LECTURE THREE
One of the concepts which must occur to us when we speak
of the relation of Christ to the human soul is undoubtedly that of
sin and guilt. We know what an incisive significance it had in the
Christianity of St. Paul. Our present age, however, is not well
adapted for gaining a really deep inner understanding of the wider
connections between the concepts “death and sin” and
“death and immortality” which are to be found in Paul's
writings. That cannot be expected in our materialistic times. Let us
recall what I said in the first lecture of this course, that there
can be no true immortality of the human soul without a continuation
of consciousness after death. An ending of consciousness with death
would be equivalent to the fact, which would then have to be
accepted, that man is not immortal. An unconscious continuance of
man's being after death would mean that the most important part
of him, that which makes him a man, would not exist after death. An
unconscious human soul surviving after death would not mean much more
than the sum of atoms which, as materialism recognizes, remain even
when the human body is destroyed.
For Paul, it was an unshakable conviction that it is
possible to speak of immortality only if individual consciousness is
maintained. And since he had to regard the individual consciousness
as subject to sin and guilt, he would naturally think: If a man's
consciousness is obscured or disturbed after death by sin and guilt,
or by their results, this signifies that sin and guilt really kill
man — they kill him as soul, as spirit. The materialistic
consciousness of our time of course is remote from that. Many modern
philosophical thinkers are content to speak of a continuance of the
life of the human soul, whereas the immortality of man can be
identified only with a continuing conscious existence of the human
soul after death.
Here, certainly, a difficulty may easily arise,
especially for the anthroposophical world-view. To approach this
difficulty we need only look at the opposition between the concept of
guilt and sin and the concept of Karma. Many anthroposophists get
over this simply by saying: “We believe in Karma, meaning a
debt which a man contracts in any one of his incarnations; he bears
this debt with him, as part of his Karma, and discharges it later;
so, in the course of incarnations, a compensation is brought about.”
Here the difficulty begins. These people then easily say: “How
can this be reconciled with the Christian acceptance of the
forgiveness of sins through Christ?” and yet the idea of the
forgiveness of sins is intimately bound up with true Christianity. We
need think of one example: Christ on the Cross between the two
malefactors. The malefactor on the left hand mocks at Christ: “If
thou wilt be God, help thyself and us!” The malefactor on the
right says that the other ought not to speak thus, for both had
merited their fate of crucifixion, the just award of their deeds;
whereas He was innocent and yet had to experience the same fate. And
the malefactor on the right went on to say: “Think of me when
thou art in thy kingdom.” And Christ answered him: “Verily
I say unto thee, today thou shalt be with me in Paradise.”
It is not permissible merely to gainsay these words or
to omit them from the Gospel, for they are very significant. The
difficulty for anthroposophists arises from the question: If this
malefactor on the right has to wash away the Karma he has incurred,
what does it mean when Christ, as though pardoning and forgiving him,
says: “Today thou shalt be with me in Paradise”? An
objector may say that the malefactor on the right will have to wash
away his Karmic debt, even as the one on the left. Why is a
difference made by Christ between the malefactor on the right and the
one on the left? There is no doubt at all that here the
anthroposophical conception of Karma meets a difficulty that is not
easy to solve. It can be solved, however, when we try to probe more
deeply into Christianity by means of spiritual science. And now I
shall approach the subject from quite another side, a side already
known to you, but it can bring certain remarkable circumstances to
light.
You know how often we speak of Lucifer and Ahriman, and
how Lucifer and Ahriman are represented in my Mystery Plays. If one
begins to consider the matter in a human-anthropomorphic sense and
simply makes of Lucifer a kind of inner and Ahriman a kind of outer
criminal, there will be difficulty in getting on; for we must not
forget that Lucifer, besides being the bringer of evil into the
world, the inner evil that arises through the passions, is also the
bringer of freedom. Lucifer plays an important role in the universe,
and so does Ahriman.
When we began to speak more of Lucifer and Ahriman, our
experience was that many of those associated with us became uneasy;
they still had a feeling of what people have always thought of
Lucifer — that he is a fearful criminal to the world, against
whom one must defend oneself. Naturally, an anthroposophist cannot go
all the way with this feeling, for he has to assign to Lucifer an
important role in the universe; and yet again, Lucifer must be
regarded as an opponent of the progressive gods, as an enemy who
crosses the creative plan of those gods to whom reverence is rightly
due. Thus, when we speak of Lucifer in this way, we are ascribing an
important role in the universe to an enemy of the gods. And we must
do the same for Ahriman.
