Our species is only that both loves and hates virtue. We love it for the value we perceive in it, the beauty and goodness and truth of it, and we desire it when we have grasped it. But having grasped it, we often are quite at a loss of how to use it properly. We love the feeling of virtue, but are often reluctant to embrace its substance, which is often painful and asks us to criticize and sacrifice parts of ourself. We would much rather have the feeling of virtue without suffering the pain and effort of it. And so our first instrinct is to wield it as a club for others, rather than a discipline for ourselves. How many of us, reading and recognizing some moral truth or bit of advice, some conviction, find ourselves thinking “Yes, people do do this! I need to tell so and so about it so they can follow this and make a change!”

How many of us, reading a bit of scripture (or whatever passes for it in our circles), recognize immediately the bits that condemn the wrongs and hurts we have experienced and sieze them and use them to slap people upside the head and say, “See, it says here you shouldn’t do that! You should be this way instead! Feel bad about what you’re doing!” We feel the justification of our own outrage, and all the conviction is directed against someone else.

Much like children, whose first instinct is to take any correction given to them by their parents and pass it on to their siblings, we must remind ourselves, as them, “No, that wasn’t for them. It was for you.” That verse about being greedy wasn’t intended as ammunition for you to use to criticize your neighbor, it was to help you criticize yourself. Outrage is the currency of the law without conviction, and conviction is the prison of virtue without outrage.

The prophecies of punishment and destruction if Israel didn’t stop ignoring their poor and helpless weren’t for their neighbors, it was for them. That letter about how husbands should treat their wives wasn’t for wives to use against their husbands; it was for husbands to use to better themselves. Whenever we seek to sieze the content of virtue for our own ends and make justice a state of affairs purely outside us, we subvert it and convert it, slowly but surely, to tyranny. We forget what the good was that virtue was seeking and become enamored with the rules and outward signs the violations and outrages and forget what the object all this fury was (for justice/virtue exists primarily within ourselves, and its presence in the world is essentially an outgrowth of the virtue or lack of it within individuals, or relationships between individuals; it makes no sense to talk of justice or virtue absent the foundation of the individual, all other modes of its existence are merely superconstructions of individual justice and virtue, or injustice and vice). Social justice that is not founded on the concept of individual virtue is incoherent because society is nothing and exists nowhere except in the beings of and relations between the individuals that possess and enact and delineate and embody that virtue.

There’s no such thing as justice among rocks, no matter how many rocks you get together. There is no sense in the idea of a healthy society absent the health of the individuals who make up that society. An ecosystem that contains no life cannot coherently be described as healthy or growing, because it doesn’t exist; it only exists in the content of life itself. The societies of man are only sensibly described as just or unjust insofar as the people who make them up are themselves cruel and selfish or generous and humble.

And you cannot produce virtue through external force alone, you can only limit the destructive power and influence of injustice. That itself may create conditions conducive to the development of virtue, but the power of the state is in forcible compulsion, in punishment, which is external. Unless someone willingly takes it into themselves, it cannot make them good or beautiful. It can only restrict their ability to enact ugliness and evil on others. That is why a good man or women cannot be harmed by the actions of an unjust society upon them, as Socrates argued. He might be made to suffer evil, but he cannot be made to become it.

Similarly, we might be able to protect goodness, or even show it to someone who is truly malevolent, but unless they choose to take it within themselves, we cannot force them externally to become good. The law has the power to reveal identity, it does not have the power to compel identification, if you will not submit internally to its claims upon your person. If you will not submit, you only pay lip service. Your heart is unchanged. Jesus argued this point strenuously against the Pharisees, as well as well as the point of a Socrates. The Pharisees complained that his followers weren’t showing respect to the traditions of cleanness and uncleanness (hand washing rituals of symbolic value), that they were blowing it on virtue by failing to display the proper signs of it. And Jesus argued back that they were the ones who were denying virtue, because they acted selfishly and proudly and put all their value in the fulfillment of external lip service while ignoring the heart and point of what those rituals were meant to convict us to change about ourselves.

“This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’”

And he called the people to him and said to them, “Hear and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person.” Then the disciples came and said to him, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying?… Explain the parable to us.”

And he said, “Are you also still without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart comes all evil. These are what defile a person. But to eat with unwashed hands does not defile anyone.”

