p472 DEAR -, - Some one has sent me -'s tracts from the Voice. There is a great deal of truth as to the new position and new creation, which I fully accept and insist on where it can be. But it is fresh truth poured in and poured out, not matured in the soul. I know what it is, and we have all to learn it. It is delighting in the wondrous fresh truth, but it is not Christ. In this respect I do not think he knows himself. It is a more subtle self, delighting in having done with self, not Christ taking the place of self. All through, it is Christ "in all," but not "Christ all." It is striking how this runs through every page. This easily accounts for the effect in others. Now realising the life of Christ as dead to the world is of all possible moment, but this is by Christ being all, not by the life of Christ in us being all. He looks for the 'sense of power,' but it is when we are weak we are strong. I think his view of the way Christ is presented in Luke very defective. I do not mean anything unorthodox. When self has become practically nothing and Christ experimentally all, the truth he has learned may become a most useful weapon of ministry. When we are young in the truth, it fills the mind always more surfeitingly; and to a mind like his where there is considerable treasury of thought, the danger is greater. It is not knowing we are nothing, but being it, which is the point. More of the power of life in Christ we do need and need greatly, at least as far as I am concerned. Truth he has seized very considerably, but I do not find Christ everywhere and what He is - we dead and Christ our life there, and the new sphere we belong to. These are details which have struck me, but they are of no importance now: they run in general into the great point I have noticed. I do not think he understands the wilderness or that he has gone through it; perhaps there is more. Nor do I think he is clear on the connection of Colossians and Ephesians; but all this is by the bye. They were brought to God Himself at Sinai.

January, 1879.

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