, and by turning earthwards away from heaven, to the knowledge of good and evil, it lost its purpose even in regard to the earth it turned to, its powers of redemption, its functions as mediator, and cursed became the ground for our sake.

Mary too stands as a symbol—the symbol of the restoration of the lost purpose of life through the sanctification of a woman. The medium, the receptacle is rehabilitated in Mary, “spiritual vessel, wondrous vessel of devotion,” and becomes the vehicle of the divine. By the Holy Ghost, Mary is made the spouse of heaven and the mother of heaven’s Lord.

The body which the Redeemer took of his Virgin Mother was not an inheritance of the flesh only, but the inheritance of a human heart and will. We all receive from our parents a heart and will made crooked by a perverted inheritance, in other words by sin. The heart and will of our Lord were clean and straight and without sin. His psychological processes were as God intended them to be—an orderly development from primitive yet honourable instincts moving towards completeness, which is perfection. “The sin is in the will.” There was no sin in the will of Mary, which was simply the will of God, so she was able to give her son what no other human parent has been able to give. The doctrine of the Virgin Birth proclaims that he took from her the feminine principle only—the vessel, the vehicle—while Godhead provided the masculine or quickening element. If he had been born according to nature he would have belonged to nature, but he was born the mediator of two worlds, the natural and the supernatural—“by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary.” Once more the Spirit of God moves upon the face of the waters, and the New Creation is begun.

It was Mary’s privilege to give our Lord all that he took of manhood. She gave him human nature at its best—the perfect vehicle. She gave him not only a human body but a human mind—and she did more than give. What she had already given she trained and guided. Again and again, psychologists tell us, even a good inheritance will be wasted by the mistakes of the parents during the first years of their child. The delicate child-mind may be hopelessly warped and spoiled by the mishandling of those that train it. The more we learn of the discoveries of modern psychology the more we are impressed by the terrific responsibility of the Mother of God. To her care was committed not only her infant’s tender body, but his beautiful, perfect, sensitive mind. Those early years which psychologists tell us make or mar a whole life were entirely in her keeping. It was for her to sow the seed of early impressions, to impart the first teaching. Only the glory of her own submitted will could have guided her through the ocean of her motherhood’s cares—that will which was simply the perfect reflection of the will of God.

The spirit of God moves over the face of the waters, and the waters become a miraculous source of life. Above the waters a single star is bright with the reflected glory of the sun.

September
_Month of the Sorrows of Mary_

There is a new sharpness in the air—the first sharpness of Winter returning. There is a sharpness which is only just not the sharpness of frost on the dew that lies so late and thick upon the morning grass. The winds sleep, and the air is bound. But this sharpness and stillness are not as in frozen January, for they are no longer sterile—they are rich, fruitful, golden. Up into the still air ascends the straight blue smoke-column of the bonfires that consume the dross of summer, and in that burning there is a sweetness, a richness that makes the heart beat quickly and almost chokes the breath. There is no perfume like that of a September garden fire, burning away the summer in an agony of sweetness. The smoke of it goes up like incense through the gold and blue of the afternoon. The breath of the earth is like incense as she turns slowly to her sleep. The earth is emptied of her harvests, but not of their perfume—it hangs still about her, perfume of the crops she has brought forth, corn and hops and hay, merged into one rich sweetness in the September sunshine. She is stripped but she still is sweet, indeed sweeter in this autumn spoliation than ever in her sun-baked fertilities of Summer, just as the trees are lovelier in their golden dying than in the pale austerity of their budding or in the green monotony of their July crown. The trees are still bearing fruit. The crimson of the apples hides among the golden green of the leaves. September is the month of the fruitful trees, of the harvest of the golden bough. The field has given up the last of her harvests, but the orchard is still heavy, and in the wild trees of the woods the acorns, the nuts, the sloes are ripe among the yellowing leaves.

* * * * *

Two women stand at the foot of two trees. The women are weeping, the trees are heavy with fruit. Eve stands at the foot of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—Mary stands at the foot of the Cross. Both are Matres Dolorosæ—sorrowful mothers—Eve the mother of all living, Mary the mother of life. Eve has betrayed her children, through the perverse choice of her will, but weeps for herself rather than for them—Mary has been redeemed by her child through the offering of her will, and she weeps for him alone.

The sorrows of Mary are fertile sorrows—the ground watered by her tears is rich for all mankind, whereas the tears of Eve water only thorns and thistles, cockle and darnel. The sorrows of Mary are sweet as the perfume of the September fires, they go up as incense to heaven. The sorrows of Eve are bitter as the smoke of green wood, and the gusts of her self-love blow them along the ground.

