Читать книгу The Second Death and the Restitution of All Things - Andrew Jukes - Страница 8

For the book of Providence, which I may call God's wrought word, has the very same peculiarity. Providence surely is a revelation of God ; and yet is it not, like Nature, a veil quite as much as a revelation? Look not only at those things which David speaks of, that God's servants suffer, while the wicked are in great prosperity and not plagued like other men; but look at born cripples and idiots, the deaf and dumb and blind, who, as far as we know, cannot be suffering for their own sake; — look at the fact that in one instance crime is punished, in another unpunished, here. Is not this inconsistent? Where is the justice of it; and where, as judged by sense, is the love of sending souls into the world whose life throughout is one of suffering ? Certainly here is a text in God's providential book of rule, (which I may say answers to the books of Kings, or Rule, in Scripture,) quite as hard as any of those texts in the book of Kings, which some would cut out of Scripture, as presenting us with false and unworthy views of Him. But can these critics blot the selfsame text out of God's book of rule in Providence?

There it stands, just as it stands in the book of Nature also. Shall we therefore say that the revelation of God in Providence is an inconsistent one? No — the fact is, it is a veil as well as a revelation,

and all its apparent inconsistencies and contradictions can be cleared up, if not to sense, yet to faith, in the light of God's sanctuary.¹

Even so it is with those two other revelations, which, much as they have been gainsaid, the Church has received and yet believes in, I mean the flesh of Christ and Holy Scripture. The flesh of Christ,

the Incarnate Word, is beyond all question a veil.² How much did it hide, even while to some it revealed God. How few knew what He was; how many misunderstood Him. And how inconsistent did that feeble form appear with the truth that it was God's chosen dwelling-place. The apparent inconsistency may be gathered from the fact that those to whom He came stumbled at it. And from that day to this that human form, that birth of a woman, that growth in years and stature, those tears, that sweat, that weariness, those bitter cries, those members of shame, that dying life, all this, or part of this, has to the eye of sense seemed so inconsistent with divinity, that thousands have denied that that Form was or could be a revelation of God, even while they allow that it has done what mere humanity never did. The fact is, it was, and was intended to be, a