"C.S.Lewis "George MacDonald. An Antology" (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

[ 32 ] Eli, Eli
He could not see, could not feel Him near; and yet it is "My God" that
He cries. Thus the Will of Jesus, in the very moment when His faith seems
about to yield is finally triumphant. It has no feeling now to support it,
no beatific vision to absorb it. It stands naked in His soul and tortured,
as He stood naked and scourged before Pilate. Pure and simple and surrounded
by fire, it declares for God.

[ 33 ] The Same
Without this last trial of all, the temptations of our Master had not
been so full as the human cup could hold; there would have been one region
through which we had to pass wherein we might call aloud upon our
Captain-Brother, and there would be no voice or hearing: He had avoided the
fatal spot!

[ 34 ] Vicarious Desolation
This is the Faith of the Son of God. God withdrew, as it were, that the
perfect Will of the Son might arise and go forth to find the Will of the
Father. It is possible that even then He thought of the lost sheep who could
not believe that God was their Father; and for them, too, in all their loss
and blindness and unlove, cried, saying the word they might say, knowing for
them that God means Father and more.

[ 35 ] Creeping Christians
We are and remain such creeping Christians, because we look at
ourselves and not at Christ; because we gaze at the marks of our own soiled
feet, and the trail of our own defiled garments. . . . Each, putting his
foot in the footprint of the Master, and so defacing it, turns to examine
how far his neighbor's footprint corresponds with that which he still calk
the Master's, although it is but his own. Or, having committed a petty
fault, I mean a fault such as only a petty creature could commit, we mourn
over the defilement to ourselves, and the shame of it before our friends,
children, or servants, instead of hastening to make the due confession and
amends to our fellow, and then, forgetting our own paltry self with its
well-earned disgrace, lift up our eyes to the glory which alone will quicken
the true man in us, and kill the peddling creature we so wrongly call our
self.

[ 36 ] Dryness
So long as we have nothing to say to God, nothing to do with Him, save
in the sunshine of the mind when we feel Him near us, we are poor creatures,
willed upon, not willing. . . . And how in such a condition do we generally
act? Do we sit mourning over the loss of feeling? Or worse, make frantic
efforts to rouse them?

[ 37 ] The Use of Dryness
God does not, by the instant gift of His Spirit, make us always feel
right, desire good, love purity, aspire after Him and His Will. Therefore
either He will not, or He cannot. If He will not, it must be because it