It is not the first time that Eve and Mary have stood over against each other in the scheme of the ages. They are both the medium of creation, vessels of life, the material of the active, creative principle of the universe. But in Eve this material has failed, it thwarts the life that works in it, so that its energies are not only cramped but perverted. Eve fights against the power that uses her—hence her own suffering, and the apparent failure of the power, due to the defects of its instrument. For Eve has discovered herself, and uses her will for her own purposes, with the result that both her own purposes and the purposes of God as far as she is concerned are lost. She knows both good and evil, but can use neither. The serpent deceived her by biting his own tail and calling himself eternity, hence she is caught in the round of things and cannot escape.

Mary stands at the foot of the Cross as the second Eve. Once more the creative principle has sought a medium, and this time the medium has responded perfectly, so that the work of the new creation of the new heavens and the new earth has not been foiled by its instrument. Mary used her freedom, her will, not for herself but to further the purposes of God. She became as it were the collaborator of God by yielding herself as his handmaiden. As a reward he has made her a sharer of his joys and sorrows. The sorrows of Mary are fertile because they are the sorrows of the Cross. Every one of them, from the flight into Egypt till the moment when she holds the slain body of her son upon her knees, every one of them draws life from the fountain of the Precious Blood. The mother standing there weeps no vain tears of selfish grief nor vain regret—her sorrows are already united with the sacrifice of her Son, she offers them to God with his, for the purposes of redemption. Her sorrows are fruitful for the assistance of the world on its new ways, in company with all human sorrow which is offered at the foot of the Cross. They are part of the new processes of life—the sublimation of the old laws whereby nature groaned and travailed towards higher things; they are part of the supernatural evolution, in which sorrow is eucharistic, a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.

The sorrows of Mary go up to heaven in perfume, like the fires of September. Her motherhood burns in an agony of sweetness. She is the rich earth, scented and fertile, at the foot of the golden bough, now ripe for harvest.

October
_Month of the Holy Angels_

The sky is black. The great moonless arch sweeps from horizon to horizon, high over the zenith. It is black, and utterly unlit except for a golden shimmer, a dust of light, which is less light than radiance, as it were a bloom upon the grape of darkness. Here and there against this background of darkness and dim bloom, the nearer constellations swing their homely shapes—the chair, the horse, the plough; and high across the heavens is the span of that great road, track of the sun’s chariot astray in mortal hands, the road of stars, where they lie like dust.

Looking up into the sky, into the blackness lit by radiant dust, we almost forget the earth under our feet. It shrinks in all this hugeness of space, and we ourselves shrink with it till we cry the age-long cry of those that watch the stars—“What is man that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that thou visitest him? Thou madest him a little lower than the angels....”

We see the earth as one of the smaller planets revolving round one of the smaller of the myriad suns that are as small dust in the small corner of the universe that is before our eyes. We see mankind as one of innumerable forms of life, some known, some unknown. Important in his small sphere, what is he in the spaceless immensity of the stars? Where does he rank in the scale of being, with its hierarchies that tower above him into eternity? Is he only a little lower than the angels?

We cannot count the suns we see—we cannot imagine the counting of the suns we do not see. We cannot count the miles, nor the years of the sky. We can only gaze upon it as it hangs above us in this moment of time, and use for our homely ends the faint glimpses we have down here of its wonderful order....

A red star suddenly cleaves the heavens. It appears to fly through them, though in reality it is far below them, burning because of its contact with the earth’s atmosphere, and only for that reason visible. It streaks the sky with a fading crimson gleam—then sinks among the woods and is lost.

* * * * *

“How art thou fallen, O Lucifer, son of the morning,”

It is easier to drop the counting of years and go outside time. Created will exists, and has power of itself. In part it has made the evil choice, it has turned away from the Creative Will which is both its source and goal. It has become evil. It is at war with good. There is war in heaven. Michael and his angels fight against the dragon; and the dragon fights and his angels, but they prevail not, neither is their place found any more in heaven. “And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan ... he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.... Woe to the inhabiters of the earth, and of the sea: for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.”

Evil, in itself, must die, since life subsists alone in God. Therefore every existence cut off from him must end. The dragon must perish apart from the Lord and Giver of life, his only hope is to establish an indirect and factitious union with his God in time. This he achieves through the material universe with which he is able to ally himself and which itself is sustained by God. He maintains his life through the elements—he becomes the Prince of the Power of the Air.

