^ " Tell me something of your Sunday night's sermon on ' The Angel and the Ass,' " I said to him when we had settled ourselves down in his study on the Thursday before his death. I had heard many references to that sermon, and to the profound impression it had produced. Berry fenced a little, but at last began. I shall never forget that half-hour. He was as interested in the theme (and what wonder !) and grew almost as earnest as he had been in the pulpit on the Sunday evening. The drift of his thought, as well as I can recall it, was that we are all too prone to regard the lower rather than the higher ministries that help our life on earth — to have eyes for the ass but none for the angel, and that it is only when our eyes are open to see the angel that the best of God can reach us. I can see him now — the fine expressive face illumined with the light of a wondrous tenderness that shone in those clear, beautiful eyes as he quoted one of his illustrations. "Three months ago, when I was lying a poor, helpless, pain- racked man yonder in Southport, a letter reached me from a friend, a letter full of sympathy and concern and genuine affection. But in the letter was this sentence : ' If any one tells you, as
,U^' >^^!!v^ '2 KINGS VI. 17 487
plenty*' of people are sure to have done, that God has sent you this suffering, don't believe him. God never sends suffering, not even to sweeten and strengthen men, although He does strengthen them in spite of the suffering. Believe me, dear friend, your sufferings were sent by the devil ; he is the sole author of pain. The devil owes you many a grudge for the hard blows you have given him in Wolverhampton and elsewhere, and now he is going to stop you if he can. Don't blame God for this, but pray to Him to put down Satan under your feet.' * Ah ! ' said Berry, ' I thank my friend with all my heart. I know well he meant to comfort me. But,' and, as he leaned towards me, the look on his face was that of a man who had seen God, and learned His secret, * / am not going to let him rot me of my angel.' " ^
(3) This generation is very fond of quoting the text, " no man hath seen God at any time," and adds, " nor can see Him." It is a xjity that they do not rather go on with the quotation itself and say, " the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him." Jesus Christ is the Eevealer. The irradiation of His brightness, "and the express image of his person," is that Divine man, God manifest in the flesh. The knowledge of God which we have in Jesus Christ is real, as sight is real. It is not complete, but it is genuine knowledge. We know the best of God, if we may use such a phrase, when we know what we know in Christ, that He is a loving and a righteous will ; when we can say of Him, " He is love," in no metaphor but in simple reality ; and His will towards all righteousness, and towards all blessing, anything that heaven has to teach us about God after- wards is less than that. We see Him in the reality of a genuine, central, though by no means complete, knowledge.
^ Jesus brought the righteousness of God and made it manifest, a clear fact where all men could read it. He laid it like a new silver light across the murky surfaces that we are all familiar with. He made the lives of fishermen and publicans the scaffolding on which He hung its exhibition. And so, too. He made the purposes of God the great important lines along which all existence ran. He let us see that the course of the great nations and the current of quiet lives were all running the way that one supreme and omnipresent will had chosen. And of the love of God, what shall we say? He wove its records every- where. He spun it in the colour of the lily and made us hear it
^ J. S. Druiumond, Charles A. Berry, 208.
488 THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE
in the noiseless fall of the sparrow. He made all sorrow and all joy its ministers, A .id then at last He hung it on a cross so high that no pride could tower so high as to overlook it, so low that the most abject humility could not fall so low as not to be within its light. This is what Jesus did. He did not bring God into the world. God forbid that we should think that! God had never been out of the world He made and loved. He touched the world with His life and made it everywhere a luminous utterance of God. And then, what else ? He opened the blind eyes of every man who would become His servant, and bid him see. He regenerated man. He brought him back, that is, into the first condition, lost so long, in which his eyes were open and he could see the God who was everywhere. " As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God." He redeemed man. He brought him back into the Eden of the perfect recon- ciliation. Once more he might see God, No longer with the eyes of sense but all the more clearly to the inner vision of the renewed obedient soul, the Lord God walked with man among the trees of the garden of the Christian life.^