GIFTS - by Alora M. Knight

 

GIFTS by Alora M. Knight I wonder if we realizeThe gifts that we've been given,The endless flow of beautyBestowed on us by heaven. A rainbow arcing 'cross the skiesShares its radiant hues,While clouds that tumble here and therePortray fantastic views. Nighttime's filled with countless stars,Each shares a twinkling lightWhile the moon rotates in gloryAs it travels throughout the night. Those who welcome early dawnSee beauty unsurpassed.The evening sun surrenders day,Its glowing lights amassed. It's there for everyone to share,To benefit thereby.A beauty that is freely givenTo those who look up at the sky.

BIBLICAL REVISION - ITS DUTIES AND CONDITIONS - 1870 - by Henry Alford

A SERMON PREACHED IN ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL AT THE SPECIAL

EVENING SERVICE, ON SUNDAY, MARCH 13, 1870

by HENRY ALFORD, D.D.  -  DEAN OF CANTERBURY.

“Every scribe that is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old.” - Matt. xiii. 52.

The Scribes were the guardians of the law, and its readers and expounders to the people.  It is related of Ezra, that he was “a ready scribe in the law of Moses which the Lord God of Israel had given: he had prepared his heart to seek the law of the Lord, and to do it, and to teach in Israel statutes and judgments.”  But in exercising this guardianship the Scribes were only representing the Church of which they were members.  They were a class of persons told off for especial attention to this duty, which in fact belonged to the whole community.  To the Jews as a people, the Apostle tells us, were committed the oracles of God: and the Church in all times is the witness and keeper of Holy Writ, as of a sacred deposit committed to her.  The character assigned in the text to the Scribe instructed unto the kingdom of heaven, belongs, in all its particulars, to her, who both is the sum, and constitutes the ideal, of all such guardians and expounders.

With these few preliminary remarks, we may apply our Lord’s words immediately to ourselves.  The Christian Church throughout the world is now the guardian of the Holy Scriptures.  All that the Jews had, we have, with the inestimably precious addition of the New Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ.  These Scriptures all Christians regard as the revelation of God to man.  Other works rise and are built up from below: this alone we receive as let down upon us from above.  All art, all science, all theology, which is but a system built up by inferences from Scripture, these are of man, and constructed on earth.  They may rise higher, and become truer, as one race is advanced in skill or in knowledge; but they began below, and will ever carry with them the infirmity of all that is born on earth.  Whereas the sayings and the lessons of this book are not of man, nor did they take their beginnings here.  They have come to us indeed through human words, and by means of human action; but they did not arise originally in the breasts of men; they came from Him who is Himself the first spring of morals and the highest fountain of truth.  Between philosophy reared up from below, and the facts, and rules, and motives, which they disclose, there is always a gap which our reason cannot bridge over.  God’s sovereignty, man’s free will - God’s creative agency, man’s inductions of science - God’s interference with physical order, man’s establishment of physical law, one member of each of these pairs will ever remain discontinuous from, and in the estimate of human reason irreconcileable with, the other.  And because this Book is unlike all other books, because its voice comes to us from another place, and is heard in deeper and more secret chambers of our being than all other voices, because its sayings have for our humanity a searching and conserving and healing power which none other possess, therefore it is that to keep these Holy Scriptures in all their integrity as delivered down to her is the solemn  trust of the Church throughout the world: a trust simple, direct, indefeasible.

Now when I say the Church throughout the world, and in all I shall say in these or like terms tonight, I am using the words in their very widest sense.  I mean by the Church no less than our Article defines it to be, “the great congregation of faithful men in which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments are duly administered according to Christ’s ordinance.”  I mean the whole body, wherever dwelling, however ordered and denominated, who take the Scriptures for their rule of life and for their ultimate appeal.  On the whole of this body rests this trust, to preserve the purity and integrity of Holy Scripture.

Now of course this duty concerns primarily the Scripture in the form in which it was given to man: the one sacred text, existing for us at this day in the very language in which it was originally written.  In plain words, by way of illustration: if the universal Church were at this day commanded to lay up a copy of this deposit, as the Law was laid up in the ark of the Covenant, that one copy would consist of the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek.

But now comes in a necessity for the exercise of judgment on the part of the scribe instructed unto the kingdom of heaven: in other words, on the part of the Church.  When we speak of these two sacred texts, we speak in fact of a store of both.  These texts have been transmitted by human means.  They exist for us in many forms, coincident in the main, but varying more or less from one another, principally through infirmities incident to transcription in ancient times.  The great mass of these variations concerns matters of relatively small importance.  In primitive Christian times believers were too intensely employed about the great interests of the Redeemer’s kingdom, to be very careful about the mere letter of the Scripture narrative.  Whether in one and the same phrase our Lord went, or came, or journeyed, whether He said, or answered, or spoke, or answered and said, was to them small matter: and thus we have these and hundreds of such as these insignificant variations in the different ancient manuscript copies of our New Testament.  But there are, and in no small number, other variations affecting the sense, modifying the facts of the history, diverting the course of argument, changing the tendency of exhortation.  And it is with regard to these that the Church, trusted as she is with the Scriptures, is bound to bring things old out of her treasures: to seek back for the most ancient and best attested of the variations, and to hold that fast as the text, rejecting the others: or, if none can be found whose evidence sufficiently preponderates, to publish to all the fact that it is so.  Less than this will not be a faithful discharge of the trust: cannot satisfy her feeling of reverence for God’s word.

