"And when the days of her purification according to the law of Moses were accomplished, they brought Him to Jerusalem to present Him to the Lord."
Changeful, unresting life, inexorable in its progress, its onward push, drove them out into the busy world. Humility, the crown of royal love, drove them to a courteous acquiescence in the rites and forms ordained of other men.
Here, then, in this mystery, the secret adventure of the spirit so deeply hidden "with Christ in God" suddenly emerges as it were into the open: takes its place in the great flux of the universal Becoming, commits itself to the seething tides of human life. There comes a moment when the wonderful thing we have borne, the Life we have cherished, can no longer be concealed. Whether we will or no, the push of Divine Love, which operates its growth in us, sends us out with it into the world; and we must go up, as Mary, to the temple that is in Jerusalem, must bring the new life we have borne into contact with the diurnal actuality of things.
How secret till this hour has been the soul’s experience: held within the homely circle of consciousness, defended by the banners of love from the enquiring gaze of other men! Now that soul must go out to those other men, meet their curious or indifferent gaze with courage: it is the first intimation of those heroic and self-giving activities to which the new life is dedicated in advance. "Every ascent to God implies a descent in charity to man." We cannot lie for ever sequestered from the tyrannous ceremony, the tiresome, orderly processes of life. We are bound to accomplish the "liturgy of love," offering our sacrifice "according to that which is said in the law of the Lord." The royal instinct of donation must be fostered from the first, even by the hard and difficult exposure of our treasure to the apathetic gaze of the world: the giving up of our little winged and dove-like thoughts, their wild and delicate magic, to the prosaic demands of a formal creed.
It is not a small sacrifice that is here exacted, in this first emergence from the nest where the soul had its secret to itself. So dear to it have been the solemn fields and the rough stable: the hiddenness and silence, the friendly neighbourhood of simple natural things. But the days are accomplished, and a road goes out of Bethlehem towards Jerusalem; towards the great centre of national, social, credal life. That organized and busy life does not seem to want us: it is well satisfied with the fruits of civilisation, has delimited the mutually exclusive spheres of "flesh" and "spirit," built and fenced in its temple, established its discreetly ceremonial cult of a far-away Divinity, decided on its attitude to God. Of us it makes only one demand: that we shall acquiesce in its ritual, become one of the obedient crowd. We must tame our wild joyousness, put our romantic passion into blinkers: conform, in fact, to the ecclesiastical ideal. Thus, we learn in amazement, was the "Light that lightens the Gentiles" first made known to men; by this humble submission of Life to the demands of tradition, this interweaving of liberty with authority, of the present with the past. "Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly of heart—surrender is My secret first and last"; and here already at the opening of its course the soul begins to learn it, submitting the liberty it has in Christ to the formulæ which seek to mediate Him to men.
True, there is here no real dimming of the inward joy, for our Love goes with us: yet there is a certain declination from that exultant state of rapture, that lyrical delight in which we have borne and nurtured It, as the curve of the spiral road takes us down towards the world. The little Child of the Infinite seems to us ill at ease amongst the formal splendours of the Temple. "Love’s architecture is His own"; but these man-made walls, so oppressively sure of their "consecrated office," stand about Him as a prison, rather than as a home: shut Him from His sunlit palace of the day. In these stately aisles a shyness falls between us: we no longer speak together as we did. Certainly, we think, the road is trending downwards: the heavenly consciousness, though still we hold it tightly, changes, and threatens to grow dim. Yet, what though we lose that intimate and exquisite communion? This is but the accident, not the substance, of our veritable life in God. "All visions, revelations, and heavenly feelings," says St John of the Cross, "and whatever is greater than these, are not worth the least act of humility, bearing the fruits of that charity which neither values nor seeks itself, which thinketh well not of self but of others."
In the spirit of humility then, bearing in its arms the Fruit of that charity which neither values nor seeks itself, the soul is to go to the world which awaits it: "thinking well" of its laws and its customs, gladly conforming to its least demands. And here, for once, the world repays its generosity. Coming to it with its Treasure, it is met with the acclamation of the seekers and the seers. "He hath exalted the humble and meek": once again, as at the Visitation, simple courtesy is given its reward. The eyes of the race are quick to discern our secret: in the vivid, piercing vision of its dreamers, the eager glance of those who wait and hunger for a glory that shall be revealed. They recognise the strangeness we bear with us, conceal it though we may. "My Secret to myself": it is the very watchword of the mystic. But Simeon, that steadfast, patient watcher on the threshold of revelation, breaks through the soul’s defences and divines the wonder of the Thing upon its breast; and cries to his God and ours in an ecstacy of selfless gratitude, "Mine eyes have seen Thy salvation!"
Thus from first to last our solidarity with the race is to be impressed on us. With each new phase of growth, with the declaration of each fresh mystery, the call of humanity rings afresh in our ears. Elizabeth in the hill-top town; the glad shepherds running to the stable; wild nature and sweet homeliness demanding of the soul their share in its wonder and its joy. Self-mergence in the traditions of the multitude, free and generous self-revelation—however much we hate it—to the eyes of those who truly seek: here is to be our duty and our delight. By self-giving we grow, by glad spending we grow rich in Him, by burning, our Light grows brighter—"a Light to lighten the Gentiles, and the Glory of Thy people Israel."