From this point of view it is easy to understand the
human feeling that leads a person to ask: “What is the right
attitude to adopt towards Lucifer and Ahriman; am I to love them or
to hate them? I really don't know what to do about them.”
How does all this come about? It should be quite clear from the way
in which one speaks of Lucifer and Ahriman that they are Beings who
by their whole nature do not belong to the physical plane but have
their mission and task in the Cosmos outside the physical plane, in
the spiritual worlds. In the lectures given in Munich in the summer
of 1913 [Eight lectures with the title The Secrets of the
Threshold], I laid particular emphasis on the fact that the
progressive gods have assigned to Lucifer and Ahriman roles in the
spiritual world; and that discrepancy and disharmony appear only when
they bring down their activities into the physical plane and arrogate
to themselves rights which are not allotted to them. But we must
submit to one fact which the human soul does not readily accept when
these matters are under consideration, and it is this: Our human
judgment holds good only for the physical plane, and — right as
it may be for the physical plane — it cannot be simply
transferred to the higher worlds. We must therefore gradually
accustom ourselves in Anthroposophy to widen our judgments and our
world of concepts and ideas. It is because materialistically minded
men of the present day do not want to widen their judgment, but
instead prefer to keep to judgments which hold good for the physical
plane, that they have such difficulty in understanding Anthroposophy,
although it is all perfectly intelligible.
If we say, “one power is hostile to another”,
then on the physical plane it is quite right to say, “enmity is
improper, it ought not to exist”. But the same thing does not
hold good for the higher planes. There, judgment must be widened.
Just as in the realm of electricity positive and negative electricity
are necessary, so is spiritual hostility necessary in order that the
universe may exist in its entirety; it is necessary that the spirits
should oppose one another. Here is the truth in the saying of
Heracleitos, that strife as well as love constitutes the universe. It
is only when Lucifer works upon the human soul, and when through the
human soul strife is brought into the physical world, that strife is
wrong. But this does not hold good for the higher worlds; there, the
hostility of the spirits is an element that belongs to the whole
structure, the whole evolution, of the universe. This implies that as
soon as we come into the higher worlds we must adopt other standards,
other colorings for our judgments. That is why there is often a
feeling of shock when we speak of Lucifer and Ahriman on the one hand
as the opponents of the gods, and on the other hand as being
necessary for the whole course of the cosmic order. Hence we must,
above all things, hold firmly in our minds that a man comes into
collision with the cosmic order if he allows a judgment which holds
good for the physical plane to hold good for the higher worlds also.
Now the root of the whole matter, which must again and
again be emphasized, is that the Christ, as Christ, does not belong
with the other beings of the physical plane. From the moment of the
Baptism in the Jordan, a Being who had not previously existed on
Earth, a Being who does not belong to the order of Earth-beings,
entered into the corporeality of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus in Christ we
are concerned with a Being who could truly say to the disciples: “I
am from above, but ye are from below”, which means: “I am
a Being of the kingdom of Heaven, ye are of the kingdom of Earth.”
And now let us consider the consequences of this. Must
an earthly judgment that is entirely justifiable as such, and that
everyone on Earth must maintain, be also the judgment of that Cosmic
Being who, as Christ, entered the Jesus body? That Being who passed
into the body of Jesus at the Baptism in the Jordan applies not an
earthly but a heavenly judgment. He must judge differently from men.
And now let us consider the whole import of the words
spoken on Golgotha. The malefactor on the left believes that in the
Christ merely an earthly being is present, not a Being whose realm is
beyond the earthly kingdom. But just before death there comes to the
consciousness of the malefactor on the right: “Thy kingdom, O
Christ, is another; think of me when thou art in Thy kingdom.”
At this moment the malefactor on the right shows that he has a dim
idea of the fact that Christ belongs to another kingdom, where a
power of judgment quite different from that obtaining on the Earth
holds sway. Then, out of the consciousness that He stands in His
kingdom, Christ can answer: “Verily, because thou hast some dim
foreboding of my kingdom, this day (that is, with death) thou shalt
be with me in my kingdom.” This indicates the super-earthly
Christ power that draws up the human individuality into a spiritual
kingdom. Earthly judgment, human judgment, must of course say: “As
regards the Karma, the right-hand malefactor will have to make
compensation for his guilt, even as the one on the left.” For
heavenly judgment, however, something else holds good. But that is
only the beginning of the matter, for of course it might now be said:
“Yes, then the judgment of Heaven contradicts that of the
Earth. How can Christ forgive where earthly judgment demands karmic
justice?”