Now before we can proceed to any application of what has already been said, we must advance further in the duty of the Church as the Guardian of Scripture.  The Word of God was not given to be laid up and hidden, but to go forth and to be understood.  That faith which is to save the nations, cometh by hearing, and hearing cometh by the Word of God.  But the nations are not able to understand the Scriptures as they were given.  And therefore it was very early recognised as a duty of each Church to provide the Scriptures for her members in their own language: to bring out of her stores not only things old, the genuine and venerable text of the word, but also things new, the new garment or vehicle of that sacred text, its expression in her vernacular language.  And here let it never be forgotten, that though we believe Scripture to be a thing divine, a version, every version, of Scripture must of necessity be a thing human; must be liable to imperfection and error, and capable of correction and improvement.  It is in fact, after all, little more than a comment or speculation upon Scripture.  A few of the simplest considerations serve to shew this.  Take but these.  In almost every sentence where there is fervour of feeling, or precision of argument, or graphic description, we are totally unable to give in the version the living force of the original.  We are obliged to enquire what is the general sense of that which is vividly represented, and to devise some English words which will as nearly as possible convey it to the mind: and thus the power and charm are lost.  Again, where an original word may have two or more meanings, giving to the sentence where it occurs a corresponding variety of applications to life or doctrine; in our rendering we are obliged, because there is no corresponding word of ours alike fertile in signification, to exclude all but one of these senses.  On the other hand, where the original employed some word of but one perfectly plain sense, we are often constrained to use a term in our tongue which, bearing an ambiguous meaning, weakens that sense, or even obliterates it altogether.  Any one may see, from even these scanty hints, how difficult, how unsatisfactory at the best, must be the discharge of this portion of the trust: how utterly impossible it is that there should ever be a perfect or final version of the Scriptures: how the Church, the Scribe entrusted with the custody and provision of God’s word for the souls of her members, is bound to bring out of her stores ever from age to age things new, fresh and more accurate renderings of such phrases of Scripture as time and use may prove to have been inaccurately represented.

And observe, before we pass on to the account of our own situation in these respects, that this duty incumbent on the Church is to be performed quite irrespectively of any beauty or aptness of outward form which such rendering may happen to possess.  An erroneous rendering of a Scripture phrase may have been so well put into words, may carry a sound so terse and epigrammatic, as to have sunk deep into the mind of a nation and to have become one of its household sayings.  But who would accept the excuse of beauty or aptness in the case of anything else wrongly come by?  It is strange that in this case only has any such argument been used and allowed.

Now we in this land possess a version of the Holy Scriptures which may challenge comparison for faithfulness, for simplicity, and for majesty, with any that the world has ever seen.  Perhaps its chief defect is that it admits of being too highly praised.  Its pure use of our native tongue, the exquisite balance and music of its sentences, the stately march of its periods, the hold on the memory taken by the very alliterations and antitheses, which were the manner of writing when it was made, these and a hundred other charms which invest almost every verse, make us love it even to excess.

And when we intensify all these claims to our affection by the fact that it has been for centuries, and is now, the vehicle to this great English race of all that is pure and holy and lovely and of good report, the first lesson of infancy, the guide of mature life, the comforter of sickness and death, we can hardly be surprised that many, and some of the best among us, refuse to see its faults, and are unable to contemplate with any content the prospect of their being corrected.  It is a spirit for which we ought to be deeply thankful, this earnest and affectionate cleaving to the English version of the Scriptures.

But good as it is, there is one thing better.  And that is, the humble reverence for God’s word, rendering a man willing to make any sacrifice for the sake, if it may be, of nearer approach to His truth.  And as the public mind has lately been and now is stirred regarding this matter, I think it may not be a wrong use of our time tonight, if I venture to speak to you of that part of the subject which especially belongs to the pulpit: avoiding details, and trying to remind you in our own case of the need for thinking of the duty at this time, and of our own means of performing it; taking into account, by the way, the principal objections urged against our putting it in hand.

The necessity of thinking of the duty at this time arises from two causes, setting in contrast our own circumstances with those under which our version was made: one relating to the things old, the other to the things new.

When that version was made, rather when it was constructed and amended out of former ones, the available sources whence the sacred text was to be derived were very few indeed, and those for the most part not of a high order.  In almost every case where the real text is matter of doubt, and has to be ascertained by evidence, our translators had not that evidence before them.  By far the greater and more important part of it was not brought to light in any trustworthy form till within the memory of living men.  Nay, one of its most ancient and principal witnesses has been within the last few years discovered and given to the Church.  And the consequence is that, setting aside all cases of indifferent or unimportant variations, there is by this time an immense weight of responsibility pressing on the Church with regard to these varieties of reading: a weight which it seems to me only those can be contented to rest under, who are not aware of its magnitude.  We, the Churches of Christ in this land, are causing to be read to our people, to take but a single very solemn instance, words respecting one of the foundation doctrines of the faith which are demonstrably no part of Scripture at all.  And we of the Church of England are doing worse: we are reading those words by special selection, implying that they convey a proof of that doctrine, on the Sunday set apart by its name.  This is perhaps the most prominent example: but there is no lack of others: we might quote instances where the text found in our English Bibles, which passes current with millions for the word of God, has but the very slenderest, if any authority to rest upon, and where other words, which very few of those millions ever heard of, really are, according to the Church’s own belief respecting Scripture, the message of God to men.  We might produce examples again, where the evidence of the great authorities is so nearly balanced, that to the end of time, if no more witnesses are discovered, the question never can be decided which of two or more is the true reading.

