p228 * * * I am a bad person to answer this question, though the blessed Lord has not left me without His presence. Yet I love to get on these subjects. A person, I think, who has really found God must in some measure feel as this person does. The passage of St. Paul in the Ephesians is the answer and expression of this, "Oh! the height and depth," etc. He that, loving, knows God, dwells in God and God in him; and one knowing His fulness must know that he is brought into a depth which none can fathom but God, and be pained at not doing it. It is the way of growth, as a child who uses the compass of strength but cannot reach it; but a Christian's exerts itself (by that solecism) to know that "which passeth knowledge." And therefore the soul, when first learning it especially, will feel at a loss and perhaps pained, nor finds its repose till it knows in a certain sense as it is known. …*
{*[Copy defective.]}

In two ways it thus dwells upon, and because of this seeks, Jesus. [First as] the unfathomable love of God, that is of love in Himself, he learns and knows that it is this too in itself, yet not as separate from the revelation in Jesus' body, therefore the apostle adds, "Herein is love," etc. Secondly, that it may be brought near to familiarise and make [known] yet diminishing nought of its fulness, it is brought into intelligence in the incarnation, and death especially, of the blessed Lord Jesus our Head. Therefore he says, To know "the breadth and length and depth and height … that ye might be filled into (or 'unto,' that is, of what fills and its extent) all the fulness of God." So, hereby know we love "because he laid down his life for us." It is the stepping-stone of weakness and emptiness and necessity unto that fulness, and the resting-place of the soul, as to its natural powers, at this inexhaustible fulness of God. Yet this is indeed learning the heavenly, having God, the peculiar and distinctive privilege of those quickened by the Spirit, which alone gives capacity to know and fathom such a thought. But as a motive of conduct it is infinitely wholesome that we should feel pained at how little we reach the fulness of God (for it is in this He has acted towards us, and as Christ is the order of this towards us, so is He of it towards Him) by His Spirit, and ever seek for more full manifestations of the power of this in us, accompanied by simple apprehension.

[A very early copy - first two pages only preserved.]

[53189E]