Virtue that is not internalized is meaningless. Evil that is not internalized is powerless.

When the power of virtue and justice is located primarily in the power of the mob, when the biggest questions were asking are “Who should we be shunning? What should we be outraged about? How am I displaying my righteousness?” we are being like the Pharisees. And we will not achieve the ends that justice and the law and knowledge of sin were directed toward. We will forget the good we sought and only remember the judgment, the tyranny. Because there’s no shortage of imperfection and dishonesty and disease in the human soul. There is no limit to how much we could find, how many people or groups or actions we could condemn and feed our outrage and self righteousness with. The real question is, what corner will be left safe for any of us to stand on if that is the approach we take to justice, to find it only in signs of external perfection and in the ruthless vengeance of authority upon the recreant?

In situations such as that, the judged won’t see or internalize the validity of the claims made against them, because they are being hypocritically ignored by those who level them. Those people are not vulnerable to judgment. They get to wield it as a weapon without fear. It doesn’t apply to them or transcend them, it belong to them. So they gave denied the true universality of the claims. They are really just claims of one against another. They are merely rights, claims against the actions of another, with no attendant responsibilities. So it’s really just a struggle of you against me, your weapon against mine. So I’ll bring my own weapon against you that affirms me and judges you. And we’ll carefully beat one another to death.

I’m reminded, oddly enough, of the wisdom of Avatar: The Last Airbender, when Uncle Iro refuses to use his power (which is probably comparable, under the comet) to defeat the Firelord. When asked why he can’t defeat his brother, he says that he must not. Because if he does, it will merely be seen as an internal struggle for power, one brother overthrowing another. The true victor must be something greater, something that represents a transcendent justice, not the mere victory of man over man. Only the Avatar can be safely allowed to defeat the firelord and hope to end in peace and reconciliation, a justice that all sides can agree to and recognize and not abuse for vengeance or false virtue.

Of course, in our own world, we don’t have an Avatar. So we’re always flirting with danger every time we seek justice on one another. We aren’t God, so our justice won’t be perfectly impartial or selfless or necessary. The closest we can come to becoming the Avatar is in our willingness to submit ourselves to the same judgment by which we judge, to wielding only that sword that we are willing to lay our own necks under. Only in our consistency, in our willingness to apply our law first to ourselves, in our recognition of ourselves as first among the condemned, can we hope to safely wield the sword of justice. Thus the warning, judge not lest ye be judged, that I referenced earlier. “For with the judgment that you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”

I do not think the” judge not” comment is a flat prosciption, for we are called daily to make judgments, and in fact this passage is an explanation of the very process I have just laid out of how we should best learn to be able to make judgements. It is a warning againsttaking the power and authority of judgement as something that belongs to us rather than something above us that we all submit to equally. It is an encouragement to deal first with yourself. First find your own conviction, first accept its claims upon yourself, before you can hope to see the claims of justice on another and truly help them and truly serve justice. Judgment that only serves you cannot also serve the cause of virtue. A man cannot have two masters. One or the other is going to get shortchanged. A flame that you cannot endure will not give light or warmth to the world.

In this passage, Jesus identified the primary distortion of justice, the sign that most clearly reveals it as corrupt, useless, and most likely to end in conflict and resentment rather than virtue: hypocrisy. Nothing destroys the universal validity and compulsion of justice more than hypocrisy. Nothing affirms it and makes it more apparent than consistency (even when it hurts, even when it costs you something, even when it lowers your status and apparent perfection in the eyes of others). Nothing proves the power of justice like putting personal submission before public judgment. What greater proof could you make of its claims than to sacrifice the one thing you truly have, yourself, to its judgment? What greater surety of the safety and goodwill of that submission could you give than to take the risk yourself? People will only trust the law when they perceive that it proceeds from love. A law that is seen as the vessel of personal power will always be resented and resisted, even when it is technically just.