Now there is no reason to think that there was any fault in our translators as regards this matter.  Where they in their time knew of an important variation, they noted it in their margin, or indicated it by the type of their text.  But in the great majority of cases, the fact was not, and could not be, within their knowledge at all.  Upon us in our own time has it fallen to carry out their principles with the vastly extended light which God has shed upon us.

But, it is asked, are we able to do this ?  As regards the text of the New Testament, where these variations principally occur, certainly we are.  The whole ground has been of late years thoroughly and repeatedly worked over, and the evidence is well known.  In many of the most important of varying passages, the decision of biblical scholars would be shortly and easily made, which reading to adopt or reject, or whether to take the middle course of fairly representing the uncertainty.  The number of such important  variations is but limited; and in most of them, the voice of ancient testimony is all one way.  So that it seems to me there would be no formidable difficulty, as regards the things old, in setting right at this time the unavoidable errors, and supplying what were the necessary defects, of our English Bible.

We now come to the second of the reasons which seem to press on the Church at this time the duty of reviewing her stewardship of the Holy Scriptures; and that reason concerns the things new, the form in which those Scriptures are represented in the vernacular tongue.  In the main, as has been already said, we have in this respect nothing to regret, and but very little that we should be compelled to change.  The character and spirit of our version are all that we can desire.  But it is utterly impossible for any one capable of judging to deny, that it is disfigured by numerous blemishes, far too important to be put by or condoned.  The gravest of these are due to manifest errors in rendering; errors, about which there could be but one opinion among biblical scholars of all religious views.  Others have arisen from principles adopted and avowed by the translators themselves: as, for instance, from the unfortunate one of allowing a number of apparently equivalent English words an equal right to represent one and the same word in the original, whereby very important passages have been disguised and confused.  Others again owe their source to causes which have come into operation since the version was made.  Certain words have, as time has gone on, passed into new meanings.  Others, which could formerly be read without offence, have now, by their very occurrence, become stumbling-blocks, and tend to remove all solemnity, and even all chance of fair audience, from the passages where they occur.  Some few blemishes may also be due (and it is hardly possible altogether to put by this source) to doctrinal or ecclesiastical bias on the part of the translator.  Of the various elements which were wisely united in the body of men entrusted with the preparation of our version, one was much weakened during the work by the death of two of its leading members: and some apparently forced or inconsistent renderings have been thought to be not altogether unconnected with this circumstance.

But, after all, we are asked, of what character are these blemishes.  Do they, do any of them, affect points of Christian doctrine?  Now let it be observed, my brethren, that this question is in itself a fallacious one.  For what is Christian doctrine?  Is it a hard dry tabular statement of dogmas, to be proved by a certain number of texts? or is it the conviction of the great truths expressed by those dogmas carried into the hearts and lives of men?  If it be the former, then might we, according to the objector’s argument, dispense with nine-tenths of Scripture altogether.  If the latter, then we can spare nothing which may make it clearer or more forcible, better apprehended or more warmly felt.  I am persuaded that no one can estimate the benefit which may be done to the souls of men by casting light on any one saying of our Blessed Lord, by making evident a sentence before obscure in the writings of prophets or apostles.  And that this may be now done, done in very important instances, done with easy consent and effectually, I am also persuaded.  The great principles of biblical translation have in our time engaged many able men both here and on the Continent; and to most of the passages in which our version has gone astray, our chosen revisers would come with their minds firmly made up, and ready at once to apply the remedy.  With regard to some other blemishes which I ventured to mention, its application would be easier still.  Few would fail to note, or be desirous to retain, an obsolete word; and in the case of expressions of the other kind, the only desire would be, while removing the offence, to leave unimpaired God’s testimony against sin, or whatever might be the solemn sense of the passage.  As regards the last class of blemishes mentioned, those few which may be due to doctrinal or ecclesiastical bias, the task might seem likely to be a hard one.  But I should be unwilling hastily to think this.  In many such instances, the question, as it would be raised among our modern scholars, would never enter the region of opinion at all.  It would be simply one of faithful and consistent rendering, to which the occurrence of the word elsewhere would furnish an easy and safe guide.  I trust it may be said of the Church in our land, that the longer she lasts, the more she becomes aware of the futility of forcing into the sacred text any foregone conclusions: the more she sees the importance of keeping pure from all later alloy the water which men are to draw from the wells of salvation.

We have thus advanced in our very hasty and incomplete sketch of this subject, to the last branch of enquiry which we proposed: by whom, and how, this review of the Church’s stewardship may be carried out.

In asking “By whom?” we are in fact putting two questions: under what sanction, and by what instruments.  To the former enquiry it might be answered, that inasmuch as uniformity in the use of a Scripture text is of the first importance, it would be desirable that the version when amended should be put forth by authority.  But there can be little doubt that such an answer would be an inconsiderate one.  The procedure would defeat the very end it has in view.  On only one of the Christian bodies in this country would such authority, even if complete in her sense, be binding.  And if the amended version were thus bound upon her, we should be departing from the precedent set us in the case of our present version, which, whatever might be the intention of the notice that it is “appointed to be read in churches,” appears to have made its way to universal acceptance by its intrinsic excellence, and without any binding authorisation at all.  There might be various conceivable ways of undertaking the revision.  It might be entrusted to a body of men selected and commissioned by the highest power in the land.  Or the action might begin, as it is now beginning, with one of the religious bodies among us, and might proceed, not confined to that body alone, but extended so as to take in such of the rest as might be willing to aid.  But, however undertaken, the result should be put forth to make its way simply and entirely on its merits, and as approving itself to the conscience and judgment of the Churches of Christ.  And we are thus brought to answer the second member of this enquiry, By what instruments should the revision be carried out?  Our last sentence has anticipated the reply.  Such a work should no more be done by one section of the Christian Church than by one man.  The same concurrence and conflict of thought, the same variety of experience, the same differing shades of feeling and apprehension, which render many men requisite for the work, render also many Churches requisite.  There is in the lay mind a natural and well-founded distrust of men who are enlisted in the warm advocacy of particular systems: and nothing but a fair balance of the English Churches in the work would command public confidence.

