see for the loved soul that would be all fair and shining in the sight of God, as Nature and Grace teacheth." And darkness, which overhangs the soul while here it is "meddling with any part of sin," "so that we see not clearly the Blissful Countenance of our Lord," is a lasting, life-long "natural penance" from God, the feeling of which indeed does not depart with actual sinning: "for ever the more clearly that the soul seeth this Blissful Countenance by grace of loving, the more it longeth to see it in fulness" (lxxii.). All this is in man's experience, with many other pains—pains which in individual lives have no proportionate relation to sin, though, in general, "sin is cause of pain" and "pain purgeth."—("For I tell thee, howsoever thou do thou shalt have woe"), (lxxvii., xxvii.). But the Comfort Revealed shews how sin, which "hath no part of being" and "could not be known but by the pain it is cause of," (sin which in this view may be compared to the nails of the Passion—mere dead matter, though with power to wound unto death for a time the blessed Life), sin, which is failure of human love,—leaves, notwithstanding all its horror, an opening for a fuller influx of Divine love and strength.[1] And as to darkness, "seeking is as good as beholding, for
- ↑ Goodness is Active Love—love that moves. Drawing back from the finite creature, as a wave from the shore, it "suffers" sin's void to appear. But this lack of itself is allowed for the time, that so returning again in its force, to which evil is nothing, it may cover the desolate nature with deepness and highness and fulness unknown before. (See lvii.).