This is indeed a difficult question, but we will try to
approach it more closely in the course of this lecture. I lay special
emphasis on the fact that we are touching here on one of the most
difficult questions of occult science. We must make a distinction
which the human soul does not willingly make, because it does not
like following out the matter to its ultimate consequences, and there
are indeed some difficulties in so doing. We shall find it, as I have
said, a difficult subject, and you will perhaps have to turn the
question over in your minds many times in order to get at its real
essence.
To start with, we must make a distinction. We must first
consider how, through Karma, objective justice is fulfilled. Here we
must clearly understand that a man is certainly subject to his Karma;
he has to make karmic compensation for unjust deeds, and if we think
more deeply about it, we can see that he will not really wish it
otherwise. For suppose a man has done another person wrong; in the
moment of doing so he is further from fulfillment than he was before,
and he can recover the lost ground only by making compensation for
his unjust act. He must wish to make compensation, for only by so
doing can he bring himself back to the stage he had reached before
committing the act. Thus for the sake of our own progress we are
bound to wish that Karma should be there as objective justice. When
we grasp the true meaning of human freedom, we can have no wish that
a sin should be so forgiven us that we would no longer need to pay it
off in our Karma. For example, a man who puts out the eyes of another
is more imperfect that one who does not, and in his later Karma it
must come to pass that he does a correspondingly good deed, for only
then will he be inwardly again the man he was before he committed the
sin. So if we rightly consider the nature of man, we cannot suppose
that when a man has put out the eyes of another it will be forgiven
him, and that Karma will be in some way adjusted. Hence there is
rightness in the fact that we are not excused a farthing of our
Karma, but must pay our debts in full.
But something else comes in. The guilt, the sins, with
which we are laden are not merely our own affair; they are an
objective cosmic fact which means something for the universe also.
That is where the distinction must be made. The crimes we have
committed are compensated through our Karma, but the act of putting
out another person's eyes is an accomplished fact. If we have,
let us say, put out someone's eyes in a present incarnation,
and then in the next incarnation we do something that makes
compensation for this act, yet for the objective course of the
universe the fact will remain that so many hundred years ago we put
out someone's eyes. That is an objective fact in the universe.
As far as we are concerned, we make compensation for it later. The
stain that we have personally contracted is adjusted in our Karma,
but the objective fact remains — we cannot efface that by
removing our own imperfection. We must discriminate between the
consequences of a sin for ourselves, and the consequences of a sin
for the objective course of the world. It is highly important that we
should make this distinction. And I may now perhaps introduce an
occult observation that will make the matter clearer.
If one surveys the course of human evolution since the
Mystery of Golgotha and approaches the Akashic Record without being
permeated with the Christ Being, it is easy, very easy indeed, to be
led into error, for one will find records which very often do not
coincide with the karmic evolution of the individuals concerned. For
example, let us suppose that in, say, the year 733 some man lived and
incurred heavy guilt. The person now examining the Akashic Record may
at first have no connection with the Christ Being. And behold —
the man's guilt cannot be found in the Akashic Record.
Examination of the Karma of this man in a later incarnation reveals
that there is something still in his Karma which he has to wipe out.
That must have existed in the Akashic Record at a certain point of
time, but it is no longer there. A strange contradiction! This is an
objective fact which may occur in many cases. I may meet a man today,
and if through grace I am permitted to know something about his
Karma, I may perhaps find that some misfortune or stroke of fate that
has fallen on him stands in his Karma, that it is an adjustment of
earlier guilt. If I turn to his earlier incarnations and examine what
he did then, I do not find his guilty deed registered in the Akashic
Record. How does this come about?
The reason is that Christ has taken upon Himself the
objective debt. In the moment that I permeate myself with Christ, I
discover the deed when I examine the Akashic Record. Christ has taken
it into His kingdom and He bears it further, so that when I look away
from Christ I cannot find it in the Akashic Record. This distinction
must be kept clearly in mind: karmic justice remains, but Christ
intervenes in the effects of the guilt in the spiritual world. He
takes over the debt into His kingdom and bears it further. Christ is
that Being who, because He is of another kingdom, is able to blot out
in the world our debts and our sins, taking them upon Himself.
