I Want to Be True, Part Two

You should not read ahead unless you are willing to have your manhood or womanhood challenged a bit. Seriously...I was and am extremely convicted by the following, but I thank God for it...its life to me really. The language isn't easy to read, but just keep going and you will be rewarded, I promise. Keep going.

Moral Facts--The Doing of Truth

The moment that whatever goes by the name of truth comes into connection with man, the moment that, instead of merely mirroring itself in his intellect as a thing outside of him, it comes into contact with him as a being of action, the moment the knowledge of it affects or ought to affect his sense of duty, it becomes a thing of far nobler import.

The question of truth then enters upon a higher plane, looks out of a loftier window.

A fact, which in itself is of no value, becomes at once a matter of moral life and death when a man has the imperative choice of being true or false concerning it. When the truth, the heart, the summit, the crown of a thing is perceived by a man, he approaches the fountain of truth whence the thing came, and perceiving God by understanding what it is, becomes more of a man, more of the being he was meant to be. In virtue of this perceived truth, he has relations with the universe until then undeveloped in him. But far higher will the doing of the least, the most insignificant duty raise him.

There, in the obedience of his actions, he begins to be a true man. A man may delight in the vision and glory of a truth, and not himself be true. The man whose vision is weak, but who--as far as he sees, and wanting to see farther--does the thing he sees, is a true man. The man who recognized the turth of any human relation and neglects the duty involved is not a true man. The man who knows the laws of nature and does not heed them, the more he teaches them to others, the less he is a true man. The man who takes good care of himself and none of his brother and sister is false. A man may be a poet or preacher, student or teacher, aware of the highest truths of many things, aware of that beauty which is the final cause of existence; he may be a man who would not tell a lie, or steal, or slander; and yet he may not be a true man, inasmuch as the essentials of manhood are not his aim, he has not come into the flower of his own being.

There are relations closer than those of the facts around him that he is failing to see, or seeing, fails to acknowledge, or acknowledging, fails to fulfill. Man is man only in the doing of truth, perfect man, only in the doing of the highest truth, which is the fulfilling of his relations to his origin. Fulfilling them, he is himself a truth, a living truth. The man is a true man who chooses duty; he is a perfect man who at length never thinks of duty. Relations, truths, duties are shown to the man away beyond him, that he may choose them and be a child of God, choosing righteousness like him. The man who regards duties only as facts, or even the man who regards them as essential truths, but goes no farther, is a man of untruth. He is a man indeed, but not a true man. He is a man in possibility, but not yet in reality. The recognition of these things is the imperative obligation to fulfill them. Not fulfilling these relations, these duties, a man is undoing the right of his own existence, destroying his raison d'etre.

When the soul or heart, or spirit, or whatever you please to call that which is the man himself and not his body, sooner or later becomes aware that he needs someone above him, whom to obey, in whom to rest, from whom to seek deliverance from what in himself is despicable, disappointing, and unworthy, then indeed is that man in the region of truth, and beginning to come true in himself. When a man bows down before a power that can account for him, a power that knows whence he came and whither he is going, who knows everything about him and can set him right, longs indeed to set him right, making of him a creature confident as a child whom his father is leading by the hand to the heights of happy-making truth-- then is that man bursting into his flower. Then the truth of his being, his real nature--born in God at first, and responsive to the truth, the being of God his origin--begins to show itself. Then is his nature coming into harmony with itself.

In obeying the will that is the cause of his being, he begins to stand on the apex of his being. He begins to feel himself free. The truth--not as known to his intellect, but as revealed in his own sense of being true--has made him free. No abstract truth held by purest insight can make a man free. But the truth done, the truth loved, the truth lived by the man, the truth of and not merely in the man himself--that is the truth that makes him free.

As I've said, I want to be true...and I want to be free. Stay tuned for part 3.