Love Is a Matter of Conscience

1 Tim. 1, 5. Men Summen af Budet er Kjærlighed af et reent Hjerte, og af en god Samvittighed, og af en Uskrømtet Tro.

1 Timothy 1:5. But the sum of the commandment is love from a pure heart, and from a good conscience, and from an unfeigned faith.

If a single phrase could name the victory Christianity has won over the world — or, more accurately, the victory by which it has more than overcome the world, since Christianity has never sought a worldly conquest — I know none briefer or more decisive than this: Christianity has turned every human relationship into a relation of conscience. This is the change of infinity at which it aims. Everything truly remains as it was, and yet, in infinity’s sense, everything is new; Christianity has never been a dealer in novelty. It did not seek to throw governments from their thrones and take the throne itself. Outwardly it has never competed for a place in the world to which it does not belong. If it finds room in the heart, it takes up no worldly space; yet it changes without limit everything it allows to remain. As blood pulses through every nerve, Christianity means the relation of conscience to permeate everything. The change does not lie in outward appearance, but it is infinite nonetheless. It is as though the blood in our veins were replaced by the divine fluid imagined by paganism: Christianity means to breathe eternal life, the divine, into the human race.

Christians have therefore been called a people of priests; considered through the relation of conscience, they may also be called a people of kings. Take the humblest and most overlooked servant — a poor, uneducated working woman who earns her living by the lowliest labour. Christianity permits her, and earnestly asks her, to speak inwardly with herself and with God while she works; this need not delay her work at all. She may say: “I do this labour for my daily wage, but I do it with such care for conscience’s sake.” In worldly terms only one person recognises no obligation other than conscience: the king. Yet before God this humble woman too may speak royally: “I do it for conscience’s sake.”

If she resents the fact that no one else hears this speech, her disposition is not Christian. Surely it is enough that God has allowed her to speak with him. In this matter, eagerly to demand freedom of expression is to act foolishly against oneself. Some things — especially the secrets of inwardness — lose something when made public and are wholly lost when publicity becomes the chief concern. Some secrets then do not merely disappear; they cease to mean anything. Christianity’s divine intention is to confide to every person: “Do not be consumed with changing the world’s outward form or your own station — as though, in this example, the poor working woman’s great advance would be to acquire the title ‘Madame’. No: make the Christian truth your own. It will show you a point beyond the world from which you shall move heaven and earth. More marvellously still, you shall move them so quietly and so lightly that no one notices.”

This is Christianity’s miracle, more wonderful than turning water into wine: silently, with no change of throne and without a hand being moved, it makes every human being a king before God. It does this so effortlessly, so skilfully and so wonderfully that the world, in one sense, need never know. In the outward world the king alone is to rule according to his conscience. But everyone must be free to obey for conscience’s sake, and no one — no one — can prevent it. Deep within, where the Christian truth dwells in the relation of conscience, everything has been changed.

Look: the world makes an uproar to achieve the smallest change, moving heaven and earth for nothing — the mountain labours and produces a mouse. Christianity silently brings about infinity’s change as if it were nothing. Its stillness is unlike anything worldly: the stillness of one who has died to the world, and of inwardness. For what is Christianity but inwardness?

Christianity thus makes every relationship between one person and another a relation of conscience — including the relationship of love. We shall now consider this claim: understood in Christian terms, love is a matter of conscience.

The apostolic words just read contain two points. First, “the sum of the commandment is love.” We developed this in the preceding consideration through the related saying that love is the fulfilment of the law. Second, our text says that if love is to be the sum of the commandment, it must come from a pure heart, a good conscience, and an unfeigned faith. We shall concentrate on one formulation: love is a matter of conscience. The other two — the pure heart and unfeigned faith — are essentially contained within it and must be understood in relation to it.

Everyone knows that Christianity has made one particular kind of love a matter of conscience: marriage. Before the Church’s minister joins two people in the shared life their hearts have chosen — a choice about which he does not question them — he asks each separately: “Have you taken counsel with God and with your conscience?” The minister thus refers love to conscience. He speaks almost as a stranger, not using the intimate “you” of their private relation. He impresses on each of them that this is a matter of conscience; he turns an affair of the heart into a matter of conscience.

The point could hardly be stated more plainly. Yet the form of the question states it again: each person is asked separately. Addressing the single individual is the more general form of the relation of conscience. Christianity therefore views the human race essentially by regarding its innumerable members first and foremost one by one — each as the single individual.

The minister therefore asks each of the two whether each has taken counsel with God and conscience. This is infinity’s change as Christianity works it upon erotic love. Like every Christian change, it is quiet and hidden, for it belongs to the inwardness of the hidden person, to the inviolable reality of the quiet spirit.

The world has seen horrifying relations between men and women: woman treated almost as an animal, despised beside man as though she were a different kind of being. It has also seen struggles to secure women equal rights with men in the worldly order. But Christianity makes only infinity’s change, and makes it silently. Outwardly the old order in one sense remains: the man is to be the woman’s lord and she subject to him. Inwardly, however, everything is changed by one small question addressed to the woman: has she consulted her conscience in choosing this man—as her lord, for she cannot have him on other terms? The question of conscience makes her inwardly and before God wholly equal to the man.