What is it that Christ on the Cross of Golgotha really
conveys to the malefactor on the left? He does not utter it, but in
the fact that He does not utter it, lies its essence. He conveys to
the malefactor on the left: What thou has done will continue to work
in the spiritual world, and not merely in the physical world. To the
malefactor on the right He says: “Today thou shalt be with me
in Paradise.” This means: “I am beside thine act; through
thy Karma thou wilt have later on to do for thyself all that the act
signifies for thee, but what the act signifies for the universe,
that” — if I may use a trivial expression — “is
my concern.” That is what Christ says. The distinction made
here is certainly an important one, and significant not only for the
time after the Mystery of Golgotha, but also for the time before the
Mystery of Golgotha.
Some of our friends will remember that in earlier
lectures I have called attention to the fact that Christ really did
descend to the dead after His death; this is not a mere legend. He
thereby accomplished something also for the souls who in previous
ages had laden themselves with guilt and sins. Error now comes in if
a man, without being permeated with Christ, investigates in the
Akashic Record the time before the Mystery of Golgotha. He will
continually make errors in his reading of the Akashic Record. Hence,
for example, I was not at all surprised that Leadbeater, who in
reality knows nothing about Christ, should have made the most
abstruse statements concerning the evolution of the Earth in his
book, Man: How, Whence and Whither. For only through
permeation with the Christ Impulse is the soul capable of really
seeing things as they are, and how they have been regulated in the
evolution of the Earth on the basis of the Mystery of Golgotha,
though they occurred before it.
Karma is an affair of the successive incarnations of
man. The significance of karmic justice must be looked at with our
earthly judgment. That which Christ does for humanity must be
measured by a judgment that belongs to worlds other than this
Earth-world. And suppose that were not so? Let us think of the end of
the Earth, of the time when men will have passed through their
earthly incarnations. Most certainly it will come to pass that all
debts will have to be paid to the last farthing. Human souls will
have had to balance their Karma in a certain way. But let us imagine
that all guilt had continued to exist in the Earth-world, that all
guilt would go on working there. Then at the end of the Earth period
human beings would be there with their Karma balanced, but the Earth
would not be ready to develop into the Jupiter condition; the whole
of Earth humanity would be there without a dwelling place, without
the possibility of developing onwards to Jupiter. The fact that the
whole Earth develops along with man is a result of the Deed of
Christ. All the guilt and debt that would otherwise have piled up
would cast the Earth into darkness, and we should have no planet for
our further evolution. In our Karma we can take care of ourselves,
but not of humanity as a whole, and not of that which in
Earth-evolution is connected with the whole evolution of humanity.
So let us realize that Karma will not be taken from us,
but that our debts and sins will be wiped out from the
Earth-evolution through what has come in with the Mystery of
Golgotha. Now we must, of course, realize clearly that all this
cannot be bestowed on man without his cooperation — i.e.,
cannot be his unless he does something. And that is clearly brought
before us in the utterance from the Cross of Golgotha which I have
quoted. It is very definitely shown to us how the soul of the
malefactor on the right received a dim idea of a super-sensible
kingdom wherein things proceed otherwise than in the mere earthly
kingdom. Man must fill his soul with the substance of the Christ
Being; he must, as it were, have taken something of the Christ into
his soul, so that Christ is active in him and bears him into a
kingdom where man has, indeed, no power to make his Karma
ineffective, but where it comes to pass through Christ that our debts
and sins are blotted out from our external world.
This has been wonderfully represented in painting. There
is no one upon whom a picture such as “Christ as Judge at the
Last Judgment”, by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, can fail
to make a deep impression. What really underlies such a picture? Let
us take, not the deep esoteric fact, but the picture that is here
presented to our souls. We see the righteous and the sinners. It
would have been possible to present this picture differently from the
way in which Michelangelo, as a Christian, has painted it. There was
the possibility that at the end of the Earth, men, seeing their
Karma, might have said to themselves: “Yes, I have indeed wiped
off my Karma, but everywhere in the spiritual, written on tablets of
brass, are my guilt and my sins, and they weigh heavily on the Earth;
they will destroy the Earth. As far as I am concerned I have made
compensation, but there the guilt stands, everywhere.” That
would not, however, be the truth. For through the fact of Christ's
death upon Golgotha, men will not see the tablets of their guilt and
sin, but they will see Him who has taken them upon himself; they will
see, united with the Being of Christ, all that would otherwise be
spread out in the Akashic Record. In place of the Akashic Record, the
Christ stands before them, having taken all upon Himself.
