Just to be good. This is enough — enough ! Oh, we who find sin's billows wild and rough, Do we not feel how more than any gold Would be the blameless life we led of old ? Ah ! though we miss All else but this.
To be good is enough.
It is enough — Enough — just to be good ! To lift our hearts where they are understood ; To let the thirst for worldly power and place Go uuappeased ; to smile back in God's face With the glad lips our mother used to kiss. Ah ! though we miss All else but this,
To be good is enough.
* A. Percival Hodgson, Thoughts for the King's Children, p. 192.
ISAIAH 143
3. Religion. — This is the strongest power that our human nature can submit to. Yet the dominion of it is constantly- pushed out of sight as men grow more complicated in their living and thinking. It is not that men are irreligious, though there are irreligioys men. It is not that men are worldly, though there seem to be men who find their whole satisfaction here ; who crawl over the mountains and the fields of the earth, like moles or lizards taking the colour of the ground they crawl on. It is that men are really religious and yet hide their religion from their fellows, never mentioning God's name aloud, never referring their life openly to Him in whose hands they know it lies. Heaven lies about us in our infancy. The child frankly and simply acknowledges God, sets Him openly on the throne over every act for every man to see. Let us go to God simply, freely, spontaneously, lovingly, as the bird goes to the nest, as the child goes to the mother.
III.
1. The religion of the child is not an unintellectual religion. The truly cultivated man has the first healthy instincts of humanity developed and enriched by all his culture, but not altered in their character, made on the contrary all the more truly themselves, as their character has been brought out. The love of God should be stronger in the man of true culture than in the savage. Says Professor Inge, " In a very fascinating mediaeval religious book, which I have tried to make better known, the Revelations of Julian of Norwich, the wise and saintly authoress says, ' To me was shown no higher stature than child- hood.' Not, of course, that we should remain children in under- standing; not that -when we have become men, we should refuse to put away childish things ; but that there should remain much of the child-character in us to the end."
2, And the religion of the child with all its simplicity is a religion which retains the mystery. Most good men would admit that in the hour when they have stood nearest to the unveiled heart of God, when with reverent wonder they have looked into the unknown depths of His infinite affection, they have been led to that holy place by the hand of a little child.
144 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
In the deepest reaches of His glorious hfe God is ever a mystery to us all.
They say that God lives very high : But if you look above the pines
You cannot see our God ; and why ?
And if you dig down in the mines You never see Him in the gold; Though from Him all that's glory shines.
God is so good. He wears a fold
Of heaven and earth across His face — Like secrets kept, for love, untold.
But still I feel that His embrace
Slides down by thrills, through all things made, Through sight and sound of every place.
As if my tender mother laid
On my shut lids her kisses' pressure, Half waking me at night, and said "Who kissed you through the dark, dear guesser?"^
3. It is only the child that is acceptable to God. It is only those who turn and become as little children that enter the Kingdom. " It is not the will of your Father which is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish " — that is the great encouragement of all who turn.
I was in heaven one day when all the prayers
Came in, and angels bore them up the stairs Unto a place where he "Who was ordained such ministry
Should sort them so that in that palace bright
The presence-chamber might be duly dight ;
For they were like to flowers of various bloom ;
And a divinest fragrance filled the room.
Then did I see how the great sorter chose One flower that seemed to me a hedgling rose,
And from the tangled press
Of that irregular loveliness Set it apart ! and — " This," I heard him say, " Is for the Master " ; so upon his way He would have passed ; then I to him : " Whence is this rose, 0 thou of cherubim The chiefest ? " " Knowest thou not ? " he said, and smiled : " This is the first prayer of a little child." ^
1 Mrs. Browning, A Child's Thought of God. ^ T. E. Brown.
The Wells of Salvation.
10
Literature.
Askew (E. A.), The Service of Perfect Freedom, 94.