Higher, higher,
Purified by suffering's fire,
Eise, my soul, until thy flight
Pierce its way to heaven's light.
Clearer, clearer,
Until, ever drawing nearer,
There shall burst upon thy sight,
Through the darkness of earth's night,
All the eye of faith may see,
Set in God's eternity.1
II.
Knowing.
In the language of St. Paul " knowledge " denotes the advanced or perfect knowledge, which is the ideal state of the true Christian. It appears only in his Latin Epistles (from Komans onwards), where the more contemplative aspects of the Gospel are brought into view, and its comprehensive and eternal relations more fully set forth. But the power of the preposition appears in the verb, no less than in the substantive. In this passage it is forced upon our notice. The partial knowledge is contrasted with the full knowledge which shall be attained hereafter. This distinction is missed in the Authorized Version here, though it is observed in 2 Cor. vi. 9, " as unknown, and yet well known" 2
i. Now.
"Now I know in part."
How much in the history of knowledge, as we read it with the comment of that most stern of critics, Time, seems to be but a record of misapplied ingenuity and dreary waste of energy. We mark one generation contemptuously discarding the studies and the methods of its predecessors and substituting its own, doomed in their turn to become antiquated and obsolete. Pro-
1 William H. Birckhead. 2 Lightfoot, A Fresh Revision, 69.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 12 377
cesses of thought which claimed to be capable of solving every contradiction are found wanting, and are abandoned for ever. Enthusiasms which boasted of their power to regenerate a dead age prove their insufficiency, and even turn themselves to worse corruption. Controversies which were treated as questions of life and death are pronounced to be barren logomachies or, at the best, of comparative insignificance, when, viewed from a distance, they assume their proper proportions.
^[ In each successive age we see the tyranny of some dominant form of thought, or subject of study, or scheme of learning, claiming to be supreme and final, to have the right to suppress its rivals, and destined to last for ever. Wherein lay the error ? Was it not that one age after another failed to take to itself St. Paul's warning that all human knowledge is partial, relative, progressive ? Each form of thought, each branch of study, served some useful end, but the mistake lay in the tendency to regard passing forms of thought as final, partial methods of study as universal ; and its consequence was a timid and anxious clinging to the past when the inevitable hour of change arrived. The dialectic of the Schoolmen served to sharpen the reasoning faculties, but long ere it was displaced it had degenerated into the merest quibbling, and stunted rather than developed the growth of the intellectual powers. Yet its adherents were slow to confess that the " science of sciences" was no infallible instrument for the attainment of knowledge, and that the exercises of the schools were perilously liable to beget a habit of mind which valued victory in argument more highly than the elucidation of truth.1
U Most of the hot debates which burn in the history of theology have been about things which were looked at in a mirror; and the fact that no one could see these things just as they were, was precisely what made them such excellent matter for debate.2
1. There are secrets hidden in every tiny flower and grain of sand, in every throbbing nerve and aching heart, which our keenest wisdom cannot discover. Every tear is a profound mystery, every sigh is a world of unimaginable things. No one can tell us why we laugh or why we cry. No one can read his brother's mind or understand his own. He who has studied human nature most closely has but touched the surface of it.
1 A. F. Kirkpatrick, Cambridge Review, xv. 85.
2 F. G. Peabody, Afternoons in the College Chapel, 9.
378 THE PARTIAL AND THE PERFECT
Those who can tell us most about man can only prove that he is fearfully and wonderfully made. Men who have been investi- gating for a lifetime the sins, sorrows, and diseases of the world find that these are still the everlasting riddle; and he whose faith has given him the clearest vision of God, knows that these are but " a portion of His ways, and the thunders of His power none can understand." The highest philosophy still prattles and stammers and guesses like a child, and we all have to kneel down humbly declaring that our wisdom is but dim-eyed folly, and repeating these words of St. Paul : " Now we see in a mirror, darkly ; but then face to face : now I know in part ; but then shall I know even as also I have been known."
If The science of all sciences is the knowledge of God. To know Him, what He has done for man, what He is to man, what man is to Him, — nay, what He is in Himself, to know at once the tenderness of His love and the mystery of His Being — this is the highest exercise of man's mind ; this is the purest joy of man's heart ; this is the only one true aim of life ; this alone can be called life ; this is the life the pulses of which begin to beat within us in this world ; this is the life which swells out into its full perfection in the world to come; for "this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent." *