And then, how should the work be done?  I do not mean, by what kind of process or machinery: the necessarily arduous details would be best judged of by those engaged in it: but I mean, guided by what maxims, in accordance with what rules?  The task may fairly be compared to the mending and restoration of a goodly piece of ancient mosaic work.  And such a comparison may guide us to one leading rule which should dominate the whole process.  Nothing should be touched of the fair fabric which can possibly remain: and all that is of necessity new should be in strictest harmony with the old.  So that the ear, while of course missing from the altered sentence the expression so long familiar, should find it superseded, not by a startling modernism, but by words worthy to stand beside those which remain.  Those who are acquainted with the history of our present version will recognise in this rule the repetition of one which its compilers had before them.

On this matter, I conceive there need be no alarm whatever.  Any body of English biblical scholars, with the responsibility upon them of purifying our version, would be at least as anxious to preserve its characteristic excellences as any could be, who were not so deeply aware what those excellences are.  And let it be observed, that in this matter a version for public and general use would of necessity differ from such as may have been put forth for private benefit by individual scholars.  In those, it may have been desired to give to the English bible-student some idea of the niceties and precise constructions of the original.  In the amended version, there should be no such design, unless where our ordinary English will fully and freely admit of it: no merely grammatical changes of tense or inference, which might give awkwardness or stiffness to what was before plainly and conventionally expressed.

From what has already been said, it will be clear that this revision of the Church’s stewardship cannot be brought about merely by the insertion of marginal notices or varieties.  We all know how little chance the margin has of being observed or known: and it would be a still more fatal objection that, in the great majority of Bibles, the requisite of cheapness precludes any marginal printing at all.  There might indeed with advantage be an addition of marginal notices in matters of secondary importance: but all necessary substantial revision must be made in the text itself, or it seems to me we are exceeding and not fulfilling our duty.

There remains but one more consideration, without which we can hardly dismiss our subject.  Will not, it has been asked, the varying of expressions in our version tend to disturb that confidence and reliance with which its words are generally regarded among English Christians?  First I would observe that this argument, as against the discharge of a solemn trust, is worthless; and secondly, that I have no dread of the consequence apprehended.  The Church of England has used for two centuries and a half, two distinct versions of the Psalms, varying to a degree but little appreciated, and with no such disturbing result.  It is not a little remarkable, that a precisely similar objection was raised at the time of the undertaking of our present version, but it was by the Romanists.  They complained of the unsettling effect of these frequent changes, and of the marginal readings as leaving men in doubt what was the truth of Scripture.  With what reason, let the firm hold which that amended version has kept be witness.

And now in drawing to an end, let us ask ourselves, why it is that the conscience of the Church is moved about this matter? why it is that, a desire which not long since stirred only in a few breasts, has now become ripe for practical settlement as to by whom and how it is to be satisfied?

And the answer is to be sought in that conscience itself.  It brings to light the estimation in which this Christian people have come to hold the precious deposit entrusted to them.  It is a result of the awakened enquiry, the honest fearless research which have been and are being widely spent upon every point connected with Holy Scripture: a higher value set, not in spite of but because of that inquiry and research, on a treasure now no longer wrapped in the disguise of mere conventional reverence, but opened and sparkling to every eye.  It is the old confession over again, no longer from the mouth of one standing in the prophetic front of his age, but in the hearts of Churches walking in the fear of God and in the comfort of the Holy Ghost, - “Thy law is tried to the uttermost: therefore thy servant loveth it.”

In this spirit, and in the depth of this affection, let us contemplate the work which is proposed, let us undertake it if undertaken it is to be: refusing to yield our reverence for God’s word to any overweening love for that to which we have been accustomed, or to let go our present trust in His guiding Spirit for any timid apprehensions of the peril of change: but on the other hand doing nothing rashly, nothing uncharitably; respecting the opinions of our brethren, and dealing tenderly with their prejudices.

And let us who are anxious for this national work remember above all things, that it is not by our professions of esteem for God’s word, but by  our proof of them, that distrust will be removed and confidence inspired: by that word being seen to be the source of our own motives, and the rule of our life.

 

AFTER THE RAIN - by Anonymous

 

AFTER  THE  RAIN by  Anonymous Whatever your cross, whatever your pain,There will always be sunshine after the rainPerhaps you may stumble, perhaps even fall,But God's always ready to answer your call He knows every heartache, sees every tear,A word from His lips can calm every fearYour sorrows may linger throughout the night,But suddenly vanish at dawn's early light The Savior is waiting somewhere above,To give you His grace and send you His loveWhatever your cross, whatever your pain,God always sends rainbows after the rain

CHARGE THE HILL - by Kristen Feighery

CHARGE  THE  HILL by   Kristen Feighery At the base of the mountain I raise my eyesTo the climb that looms ahead.And though I tremble at the road beforeIt is the path that I must tread. My heart beats wildly and my legs feel weakbut my comfort comes in knowingThere’s a power greater than all of meSo my faith just keeps on growing. Though the world may try to tell meFaith is simple and quite naive,I’ve felt His presence in the blackest of timesAnd I shall continue to believe. There may be days to come where I feel aloneDuring the pain and hardest trials.But there’s an unseen world holding me upAnd protecting me all the while. I know prayers and love will come to HimFrom those who share my suffering.Whose hearts and souls are tied with mineIn this journey laid out for me. So I take the first step and begin the climband I know love will gently lead.Each hand firmly held by family and friendsWe charge the hill to victory.