The examples of moral criticism I’ve picked here are from the Bible, although the issues they address are just as valid across all cultures and religions and secular philosophies. The Bible is fairly unique among ancient documents because of its willingness (often not shared by Jews or Christians) to be consistent. The faults, flaws, and failings of the greatest kings and leaders (as well as those of the Jewish people and the disciples and the early churches) are the main subject of discussion. Rather than spending much time recounting their moral successes, the ways they proved their righteousness of God’s people, the Bible makes fairly clear that they’re all a total bust in that. They’re only God’s people because he chose to love them, and the whole book is about how hard it is for them to try to live up to their own identity. The Bible presents us with a concept of virtue and justice, then explains it by dealing with the total inability of the Jews or Christians to not immediately turn it into false pride and vanity and hypocrisy.

The power of the law of the Jews is that they recognized and recorded its judgments against themselves. It didn’t belong to them, they belonged to it. And it’s a good thing, because they sucked at it. And they got super resentful whenever that fact was pointed out to them and tended to kill the people who did it. And then they wrote all that down too so they wouldn’t forget it. No sooner does Paul finish telling people something about how they should love than he has to write them a letter to tell them that they missed the point entirely and to stop going after one another; the whole point was to let God convict them, not to criticize one another and turn virtue into an internal power struggle. The Bible scores enormous marks for reliability and authenticity simply because it’s brutally honest about what actually happened every time people tried to enact a bit of justice and virtue, every time they were given a bit of knowledge and wisdom, how they subverted it to their own ends. Rather than telling the story how they wish it had happened, where they did everything right and they all became the perfect people of God once they saw the light, the whole book from end to end is about how quickly and completely they blew it and turned what was meant for their good into their misery and corruption the moment they had it.

However it’s framed, that’s the essence of history, of honesty. Telling it how it happened instead of elevating themselves and their story to the mythological and archytpical. All the best ancient literature does this. It honestly reveals a picture of ourselves we can recognize today. If there was one thing that the Jews were fully honest about and handed down to us in a way that transcends all other cultural and literary and historical and philosophical differences between us, to reach us clearly and without distortion, it was this. They were honest about themselves. Or at least tried hard to be.

Their law was a true law, a divine law, because it wasn’t just for them. It was above them. It was a law of love they struggled with, but they preserved (including their inability to follow it) because they had submitted themselves to it and taken its claims within themselves, believing it to be right and desirable and true beyond their own ability to consistently act like it was. They were hypocrites, but they were at least honest hypocrites who constantly reminded themselves they were hypocrites, which is maybe about as good as they could hope for. They didn’t admit any claims they weren’t willing to have brought against themselves, and so, for once, touched the universal. They blazed a trail, an example, we should be careful to follow. If you’re not willing to record and recognize your own sins, then you probably aren’t as full of justice and virtue as you think.

The Christian gospel of course continues this story, but with the added complexity of grace and redemption and belonging becoming permanent, individual realities, not just a fixture of ritual and symbolism at a societal level. Having illustrated in ritual and demonstrated historically the difficulties of enacting justice on a collective scale, the gospel brings it home to the individual level where it can really live and indwell (to then eventually return, fulfilled, to the world as a natural outgrowth of the love and goodness of God). Like a child growing up, we have fully internalized the nature of the law at long last, taking the goodness within ourselves rather than as mere structures of restriction and direction around us. Not as something to posses or wield, not as something we swallow or control, but as something we give ourselves to, something that takes us up into itself. Now that we gave grasped the greatness of truth, beauty, and goodness, the universality of the claims of their claims upon ourselves, and we have at last submitted our own identity as small and dishonest and ugly things and have given them to be nailed upon the cross (an act not unlike what the Jews did collectively by nailing their failures up in full view of humanity), in full view of the world, we can finally begin to be free of them. Like the Jews, we will probably never be without our failures in our day to day reality, but we at least have this hope, that we have dislocated them from our identity. By giving up our control over justice, our rights as gods and judges, and centering our approach henceforth in the knowledge that we have given ourselves over to virtue itself, we have ceased to be our own people and become the people of God. Our virtue no longer belongs to us, and so neither does our sin. And if Virtue loves us and is willing to cover over our sin, so that we may receive its full fire of knowledge within us and not be destroyed, but illuminated, then that is a victory truly worth celebrating.

Of course the record shows that people were just as quick to reenslave themselves to their former systems of judgment, just as quick to try to retake either grace or sin for themselves. But that’s just the continuation of personal honesty, of nailing ourselves up on th at cross for the world to see. It’s a difficult, dangerous task, and people are fallible. We take the greatest gifts and freedoms and try to make punishments and chains out of them. We try to make things small so they can belong to us as our private possessions. And we do it almost as fast as the gifts can be given.