He enters the cycle of evolution, and we can follow his trail through natural law—in the cruelty and futility of nature, which we cannot believe formed part of her Creator’s original design. As life develops, becomes more subtle, rich and various, we see the adversary’s growth more explicitly revealed, till at last in animal consciousness, with its capacity for fury and pain, he attains a new power and satisfaction. The world is like a beautiful tree with a worm gnawing at its roots—twisting, stunting, and warping it, so that the fruit shrivels among the wilting leaves. Jömungund gnaws at the root of Yggdrasil.

But a new wonder happens upon the earth. To consciousness is added mind and will. Created will makes a new appearance—in time. Here is a great new opportunity, both for good and evil. If the adversary can obtain power over this new form of conscious will, he can prolong indefinitely his own life and activity—perhaps even obtain once more a holding in eternal things, by means of this new creature which has been made in the image of God. On the other hand, man may by a right use of his free will redeem the world, save nature from her curse of cruelty and futility, and set her free to return to the kingdom of God. Then the evil one and his angels would fail and perish—they would be cast out of earth as before they were cast out of heaven, and be unable to maintain any longer through creation their illicit hold on life.

These were the issues, and the myths of many races tell us how mankind failed to rise to his high calling. Instead of devoting the sword of his free will to the service of good, and assuring thereby the overthrow of evil in time as it had been overthrown in eternity, man, thinking thereby to serve himself, turned it to the service of evil. Thus evil, defeated in eternity, became victorious in time. The adversary’s power, till then bound by the limited consciousness of animal life, was enormously increased by its new hold on human mind and will. He was now the Prince of this World, its ruler and potentate, and would inevitably have destroyed it if the Almighty King of Heaven had not decided that evil should not triumph even in time—that mankind’s lost battle should be fought over again, and won.

By assuming our manhood, God fought our lost battle over again in his own person, and won it for us, redeeming not only ourselves but the kingdom of nature which we had betrayed. The serpent’s head was bruised—he lost his kingdom. He has no more real power even in time—he is bound by time and must end in time. The Prince of this World is judged.

* * * * *

This is only a dream of good and evil, of the mystery of their conflict. It is only a theory, a guess at the explanation of the apparently distorted processes of nature, and the slavery of mankind to the elements of the world. The eternal issues between good and evil have been fought outside time, by beings of a different nature from ourselves, in that symbolic heavenly war wherein Michael and his angels triumphed over the devil and his angels. In that conflict the victory is already won by the forces of good. Evil is already cast out of the eternal sphere, neither is its place found any more in heaven. There is no dualism in the Christian religion, no setting of Satan against God as Ahriman is set against Ormuzd in the Persian myth. For evil is definitely cast out and trampled under the foot of triumphant Godhead. It has only a secondary and limited existence—in time; whereas good is primary, unlimited and eternal.

In time, the forces of good are in conflict with the forces of evil, though outside time their victory is won. Michael and his angels still have need to succour and defend us on earth, and their power lies in the fact that they also do continual service in heaven. Their power is not secondary and limited by time as is the power of their adversary and ours—it derives from an eternal source, it is the same power that overthrew the Dragon on the plains of heaven—the power of God.

The power of the dragon lies in the life he is able to absorb from creation—from ourselves—just as the meteor owes its light to its passing through our earth’s atmosphere. In one of Dr. M. R. James’s ghost stories there is a spectre which makes itself a body out of some bedclothes, but is unable to injure its victim, as its strength lies entirely in the medium it has chosen, which is merely a bundle of linen. So the harm that evil can do is merely a question of the body it acquires. It rests with us whether it embodies itself in our highest thoughts and strivings or can do no more than frighten us with a bogey made of our discarded primitive instincts. Its most common embodiment is in the elements of our human psychology which we inherit from our animal ancestors—the grave clothes that the risen man has cast aside.

In our fight against evil we fight against what is merely temporary, parasitic and doomed, and on our side are forces which are primary, self-existing and eternal. On our side are the unchanging stars in their order, and our adversary is only the meteor that streaks the sky for a moment of earth-derived brightness, falls and is lost.