CLAUDE MELLAN - ( 1598 – 1688) French engraver.

Incredible! This 17th century engraving depicting Jesus Christ wearing a crown of thorns is called "Sudarium of Saint Veronica", engraving by Claude Mellan in 1649. An ordinary drawing, close up, turns out to be an image created using a single line that is twisted in a spiral. All the details of the face and transitions of light and shadow are created using thickenings of this line. For the artist's contemporaries, his method of engraving remained a mystery, and no one was able to repeat it.

Self-portrait, engraving by Claude Mellan (1635)

Claude Mellan ( 1598 – 1688) was a French draughtsman, engraver, and painter.

Mellan was born in Abbeville, the son of a customs official.

His first known print (Préaud no. 288 ), made for a thesis in theology at the Collège des Mathurins, shows that he was in Paris by 1619. His first teachers have not been identified, but his early engravings are thought to show the influence of Léonard Gaultier.

In 1624 Mellan went to Rome, where he studied engraving for a brief time with Francesco Villamena, who died that year. He then studied under Simon Vouet, who had been in Rome since 1614. Vouet encouraged Mellan to draw, considering it essential for both engraving and painting. Mellan engraved some of Vouet's works and also began drawing small portraits from life. Many of his portrait drawings were never engraved. He developed a style that was simple and natural, that would be characteristic throughout his later career. Many of his engravings in Rome were reproductive works, including, for example, designs by Pietro da Cortona and Gianlorenzo Bernini. The few after his own designs include Saint Francis de Paul  and the Penitent Magdalene . The plates Mellan engraved in Rome were mostly executed in a conventional manner.

In 1637, after a period of time in Aix-en-Provence with Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, he returned to Paris, where he adopted an idiosyncratic technique, in which, instead of creating shade by cross-hatching, he used a system of parallel lines, regulating tone by varying their breadth and closeness.

Particularly notable is his engraving The Face of Christ , also called the Sudarium of Saint Veronica (see Veil of Veronica), created from a single spiralling line that starts at the tip of Jesus's nose. (as I said few lines above).

During this later period in Paris, Mellan mostly engraved his own work. He was much sought after as a portrait artist, drawing from life and engraving the portraits. Among his subjects were members of the royal family of Bourbon. His drawings "reveal more variety of style and execution than he showed in the engravings." Two examples, for which both a drawing  and an engraving exist, are portraits of Marie-Louise de Gonzague-Nevers and Henri de Savoie, Duc de Nemours.

He also created large religious works with geometric layouts and poses. According to Barbara Brejon de Lavergnée, writing in The Dictionary of Art, Mellan's use of the single line gives "an abstract effect" and, "as an engraver he proved sensitive to the classical ideal developed by Nicolas Poussin, Jacques Stella and others in Paris in the middle of the 17th century." Among Mellan's reproductive engravings are two frontispieces for religious works after designs by Poussin  and Stella .

Anatole de Montaiglon catalogued 400 engravings by Mellan, and about 100 drawings are known. The latter are mostly in the Stockholm Nationalmuseum (via the collection of Carl Gustav Tessin) and the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg (via the Cobenzl collection). Several of Mellan's lost paintings are known from his engravings of them, including Samson and Delilah  and Saint John the Baptist in the Desert.  A few other paintings were attributed to him, beginning in the 1970s, but these have not been generally accepted.

Moon

FOR SOMEONE SPECIAL - by Ginny Bryant

FOR  SOMEONE  SPECIAL by  Ginny Bryant Days may come and days may go They never seem the same Some are bright and sunny And some are filled with rain. Whenever life seems unfair And time you'd like to stop That's when you need to think a bit Be thankful for what you've got. You are so very fortunate You have loving family and friends That lift your spirits when needed As each new day begins So when your life seems shadowed Lift your eyes to Heaven and pray For help in whatever need you have Let Him touch your heart today. This is a special greeting Full of love and prayers too Because you are a special friend And because I do love you. God Bless You !

MEMORARE - A Prayer to Virgin Mary

MEMORARE  Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that any one who fled to thy protection, implored thy help or sought thy intercession, was left unaided. Inspired by this confidence, We fly unto thee, O Virgin of virgins my Mother; to thee do we come, before thee we stand,  sinful and sorrowful; O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not our petitions, but in thy mercy hear and answer them.  Amen.

FAITH, HOPE, AND CHARITY - from "Tragic Sense Of Life" - by Miguel de Unamuno - PART II

Charity, which eternalizes everything it loves, and in giving us the goodness of it brings to light its hidden beauty, has its root in the love of God, or, if you like, in charity towards God, in pity for God. Love, pity, personalizes everything, we have said; in discovering the suffering in everything and in personalizing everything, it personalizes the Universe itself as well for the Universe also suffers and it discovers God to us. For God is revealed to us because He suffers and because we suffer; because He suffers He demands our love, and because we suffer He gives us His love, and He covers our anguish with the eternal and infinite anguish.