If anything has puzzled or troubled me lately, it’s this fact. That so little in us seems to really change. That the Jews had learned or changed so little by the end of their journey. That they still seemed just as lost, still making the same mistakes. That individual Christians seem to suffer the same fate in their own lives. Unable to hold on to their gifts for more than a generation of thought, swift to turn away, swift to corrupt. No better than they were before. Maybe worse, because they took back with them some of the memory of the power of grace or conviction with them and still think they have it or can use it for their own ends. Where, I wonder, is this new life that was promised, this new spirit, this new covenant? Like the new covenant of the Jews (for it was new to them when it first arrived on the scene), it seems just as prone to end in disaster and be forgotten and abused as theirs. What was gained, what accomplished, what reality was really altered? Where is the proof of new life? I suppose my mistake, like before, is trying to find it in the large outward signs, the society, the movement, the show. I must look closer, at the individual heart, at the private stories. At the hidden moments of grace and goodness. If I spend all my time looking for the outward signs of weakness and failure and reasons for outrage I will never find an end of examples. Jung said that modern man cannot find God because he will not look low enough. Jesus said that this was how people would know that we were his followers: by the love that we have for one another. You have to look small and close to see love. You have to know someone and get personal. Love is patient and kind. It doesn’t envy or boast; it isn’t proud. It doesn’t dishonor others, it isn’t self-seeking. It doesn’t delight in evil. It rejoices in the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. It never fails.

That description doesn’t really sound like people much to me. Maybe for a few brief moments in our lives that’s what we are. Maybe across our whole lives we manage to be some part of that. Most of us can can find much more in common in humanity with the warning that proceeded that description of love: If we speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, we are only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If we have the gifts of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if we have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, we are nothing. If we give all we possess to the poor and give over our bodies to hardship that we may boast, but do not have love, we gain nothing.

To what end is all our virtue and justice and knowledge if we don’t have love? And who among us, having read that description, can say that we do?

I would assume that the answers to this problem should lie in the concluding paragraph of that particular letter, but I’m honestly not sure what to make of them. They seem more like a vision than an explanation:

“But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

I have no idea what this means, except that I think it’s saying that what we’re seeing is just the first fruits, the stilness of spring, the signs of the thing approaching, not its fulfillment and completeness, not the thing full-grown, a reflection of reality, not the final revelation of it. Maybe it’s saying that the reality is there, but the signs are small and imperfect, and it can be hard to see the future oak in the smallness and oddness of the acorn. Maybe it’s saying that what we see now is just a symbol of what’s to come, a third new covenant; as the rituals of the first covenant were a symbol of what was to come in the second, the personal struggles of sin and absolution in the second are a symbol of what is to come in the third and final. The outer pursuit of justice leads to and points to the inner pursuits, which finally returns to the outer, fulfilling it, bringing its wholeness with it, resolving both. I understand the logical progression there. But it would be a pretty big surprise to see it actually happen, as much as the first two surprises. I don’t know. As this letter says, life is confusing and it’s hard to see the realities of the things we belive in. But these three things remain: faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of them is love. Just hang onto those three things, and to love most of all, and you’ll be doing as well as you can in this life. You’re coming as close as you can to the path where justice leads to virtue.

I think my own personal sin is that it’s very easy for me to lose faith, hope, and love for others when they aren’t speaking in the tongues of men and angels. I think my wife has a harder time when they aren’t being patient and kind. It’s very very easy for me to give up on people when they disappoint me with the things they say. It’s very easy for me to get frustrated and dismissive.

So what is virtue?

Virtue is the strength that develops from learning to submit our disordered self to a higher order. Virtue is the beauty of the harmony that results when the various powerful parts of us are tamed and made to operate in balance and interconnection, toward a purpose. It is the unity of chaos and order where the power of chaos serves the meaning of order. It is when the knowledge of the past and investment in the future exist together in the wisdom of the present. It is when the unknown unconscious of the id becomes known, the puerility of the ego becomes mature, and the loftiness of superego descends to live with them as a brother. It is the state of health that is most likely to create goodness and beauty and truth in the world and in us.