November
_Month of the Holy Souls_

There is a great silence over all the land. The furrows hold in stillness the new seed—brown, bare, and earth-smelling, they keep the secret of the life that has been buried in them. There is darkness too. At night the galaxy has faded from the sky—here and there rarely some greater lamp shines through the mists that veil the zenith, but more often even the moon herself is hidden, fog-wrapped, a mere dim spilling of light into the clouds. By day too the mists hang thick. The earth lies motionless and silent under a veil. Trees and hedges near at hand are hidden away or only loom occasionally through the mists as monstrous, unnatural shapes. There is something terrifying about the familiar barns and haystacks that the mist has blotted into ghostliness. The dimness and the silence bring a sense of fear, as of a land changed. Yet it is only the exhalations of the earth that have given this sinister, mysterious cast to loved, familiar objects. A gleam of sunlight falls upon the mists, and for a moment they part and show us the waiting furrow, and the hedgerows pearled with moisture and bloomed with a soft, spring-like purple that reminds us of March’s brave passional livery of redemption. Though despoiled, and bound, the earth is not dead, and in her already a new harvest sleeps.

* * * * *

“For thou, O Lord, changest, but takest not away the life of thy people....” They are changed, they have gone from us, the mists of earth hide them from us and give to their loved, familiar personalities a touch of the sinister, of ghostliness. If we would let her, the earth would make them ghosts. But as our prayers strive through the mists that veil not them but us, a gleam of sunlight falls, and for a moment we catch a glimpse of them in their passional livery of redemption, waiting there under the altar, the prisoners of hope. “Turn ye to the stronghold, ye prisoners of hope.”

They are changed. They no longer look into the same mirror as ourselves, the mirror of nature where supernature lies reflected as in a glass darkly. They do not yet see face to face, but theirs is no longer the mirror of the months, where together with divine things strange troubling things of earth are shown, where often Narcissus sees but his own image calling him down into the well of shadows. Their mirror, though a reflector only, is unclouded and cannot deceive. They have escaped out of the deceiver’s power, and can no longer be touched by the evil that preys on the world. They have left that evil behind in space and time, by virtue of him who for their sake assumed space and time that he might bind with them the enemy of eternity.

They are changed. They have entered as it were into a new function as mediators, for they are now a link between us and those unknown worlds whose complexity makes the unity of creation. We cannot limit our conception of life to beings like ourselves. If they live, and we know that they live, they do not live as we do, but manifest themselves in other ways and under other conditions. Spirit and manifestation—the first is always the same, the latter is constantly changing. But spirit shall never be without manifestation—that truth was proclaimed for all time in Joseph of Arimathea’s garden, and is preserved for all time in the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body. We shall not live as the helpless and futile shades of a Greek paradise, but as body and spirit, though that idea of a body need not bind us to the body as we know it now. The body of the springing corn in May is very different from the body of the seed that was cast into the November furrow, but it is as much the corn as ever was the seed—indeed it is more, for in the seed the idea of the corn slept undeveloped, uncertain and incomplete. Nevertheless the body of the springing corn was formed invisibly in the seed, and invisibly in the bodies of our flesh that spiritual body of our glory may be forming itself even now, waiting for the sowing in the ground which shall set it free to grow and lift itself out of the bondage of the earth into the liberty of the sun.

They are changed. They are learning perhaps painfully to develop this new body, from which the husk has fallen away. As yet they have not the new vehicle, though they have lost the old, their spirit fumbles for its manifestation in that Mediatory Kingdom where they wait. They are prisoners, but they are prisoners of hope, for their new faculties and powers are forming themselves in that unknown land. Once again, as it were, they go through the processes of birth, as at the beginning of their earthly life they went through them in their mother’s womb. A new body is forming itself in the shelter of that land we call Purgatory, where evil cannot seize upon the growing form as it seized upon that which was cast off. For those who escape the bondage of the earth, the Old Testament fierceness of natural law, the continual harrying and preying of evil seeking to maintain its life parasitically through ours, Purgatory even if viewed as a place of retribution as well as of cleansing must also be a place of refreshing, light and peace.

For there only good wills move in an orderly growth, an evolution which sin has not corrupted and debased. There the mists of earth can no longer hide from us the stars which are the burning of spirits aflame with the love of God, the angelic hierarchies that fill a universe in which our earth and its humanity holds only a small space. The shelter of the furrow is paradoxically the freedom of the sky. The prisoner of hope is the freeman of love.

December
_Month of the Incarnation_

The earth has gone back to the beginning. Her secrets are locked up. The year’s tale is told. She lies at the end of the months as she lay at the beginning—still and frozen, wrapped in the swaddling clothes of frost and snow. The beginning and the ending are the same.

There seems to be neither growth nor change nor life in the iron-hard soil, powdered here and there with snow, in the bare hedges and the barren woods, in the ponds that are black under their bondage of ice. Even the sun in the heavens stands still at his winter solstice. The glory and bravery of summer are almost unimaginable—it is hard to remember the changes of the months—the kindling gleam of February, the brightness of the April garden, the whiteness of the May-day hedgerow, the calm, star-lit seas of August, the fruitful golden trees of September. All have ended as they began in this darkness and stillness. The year’s tale is told, and the beginning and the ending are the same.