This was the scandal of Christianity among Jews and Greeks, among Pharisees and Stoics, and this, which was its scandal of old, the scandal of the Cross, is still its scandal to-day, and will continue to be so, even among Christians themselves, the scandal of a God who becomes man in order that He may suffer and die and rise again, because He has suffered and died, the scandal of a God subject to suffering and death. And this truth that God suffers, a truth that appals the mind of man is the revelation of the very heart of the Universe and of its mystery, the revelation that God revealed to us when He sent His Son in order that he might redeem us by suffering and dying. It was the revelation of the divine in suffering, for only that which suffers is divine.

And men made a god of this Christ who suffered, and through him they discovered the eternal essence of a living, human God, that is, of a God who suffers it is only the dead, the inhuman, that does not suffer, a God who loves and thirsts for love, for pity, a God who is a person. Whosoever knows not the Son will never know the Father, and the Father is only known through the Son; whosoever knows not the Son of Man he who suffers bloody anguish and the pangs of a breaking heart, whose soul is heavy within him even unto death, who suffers the pain that kills and brings to life again, will never know the Father, and can know nothing of the suffering God.

He who does not suffer, and who does not suffer because he does not live, is that logical and frozen ens realissimum, the primum movens, that impassive entity, which because of its impassivity is nothing but a pure idea. The category does not suffer, but neither does it live or exist as a person. And how is the world to derive its origin and life from an impassive idea? Such a world would be but the idea of the world. But the world suffers, and suffering is the sense of the flesh of reality; it is the spirit's sense of its mass and substance; it is the self's sense of its own tangibility; it is immediate reality.

Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons. And suffering is universal, suffering is that which unites all us living beings together; it is the universal or divine blood that flows through us all. That which we call will, what is it but suffering?

And suffering has its degrees, according to the depth of its penetration, from the suffering that floats upon the sea of appearances to the eternal anguish, the source of the tragic sense of life, which seeks a habitation in the depths of the eternal and there awakens consolation; from the physical suffering that contorts our bodies to the religious anguish that flings us upon the bosom of God, there to be watered by the divine tears.

Anguish is something far deeper, more intimate, and more spiritual than suffering. We are wont to feel the touch of anguish even in the midst of that which we call happiness, and even because of this happiness itself, to which we cannot resign ourselves and before which we tremble. The happy who resign themselves to their apparent happiness, to a transitory happiness, seem to be as men without substance, or, at any rate, men who have not discovered this substance in themselves, who have not touched it. Such men are usually incapable of loving or of being loved, and they go through life without really knowing either pain or bliss.

There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. And love leads us to no other happiness than that of love itself and its tragic consolation of uncertain hope. The moment love becomes happy and satisfied, it no longer desires and it is no longer love. The satisfied, the happy, do not love; they fall asleep in habit, near neighbour to annihilation. To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be. Man is the more man that is, the more divine the greater his capacity for suffering, or, rather, for anguish.

At our coming into the world it is given to us to choose between love and happiness, and we wish, poor fools! - for both: the happiness of loving and the love of happiness. But we ought to ask for the gift of love and not of happiness, and to be preserved from dozing away into habit, lest we should fall into a fast sleep, a sleep without waking, and so lose our consciousness beyond power of recovery. We ought to ask God to make us conscious of ourselves in ourselves, in our suffering.

What is Fate, what is Fatality, but the brotherhood of love and suffering? What is it but that terrible mystery in virtue of which love dies as soon as it touches the happiness towards which it reaches out, and true happiness dies with it? Love and suffering mutually engender one another, and love is charity and compassion, and the love that is not charitable and compassionate is not love. Love, in a word, is resigned despair.

That which the mathematicians call the problem of maxima and minima, which is also called the law of economy, is the formula for all existential that is, passional activity. In material mechanics and in social mechanics, in industry and in political economy, every problem resolves itself into an attempt to obtain the greatest possible resulting utility with the least possible effort, the greatest income with the least expenditure, the most pleasure with the least pain. And the terrible and tragic formula of the inner, spiritual life is either to obtain the most happiness with the least love, or the most love with the least happiness. And it is necessary to choose between the one and the other, and to know that he who approaches the infinite of love, the love that is infinite, approaches the zero of happiness, the supreme anguish. And in reaching this zero he is beyond the reach of the misery that kills. "Be not, and thou shalt be mightier than aught that is," said Brother Juan de los Angeles in one of his Diálogos de la conquista del reino de Dios (Dial. iii. 8).

And there is something still more anguishing than suffering. A man about to receive a much-dreaded blow expects to have to suffer so severely that he may even succumb to the suffering, and when the blow falls he feels scarcely any pain; but afterwards, when he has come to himself and is conscious of his insensibility, he is seized with terror, a tragic terror, the most terrible of all, and choking with anguish he cries out: "Can it be that I no longer exist?" Which would you find most appalling to feel such a pain as would deprive you of your senses on being pierced through with a white-hot iron, or to see yourself thus pierced through without feeling any pain? Have you never felt the horrible terror of feeling yourself incapable of suffering and of tears? Suffering tells us that we exist; suffering tells us that those whom we love exist; suffering tells us that the world in which we live exists; and suffering tells us that God exists and suffers; but it is the suffering of anguish, the anguish of surviving and being eternal. Anguish discovers God to us and makes us love Him.

To believe in God is to love Him, and to love Him is to feel Him suffering, to pity Him.

It may perhaps appear blasphemous to say that God suffers, for suffering implies limitation. Nevertheless, God, the Consciousness of the Universe, is limited by the brute matter in which He lives, by the unconscious, from which He seeks to liberate Himself and to liberate us. And we, in our turn, must seek to liberate Him. God suffers in each and all of us, in each and all of the consciousnesses imprisoned in transitory matter, and we all suffer in Him. Religious anguish is but the divine suffering, the feeling that God suffers in me and that I suffer in Him.