We are looking into deep secrets of the Earth's
existence. But what is necessary in order to fathom the true state of
things in this domain? It is this: that men, no matter whether they
are righteous or sinful, should have the possibility of looking upon
Christ, that they should not look upon an empty place where the
Christ should stand. The connection with Christ is necessary, and the
malefactor on the right shows us his connection with Christ by what
he says. And although the Christ has given to those who work in His
spirit the behest to forgive sins, this never means encroaching upon
Karma. What it does mean is that the earthly kingdom will be rescued
for those who stand in relationship to Christ, rescued from the
spiritual consequences of guilt and sin, which are objective facts
even when a later Karma has made compensation for them.
What does it signify for the human soul when one who may
so speak says in the name of Christ: “Thy sins are forgiven
thee?” It means that he is able to assert: “Thou hast
indeed to await thy karmic settlement; but Christ has transformed thy
guilt and sin so that later thou mayest not have the terrible sorrow
of looking back upon thy guilt and seeing that through it thou hast
destroyed a part of the Earth's existence.” Christ blots
it out. But a certain consciousness is necessary, and those who would
forgive sins may rightly demand it — a consciousness of the
guilt, and consciousness that Christ has the power to take it upon
Himself. For the saying: “Thy sins are forgiven thee”
denotes a cosmic fact and not a karmic fact.
Christ shows His relation to this so wonderfully in a
certain passage — so wonderfully that it penetrates deep, deep
into our hearts. Let us call up in our souls the scene where the
woman taken in adultery comes before Him, with those who were
condemning her. They bring the woman before Him and in two different
ways Christ meets them. He writes in the Earth; and He forgives, He
does not judge; He does not condemn. Why does He write in the Earth?
Because Karma works, because Karma is objective justice. For the
adulteress, her act cannot be obliterated. Christ writes it in the
Earth.
But with the spiritual, the not-earthly consequence, it
is otherwise. Christ takes upon Himself the spiritual consequence.
“He forgives” does not mean that He blots out in the
absolute sense, but that He takes upon Himself the consequences of
the objective act.
Now let us think of all that it signifies when the human
soul is able to say to itself: “Yes, I have done this or that
in the world. It does not impair my evolution, for I do not remain as
imperfect as I was when I committed the deed; I am permitted to
overcome that imperfection in the further course of my Karma by
making compensation for the deed. But I cannot undo it for the
Earth-evolution.” Man would have to bear unspeakable suffering
if a Being had not united Himself with the Earth, a Being who undoes
for the Earth that which we cannot change. This Being is the Christ.
He takes away from us, not subjective Karma, but the objective
spiritual effects of the acts, the guilt. That is what we must follow
up in our hearts, and then for the first time we shall understand
that Christ is in truth that Being who is bound up with the whole of
Earth-humanity. For the Earth is there for the sake of mankind, and
so Christ is connected also with the whole Earth. It is a weakness of
man, as a consequence of the Luciferic temptation, that although he
is indeed able to redeem himself subjectively through Karma, he
cannot redeem the Earth at the same time. That is accomplished by the
Cosmic Being, the Christ.
And now we understand why many anthroposophists cannot
realize that Christianity is in full accord with the idea of Karma.
They are people who bring into Anthroposophy the most intense egoism,
a super-egoism; certainly they do not put it into words, but still
they really think and feel: “If I can only redeem myself
through my Karma, what does the world matter to me? Let it do what it
will!” These anthroposophists are quite satisfied if they can
speak of karmic adjustment. But there is a great deal more to be
done. Man would be a purely Luciferic being if he were to think only
of himself. Man is a member of the whole world, and he must think
about it in the sense that he can indeed be egotistically redeemed
through his Karma, but is not able to redeem the whole
Earth-existence. Here the Christ enters. At the moment when we decide
not to think only of our ego, we must think about something other
than our ego. Of what must we think? Of the “Christ in me”,
as Paul says; then indeed we are united with Him in the whole
Earth-existence. We do not then think of our self-redemption, but we
say: “Not I and my own redemption — not I, but the Christ
in me and the redemption of the Earth.”
Many believe they may call themselves true Christians,
and yet they speak of others — anthroposophical Christians, for
instance — as heretics. There is very little true Christian
feeling here. The question may perhaps be permitted: “Is it
really Christian to think that I may do whatever I like and that
Christ came into the world in order to take it all away from me and
to forgive my sins, so that I need have nothing more to do with my
Karma, with my sins?” I think there is another word more
applicable to such a way of thinking than the word “Christian”;
perhaps the word “convenient” would be better.