* * * * *

The months end as they began—with the Child. In December we meet the Child again, the Child of January, the Child who is Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord. In this Child the Christian faith begins and ends. All the doctrines of Councils, all the learning of doctors, all the disputations of scholars, all the splendour of creeds, have their beginning and ending in the Child born of the Virgin Mary. The Christian Gospel is simply the Gospel of the Incarnation—of the New Life born of a Virgin into the world, redeeming man from his bondage to the Law which was added because of transgressions—making him a citizen of a new and heavenly kingdom and a partaker of a new and heavenly nature—redeeming through him the rest of creation, of which he was first appointed a mediator, so that there shall be in eternity not only a new heaven but a new earth—an earth set free from the bondage of sin that held her in time, her processes redeemed for mercy, her creatures redeemed for joy.

It is this and nothing less than this that the New Life comes to accomplish—the first life having been corrupted by the enemy, and mankind having failed to fulfil his appointed purpose of restorer and healer. By virtue of the Incarnation of the Son of God, there is now a new power working in the world towards its at-onement with its maker. The Divine Humanity of our Lord, both superseding and containing ours, has already fulfilled the purposes of God for us, and through it we have union with God and are accounted his obedient sons, with power to co-operate in his eternal work.

The New Life works through the old. It uses matter in the way it was originally intended—as the vehicle and manifestation of spirit. Through Christ even the earth knows the glory of the Resurrection of her body. As long ago water gave birth to life, so now water is made the vehicle of the new birth and supernatural life—“Therefore do I hallow thee, O thou gift of water,” says the Priest at the Blessing of the Font on Holy Saturday, “by God the faithful, by God the holy, by God who in the beginning by his word divided the land from thee, by whose Spirit the waters were overshadowed.” As bread and wine have been the bodily food of man, giving strength and joy to his flesh, preserving his body in life, so now they are made his spiritual food, giving strength and joy to his soul, preserving his body and soul unto everlasting life. By natural modes they have been assimilated by man’s body and made a part of his humanity, and now by spiritual modes they are assimilated by God and made a part of his divine humanity. “Hear us, O merciful Father, we most humbly beseech thee, and grant that we receiving these thy creatures of bread and wine according to thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ’s holy institution ... may be partakers of his most blessed Body and Blood.”

The Sacraments go down to the very roots of creation—they go further down than our humanity, though our humanity is the means by which they descend, thus restoring it to its original mediatory purpose. Water, bread and wine—the elements and our own uses of the elements, inorganic and organic nature—are made the vehicles of supernatural life. Thus we are brought into a wonderful and mystical union between the earth and ourselves and the divine. Instead of remaining a creation at issue and enmity with itself and separated from God, we become a creation working together in mutual love and co-operation in union with God. Thus is the atonement wrought between God and man and the earth.

For our redemption is not only nearer but wider than we believed, and includes not only humanity but the whole creation groaning and travailing in pain together.... It is not only in poetry but in truth that the Priest bids nature join in his thanksgiving after every Mass. “Let us sing the song of the Three Children which they sang when they blessed the Lord in the furnace of fire.” And the Song of the Three Holy Children, redeemed from the furnace, is also the song of earth redeemed: “O let the earth bless the Lord, yea let it praise him and magnify him for ever.... O ye mountains and hills bless ye the Lord.... O all ye green things upon the earth bless ye the Lord.... O ye wells bless ye the Lord.... O ye seas and floods.... O all ye fowls of the air.... O all ye beasts and cattle—join to-day with the angels and with the priests of the Lord, with the servants of his sanctuary and the spirits and souls of the righteous, with all holy and humble men of heart, in singing the song of our redemption which we sing in the midst of the furnace of fire, praising and magnifying him for ever.”

“The angel of the Lord came down into the oven and smote the flame of the fire out of the oven; and made the midst of the furnace as it had been a moist whistling wind. Then the three, as out of one mouth praised, glorified and blessed God in the furnace, saying: Blessed art thou, O Lord God of our fathers, and to be praised and exalted above all for ever.”

The heart of the burning fiery furnace has become Joseph of Arimathea’s garden—the garden of the new earth and of the new spring, the blessed country where all the works of the Lord praise the Lord, the home of the children of men, of the holy souls and of the angels, where the risen Christ stands between the sun and moon, and greets the Church of his new creation with “Peace be unto you.”

● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).