The universal suffering is the anguish of all in seeking to be all else but without power to achieve it, the anguish of each in being he that he is, being at the same time all that he is not, and being so for ever. The essence of a being is not only its endeavour to persist for ever, as Spinoza taught us, but also its endeavour to universalize itself; it is the hunger and thirst for eternity and infinity. Every created being tends not only to preserve itself in itself, but to perpetuate itself, and, moreover, to invade all other beings, to be others without ceasing to be itself, to extend its limits to the infinite, but without breaking them. It does not wish to throw down its walls and leave everything laid flat, common and undefended, confounding and losing its own individuality, but it wishes to carry its walls to the extreme limits of creation and to embrace everything within them. It seeks the maximum of individuality with the maximum also of personality; it aspires to the identification of the Universe with itself; it aspires to God.

And this vast I, within which each individual I seeks to put the Universe - what is it but God? And because I aspire to God, I love Him; and this aspiration of mine towards God is my love for Him, and just as I suffer in being He, He also suffers in being I, and in being each one of us.

I am well aware that in spite of my warning that I am attempting here to give a logical form to a system of a logical feelings, I shall be scandalizing not a few of my readers in speaking of a God who suffers, and in applying to God Himself, as God, the passion of Christ. The God of so called rational theology excludes in effect all suffering. And the reader will no doubt think that this idea of suffering can have only a metaphorical value when applied to God, similar to that which is supposed to attach to those passages in the Old Testament which describe the human passions of the God of Israel. For anger, wrath, and vengeance are impossible without suffering. And as for saying that God suffers through being bound by matter, I shall be told that, in the words of Plotinus (Second Ennead, ix., 7), the Universal Soul cannot be bound by the very thing namely, bodies or matter, which is bound by It.

Herein is involved the whole problem of the origin of evil, the evil of sin no less than the evil of pain, for if God does not suffer, He causes suffering; and if His life, since God lives, is not a process of realizing in Himself a total consciousness which is continually becoming fuller that is to say, which is continually becoming more and more God - it is a process of drawing all things towards Himself, of imparting Himself to all, of constraining the consciousness of each part to enter into the consciousness of the All, which is He Himself, until at last He comes to be all in all, παντα εν πασι, according to the expression of St. Paul, the first Christian mystic. We will discuss this more fully, however, in the next chapter on the apocatastasis or beatific union.

For the present let it suffice to say that there is a vast current of suffering urging living beings towards one another, constraining them to love one another and to seek one another, and to endeavour to complete one another, and to be each himself and others at the same time. In God everything lives, and in His suffering everything suffers, and in loving God we love His creatures in Him, just as in loving and pitying His creatures we love and pity God in them. No single soul can be free so long as there is anything enslaved in God's world, neither can God Himself, who lives in the soul of each one of us, be free so long as our soul is not free.

My most immediate sensation is the sense and love of my own misery, my anguish, the compassion I feel for myself, the love I bear for myself. And when this compassion is vital and superabundant, it overflows from me upon others, and from the excess of my own compassion I come to have compassion for my neighbours. My own misery is so great that the compassion for myself which it awakens within me soon overflows and reveals to me the universal misery.

And what is charity but the overflow of pity? What is it but reflected pity that overflows and pours itself out in a flood of pity for the woes of others and in the exercise of charity?

When the overplus of our pity leads us to the consciousness of God within us, it fills us with so great anguish for the misery shed abroad in all things, that we have to pour our pity abroad, and this we do in the form of charity. And in this pouring abroad of our pity we experience relief and the painful sweetness of goodness. This is what Teresa de Jesús, the mystical doctor, called "sweet-tasting suffering" (dolor sabroso), and she knew also the lore of suffering loves. It is as when one looks upon some thing of beauty and feels the necessity of making others sharers in it. For the creative impulse, in which charity consists, is the work of suffering love.

We feel, in effect, a satisfaction in doing good when good superabounds within us, when we are swollen with pity; and we are swollen with pity when God, filling our soul, gives us the suffering sensation of universal life, of the universal longing for eternal divinization. For we are not merely placed side by side with others in the world, having no common root with them, neither is their lot indifferent to us, but their pain hurts us, their anguish fills us with anguish, and we feel our community of origin and of suffering even without knowing it. Suffering, and pity which is born of suffering, are what reveal to us the brotherhood of every existing thing that possesses life and more or less of consciousness. "Brother Wolf" St. Francis of Assisi called the poor wolf that feels a painful hunger for the sheep, and feels, too, perhaps, the pain of having to devour them; and this brotherhood reveals to us the Fatherhood of God, reveals to us that God is a Father and that He exists. And as a Father He shelters our common misery.

Charity, then, is the impulse to liberate myself and all my fellows from suffering, and to liberate God, who embraces us all.

Suffering is a spiritual thing. It is the most immediate revelation of consciousness, and it may be that our body was given us simply in order that suffering might be enabled to manifest itself. A man who had never known suffering, either in greater or less degree, would scarcely possess consciousness of himself. The child first cries at birth when the air, entering into his lungs and limiting him, seems to say to him: You have to breathe me in order that you may live!