“Convenient” it would certainly be if a man had only to
repent, and then all the sins he had committed in the world were
obliterated from the whole of his later Karma. The sin is not blotted
out from Karma; but it can be blotted out from the Earth-evolution,
and this it is that man cannot do because of the human weakness that
results from the Luciferic temptation. Christ accomplishes this. With
the remission of sins we are saved from the pain of having added an
objective debt to the Earth-evolution for all eternity. Only, of
course, we must have a serious interest in this. When we have this
true understanding of Christ, a greater earnestness will manifest
itself in many other ways as well. Many elements will fall away from
those conceptions of Christ which may well seem full of triviality
and cynicism to the man whose soul has absorbed the Christ-conception
in all seriousness. For all that has been said today, and it can be
proved point by point from the most significant passages of the New
Testament, tells us that everything Christ is for us derives from the
fact that He is not a Being like other men, but a Being who, from
above — that is, from out of the Cosmos — entered into
Earth-evolution at the baptism by John in Jordan. Everything speaks
for the cosmic nature of Christ. And he who deeply grasps Christ's
attitude towards sin and debt may speak thus: “Because man in
the course of the Earth's existence could not blot out his
guilt for the whole Earth, a Cosmic Being had to descend in order
that the Earth's debt might be discharged.”
True Christianity must needs regard Christ as a Cosmic
Being. It cannot do otherwise. Then, however, our soul will be deeply
permeated by what is meant in the words, “Not I, but Christ in
me.” For then from this knowledge there radiates into our soul
something that I can express only in these words: “When I am
able to say, ‘Not I, but Christ in me’, in that moment I
acknowledge that I shall be raised from the Earth-sphere, that in me
there lives something that has significance to the Cosmos, and that I
am counted worthy, as man, to bear a super-earthly element in my
soul, just as I bear within me a super-earthly being in all that has
entered into me from Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions.”
The consciousness of being permeated with Christ will
become of immense importance. And with St. Paul's saying, “Not
I, but Christ in me”, a man will connect the feeling that his
inner responsibility to Christ must be taken in deep, deep
earnestness. Anthroposophy will bring into the Christ-consciousness
this feeling of responsibility in such a way that we shall not
presume on every occasion to say: “I thought so, and because I
thought so, I had a right to say it.” Our materialistic age is
carrying this further and further. “I was convinced of this,
and therefore I had a right to say it.” But is it not a
profanation of the Christ in us, a fresh crucifixion of the Christ in
us, that at any moment when we believe something or other, we cry it
out to the world, or send it out into the world in writing, without
having investigated it?
When the full significance of Christ comes home to
mankind, the individual will feel that he must be more and more
conscientious, must prove himself worthy of Christ, this Cosmic
Principle, within him.
It may be readily believed that those who do not want to
receive Christ as a Cosmic Principle, but are ready at every
opportunity to repent an offence, will first tell all kinds of lies
about their fellow men and will then want to wipe out the lies.
Anyone who wishes to give worthy proof of the Christ in his soul will
first ask himself whether he ought to say a certain thing, even
though he may for the moment be convinced of it.
Many things will be changed when a true conception of
Christ comes into the world. All those countless people today who
write, or disfigure paper with printer's ink, because they
briskly write down things of which they have no knowledge, will come
to realize that by so doing they are putting the Christ in the human
soul to shame. And then the excuse will cease: “Well, I thought
it was so, I said it in good faith.” Christ wants more than
“good faith”; Christ would fain lead men to the truth. He
Himself has said, “The truth will make you free.” But
where has Christ ever said that it is possible for anyone who is
thinking in His sense to shout out or put forth in writing
something or other of which he really knows nothing? Much indeed will
be changed! A great deal of modern writing will be ruled out when
people proceed from the principle of proving themselves worthy of the
saying: “Not I, but Christ in me.” The cancer of our
decadent civilization will be rooted out when silence falls on those
voices which, without real conviction, cry everything out into the
world, or cover paper with printer's ink irresponsibly, without
being first convinced that they are speaking the truth.
The “Christian conscience”, as we may call
it in a certain sense, will arise in increasing measure as human
souls become more and more conscious of the presence of Christ, and
the saying of Paul becomes true: “Not I, but Christ in me!”
More and more will souls be imbued with the
consciousness that a man ought not to say merely what he “thinks”,
but must prove the objective truth of what he says.
Christ will be for the soul a teacher of truth, a
teacher of the highest sense of responsibility. In these ways He will
permeate souls when they come to experience the whole import of the
saying: “Not I, but Christ in me.”
|