Virtue is when the three lenses within us, what is good, what is true, and what is beautiful, draw close and overlap, so that what seems lovely and desirable, what is known to be true, and what seems good and useful are indistinguishable from one another and exist in a single, unified whole. Virtue is when knowledge, desire, and duty become one within us, when all the several parts of us share one desire, one understanding, one action.

Virtue is that quality that life possesses when it is flourishing, when the various disordered powers within a thing are organized and made to serve a purpose and design, a logos, when that logos permeates every cell within it and brings all into harmony to create and grow, to make more of the harmony that is within. In this sense, virtue is as much biological as it is psychological, moral, intellectual, and spiritual. In virtue, all levels of being are united, and we see the truth and purpose and growth and beauty expressed in all functions. The logos, the word, purpose, meaning, intention, function is the essence of what life is.

Virtue is the fulfillment of the essence of life, the movement away from death, from disorder, from purposelessness, from meaninglessness, from raw material and matter. Life is the submission of that raw material, that chaos, to a higher order and purpose, being drawn up into it, becoming part of it. Death is merely the dissolution of that connection, the disconnection of the parts from that purpose and goal, scattering back into the primordial chaos from which they were drawn. The logos is imposed at the physical level, the emotional level, the psychological level, the intellectual level, when life is flourishing.

In what dimension the logos truly exists, where it is ultimately located and imposed from, is unclear. Because purpose and meaning and intention exist only within a mind (even if they may be expressed and embodied at any level, as my thoughts are expressed and embodied on this page), and can only be perceived by a mind (as only a mind can understand my thoughts written on this page), it must be speculated that the fundamental nature of life, where it exists, is mind (awareness, intention, being in itself, the I, the I am).

Where such a strange thing and place could exist or come from is a complete mystery. It is the most strange thing in the universe, for it cannot be said to be part of it, strictly. The organization of my “I” may be seen making its presence known in its organizational effect upon the materials of the world, I can find that pattern of organization written into my cells, in the artifacts like this writing I produce, in my actions, in my thoughts, in my relationships, in my story. It is seen and known by I and other Is. But where and what it is, what kind of thing it is in itself, what sort of being purpose and meaning and intention are composed of, is not clear. That, I suppose, if what we mean by soul. And why we distinguish different levels of that logos at different levels of existence. The soul of matter, the particular way it behaves and is organized (though the why remains a mystery). The soul of animals, those who serve and follow a purpose they are not conscious of, the structure and design of the body and species. And there is the soul of that which knows itself and relates to its own design and speaks back to it, that seeks to understand and add to its own logos and the logos of other things. The things with a spark of creative power, that know and understand and can appreciate and manipulate that power. The little I ams. That is the third type of soul, and the strangest, for it can create a bit of meaning, a soul, out of itself and knowingly form matter (ink in a book, pieces of metal in a tool, paint on a canvas, shapes in a carved stone) to contain it.

Truth is the knowledge outside us. Desire/feeling is the knowledge within us. Duty/morality exists in the middle plane between them, where we negotiate and interpret and attempt to integrate them within us, making judgements that seek to fulfill the demands of one or other or both. Hedonism is the collapsing of truth into desire. Asceticism is the collapsing of desire into truth. True virtue is the unity and preservation and alignment of both in truth and love. The unity of truth and love within us is virtue in us. Beauty and truth become identical, and so become goodness. Goodness that desires truth and knows loveliness will only create more of itself, more beauty, more goodness, more truth.

We can grasp truth but miss goodness when its heart is dead and cold. We can desire beauty but miss goodness when we are blind to the light of truth. We have the beginnings of virtue, a path toward it. But unless we add to our knowledge love or to our love knowledge, we may never find it. And that finding can be terribly painful. They only find their opposite when we allow them to pass beyond ourselves.