We must needs believe with faith, whatever counsels reason may give us, that the material or sensible world which the senses create for us exists solely in order to embody and sustain that other spiritual or imaginable world which the imagination creates for us. Consciousness tends to be ever more and more consciousness, to intensify its consciousness, to acquire full consciousness of its complete self, of the whole of its content. We must needs believe with faith, whatever counsels reason may give us, that in the depths of our own bodies, in animals, in plants, in rocks, in everything that lives, in all the Universe, there is a spirit that strives to know itself, to acquire consciousness of itself, to be itself, for to be oneself is to know oneself to be pure spirit; and since it can only achieve this by means of the body, by means of matter, it creates and makes use of matter at the same time that it remains the prisoner of it. The face can only see itself when portrayed in the mirror, but in order to see itself it must remain the prisoner of the mirror in which it sees itself, and the image which it sees therein is as the mirror distorts it; and if the mirror breaks, the image is broken; and if the mirror is blurred, the image is blurred.

Spirit finds itself limited by the matter in which it has to live and acquire consciousness of itself, just as thought is limited by the word in which as a social medium it is incarnated. Without matter there is no spirit, but matter makes spirit suffer by limiting it. And suffering is simply the obstacle which matter opposes to spirit; it is the clash of the conscious with the unconscious.

Suffering is, in effect, the barrier which unconsciousness, matter, sets up against consciousness, spirit; it is the resistance to will, the limit which the visible universe imposes upon God; it is the wall that consciousness runs up against when it seeks to extend itself at the expense of unconsciousness; it is the resistance which unconsciousness opposes to its penetration by consciousness.

Although in deference to authority we may believe, we do not in fact know, that we possess heart, stomach, or lungs so long as they do not cause us discomfort, suffering, or anguish. Physical suffering, or even discomfort, is what reveals to us our own internal core. And the same is true of spiritual suffering and anguish, for we do not take account of the fact that we possess a soul until it hurts us.

Anguish is that which makes consciousness return upon itself. He who knows no anguish knows what he does and what he thinks, but he does not truly know that he does it and that he thinks it. He thinks, but he does not think that he thinks, and his thoughts are as if they were not his. Neither does he properly belong to himself. For it is only anguish, it is only the passionate longing never to die, that makes a human spirit master of itself.

Pain, which is a kind of dissolution, makes us discover our internal core; and in the supreme dissolution, which is death, we shall, at last, through the pain of annihilation, arrive at the core of our temporal core at God, whom in our spiritual anguish we breathe and learn to love.

Even so must we believe with faith, whatever counsels reason may give us.

The origin of evil, as many discovered of old, is nothing other than what is called by another name the inertia of matter, and, as applied to the things of the spirit, sloth. And not without truth has it been said that sloth is the mother of all vices, not forgetting that the supreme sloth is that of not longing madly for immortality.

Consciousness, the craving for more, more, always more, hunger of eternity and thirst of infinity, appetite for God these are never satisfied. Each consciousness seeks to be itself and to be all other consciousnesses without ceasing to be itself: it seeks to be God. And matter, unconsciousness, tends to be less and less, tends to be nothing, its thirst being a thirst for repose. Spirit says: I wish to be! and matter answers: I wish not to be!

And in the order of human life, the individual would tend, under the sole instigation of the instinct of preservation, the creator of the material world, to destruction, to annihilation, if it were not for society, which, in implanting in him the instinct of perpetuation, the creator of the spiritual world, lifts and impels him towards the All, towards immortalization. And everything that man does as a mere individual, opposed to society, for the sake of his own preservation, and at the expense of society, if need be, is bad; and everything that he does as a social person, for the sake of the society in which he himself is included, for the sake of its perpetuation and of the perpetuation of himself in it, is good. And many of those who seem to be the greatest egoists, trampling everything under their feet in their zeal to bring their work to a successful issue, are in reality men whose souls are aflame and overflowing with charity, for they subject and subordinate their petty personal I to the social I that has a mission to accomplish.

He who would tie the working of love, of spiritualization, of liberation, to transitory and individual forms, crucifies God in matter; he crucifies God who makes the ideal subservient to his own temporal interests or worldly glory. And such a one is a deicide.

The work of charity, of the love of God, is to endeavour to liberate God from brute matter, to endeavour to give consciousness to everything, to spiritualize or universalize everything; it is to dream that the very rocks may find a voice and work in accordance with the spirit of this dream; it is to dream that everything that exists may become conscious, that the Word may become life.

We have but to look at the eucharistic symbol to see an instance of it. The Word has been imprisoned in a piece of material bread, and it has been imprisoned therein to the end that we may eat it, and in eating it make it our own, part and parcel of our body in which the spirit dwells, and that it may beat in our heart and think in our brain and be consciousness. It has been imprisoned in this bread in order that, after being buried in our body, it may come to life again in our spirit.

And we must spiritualize everything. And this we shall accomplish by giving our spirit, which grows the more the more it is distributed, to all men and to all things. And we give our spirit when we invade other spirits and make ourselves the master of them.

All this is to be believed with faith, whatever counsels reason may give us.

***

And now we are about to see what practical consequences all these more or less fantastical doctrines may have in regard to logic, to esthetics, and, above all, to ethics, their religious concretion, in a word. And perhaps then they will gain more justification in the eyes of the reader who, in spite of my warnings, has hitherto been looking for the scientific or even philosophic development of an irrational system.

I think it may not be superfluous to recall to the reader once again what I said at the conclusion of the sixth chapter, that entitled "In the Depths of the Abyss"; but we now approach the practical or pragmatical part of this treatise. First, however, we must see how the religious sense may become concrete in the hopeful vision of another life.

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translater  J.E. Crawford  Flitch