O Lord, who never faileſt to help and govern them whom thou doſt bring up in thy ſtedfaſt fear and love; Keep us, we beſeech thee, under the protection of thy good providence, and make us to have a perpetual fear and love of thy holy Name, through Jeſus Chriſt our Lord. Amen.
Keynote: The Good Law
When we are beset with the difficulties of daily life, when its tragedies overshadow us, we ask ourselves whether there is indeed a divine law ordering all things, and, if there be such a law, is it responsible for all the misery and useless suffering we see about us.
One thing is self-evident - if no law ordered the universe it must long ago have shaken itself to pieces from sheer friction. Why should we conclude that natural law stops short with the lower animals?
When we come to consider man, with his intelligence and a will sufficiently free to be a determining factor in his fate, we have to expand our conception of natural law to include those higher aspect of his nature, latent in many, subconscious in most, but conscious in a few, which, for lack of a better term, we call spiritual. Surely the spiritual aspect of man's nature is just as natural as the emotional. It is neither a pathology nor a miracle, but a higher stage of evolution. It may be having a hard struggle for survival in the present age, but nevertheless, we can see that it is going to inherit the earth in due course of evolutionary time.
May we not believe that there are natural laws of the spiritual plane of existence which govern this aspect of man's nature, and are vital, though disregarded factors in the polity of nations, which, when broken, are responsible for the mass of human misery we see about us, just as the laws of hygiene, when broken, are to us the administrators of disease? Should we attribute to divine wrath the results of man's ignorant wilfulness? Can we plead ignorance as an excuse after God has given us a standard of manhood in Christ Jesus our Lord? We all know better than we do. It is the cumulative effect of human shortcomings that piles up the sum of human misery.
If every single human being were pure, and diligent in his Father's business, and compassionate, the world's misery would be wiped out in one generation. For think what it would mean: sensuality would no longer bring into the world weakly bodies and depraved minds, and spread the racial poisons; selfishness would no longer ignore human needs and cause the poverty diseases; self-indulgence and sloth would no longer produce their inevitable results. Death would come to us in the calm sleep of old age or the swift extinction of accident, even as it comes to the animal kingdom under natural law.
We must keep God's law, not cry out against it; and being our brother's keeper, must suffer with him when all creation groans and travails together. But if in all our ways we love God's law and fear to break it, then will He never fail to help and govern us, and the first earnest of the fulfilling of His law will be the inner peace that comes to us, even amidst the human confusion that still overspreads the earth.
[Dion Fortune, Mystical Meditations on the Christian Collects]
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