The problem with social justice is the same problem as that with personal righteousness. One cannot exist without the other, the absence of their opposite always inevitably leads to tyranny and selfishness and hypocrisy. Virtue that exists only outside us costs us nothing. It is only ultimately a tool to be wielded against others to please ourselves, however we dress it up. Virtue that makes claims only upon others and lives to serve your own self is not virtue. It is a contradiction. The submission of the world to the good and the true must necessarily include submission of myself as it’s first end. I can hardly hope to bring others to good if I have not sought the good and rooted out the evil and disorder in myself first. That is why the Bible enjoins us to “First pluck the plank from our own eye before we seek to remove the speck from our neighbor’s”. Before we can lay the claims of justice upon someone else, we must first lay them at our own door. We will never have the proper understanding, never show the proper value and mercy toward the sins of others, never understand how apply them for growth and life instead of oppression and destruction, until we discover and confront them in ourselves. When we have known the weakness and disorder and pain within ourselves, when we have found the plank within our own eyes, when we have taken the flame to ourselves and learned how to use its power for life and light and warmth, then and only then. If we use our virtue and our loud proclaiming of our devotion, when we make our phylacteries great, when we go to the temple of public approval and make great gestures so all can see, all we are doing is bending the claims of justice to serve ourselves and our own safety. We must know what it is to be the sinner before we can confront the sins of others. Only when we see the sins of others as our own, belonging and finding a home as much in us as in them, only when we can recognize ourselves as the guilty as well as the judge, will we take the proper care and lay out a law designed and understood as a path to our good, our healing, our preservation, a truth spoken in love. So long as we are lighting beacons we think cannot burn us, we will fail to give light and warmth to others, but only arouse their fury and pain by igniting the ground beneath their feet. The light of justice for others proceeds directly from the knowledge of our own injustice.

Justice that does not present a threat to what is wrong within us is not a fire that will cleanse the wrongs of the world. We are ourselves one of those wrongs, we are ourselves complicit, and any fire that cannot harm us is not a holy fire of sacrifice and purification, but an infernal fire of torment (the very picture of hell, a fire that burns but cannot consume).

That is why both the Holy Spirit and the torments of Hell are conceived of as flames. The Spirit is a consuming fire, because it consumes all that cannot stand, all that must be given up, the sacrifice, so that what could be can emerge from the ashes. It is the fire of the phoenix. The death that restores life. The self is given up, and in so giving, it is preserved. The bush is not devoured but is transformed into a thing of glory. The light of the flame does not eradicate us but becomes part of us. But the fire of hell is one of torment, because the self will not be given, will not be sacrificed. And so the fire burns but cannot burn away, cannot consume. It is the action of refinement upon that which will not be refined. It holds itself in eternal suspension, forever unable to resist the fires that it invoked against others, forever unable to give itself to them. It is the clinging to life that creates death.

Likewise, virtue that seeks only itself and seeks no good and shares no love for others outside itself finds nowhere to go, nothing to touch, nowhere to live and exist and be made manifest. Submission of the self to a greater reality of love and ultimate truth and goodness that remains contained within and exists only for itself is incoherent; it’s a contradiction. You’ve merely tried to swallow your God, not worship him. It is the barest hypocrisy. It is a fruitless flower. It is worse than a tree with no bloom. Because it has what it needs, what exists to give fruit, and refuses it’s natural function. It is knowingly barren. Grace and goodness that is freely given by necessity must be given to others, or you deny its nature, and are still merely trapped within yourself.

That is why it says that we love because God first loved us. We were broken, knowing our illness, in knowledge of our disorder and chaos, our selfishness and ugliness and dishonesty and the pain it caused us and others. But we were freed from it because of a love that transcended it. We were freed because our sin belonged to us, but our beauty belonged to God. He made a door that could give us hope and value beyond the knowledge of our own limited nature, a glimpse of a higher harmony, a truth and beauty and goodness beyond us. To say that such a thing is only for us, that it is a private possession, for our good only, a love for us only, is to deny the very means of our freedom. It is a denial of the gospel itself. The preserving love of God is for all, as the purifying fire of the law is for all. We cannot lock ourselves into eternal bliss in that love or eternal torment in that fire without invoking a power beyond ourselves that denies our right to either. We must submit ourselves to both, seek justice within and justice without, if we want either. We must seek also to commit ourselves to love within and love without, if we wish for either, and would not be trapped by one or the other. We must submit to both love and destruction of ourselves and cannot hold back from either if we do not wish to be ruined by them.

If we wish for justice outside us, we must let it do its work within us. If we wish for justice within, we must serve its work outside us. The fires of justice will only burn down the world if we will not let it inside us. The fires of justice will give no light or warmth if we do not take it outside us.

The law without grace is hopeless. Grace without the law is pointless.

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