What Christ said of his kingdom — that it is not of this world — applies to everything Christian. The higher order is present everywhere but cannot be grasped, like a kindly spirit surrounding those it loves and following every step without becoming something one can point to. What is Christian remains foreign in worldly life because it belongs to another world and to the inward person. Foolish people therefore busy themselves foolishly, in Christianity’s name, with making women’s equal rights outwardly manifest. Christianity has never demanded or desired this. It has done everything for woman if she is content, in Christian terms, with what is Christian; if she is not, the little outward standing she can wrest from the world is only poor compensation for what she loses.

So much for marriage. But Christianity’s making erotic love a matter of conscience in marriage may not yet seem to prove that it makes love as such a matter of conscience. But anyone who thinks that Christianity does not make all love a matter of conscience misunderstands the Christian claim. Christianity has not treated erotic love as an exception. Because it has made all love a matter of conscience, erotic love too falls within conscience.

Indeed, if any love resists this transformation it is erotic love, grounded as it is in drive and inclination. Drive and inclination appear sufficient to decide whether love is present; in that sense they object to the Christian demand just as it objects to their self-sufficiency. If two people love one another — something they should know better than anyone — and nothing else prevents their union, why introduce a difficulty? Christianity does precisely that: “No; first they must answer whether they have taken counsel with God and their conscience.” It does not seek to alter outward arrangements or abolish drive and inclination. It seeks infinity’s change in the inward person.

Christianity means to work infinity’s change everywhere and therefore to make all love a matter of conscience. This change is the hidden person of inwardness, directed inwardly towards the God-relation and thereby distinguished from an inwardness directed outward. It is a mistake to suppose that Christianity singles out one type of love and exceptionally subjects it to conscience. Nothing isolated can be made a matter of conscience: either everything must become such a matter, as Christianity maintains, or nothing can.

Conscience’s inward power to extend through life resembles God’s omnipresence. One cannot confine omnipresence to one place and say, “God is everywhere here,” for that would deny the very thing asserted. In the same way, limiting the relation of conscience to one isolated concern denies the relation itself.

Suppose we try to identify a starting point in Christianity’s doctrine of love, though no starting point can finally be fixed in a circle. Christianity does not begin by singling out erotic love as a matter of conscience, as though a teaching with far larger concerns had been chiefly occupied with getting people married. It begins at the foundation, with the spirit’s teaching about what love is. It begins with God or with “the neighbour”, for these belong to the essentially Christian doctrine of love: to find the neighbour in love one must begin from God, and in loving the neighbour one must find God. From this foundation Christianity lays claim to every expression of love and guards its claim jealously.

The doctrine of the human God-relation and the doctrine of neighbour-love may therefore equally be said to have made erotic love a matter of conscience. Both oppose the self-will of drive and inclination. A man belongs first to God, before he belongs within any human relationship, and so he must first be asked whether he has consulted God and conscience. The same is true of a woman. Even in relation to the woman he loves, the man is first her neighbour, as she is first his. Each must therefore be asked about conscience. Christianity understands all people as equal before God, and the command to love the neighbour expresses that equality. Neighbour-love is not erotic love after it has been pensioned off. It is the final and highest love and must be given first place at the very first and highest moment of falling in love.

This is the Christian point. Far from first making it our great business to find the beloved, we must first love the neighbour in the very act of loving the beloved. To drive and inclination this certainly looks like a strangely chilling reversal. Yet it is no more chilling than spirit is in relation to the sensuous or the sensuous life of the soul. Spirit’s distinctive quality is to burn without flaring up. Your wife is first and foremost your neighbour; her being your wife further defines your particular relationship. What lies eternally at the foundation must also ground every expression of the particular.

Without this order, where could the doctrine of neighbour-love find a place? Yet it is generally forgotten. We speak of erotic love and friendship in pagan terms without noticing, arrange this part of life on pagan assumptions, and then add a Christian supplement about loving “the neighbour” — meaning a few other people. But anyone who does not ensure that his wife is first his neighbour and only then his wife will never love the neighbour, however many people he may love. He has made his wife the exception. He will either love this exception with excessive intensity throughout life or begin too hotly and end too coldly.

A wife is indeed loved differently from a friend, and a friend differently from the neighbour, but this is not an essential difference. Their fundamental equality lies in the determination “neighbour”. “The neighbour” works here like the determination “human being”. Each of us is human and then the particular person each is; being human remains the fundamental determination. No one should become so captivated by difference that, through cowardice or pride, he forgets his humanity. No particular difference exempts anyone from being human. Christianity likewise has no objection to a husband’s particular love for his wife, but he must not make her an exception to being the neighbour, as every human being is. If he does, he confuses the Christian relation: his wife ceases to be his neighbour, and so do all other people. If even one person were exempted by difference from being human, the whole concept “human being” would be disordered: the exception would not be human, and neither would the rest.

People speak of a man conscientiously loving his wife, his friend, or those closest to him, but the phrase often conceals a serious error. Christianity commands you to love every person conscientiously, including wife and friend, because love is a matter of conscience. Ordinary talk of conscientiously loving wife and friend, however, often means loving them with such preference — in divisiveness, or equivalently in a closed solidarity — that one has nothing to do with anyone else. Understood in Christian terms, that conscientiousness is precisely a lack of conscience. It lets wife or friend decide whether the love shown is conscientious. This is the falsehood. God tests such love, both directly and through “the neighbour” as the middle term.

Only in that way does your love become a matter of conscience. One can truly be conscientious only in a matter that belongs to conscience; otherwise one might speak of being conscientious in receiving stolen goods. Love must first be defined as a matter of conscience before “loving conscientiously” has a sound meaning. It is so defined only when God or the neighbour is the middle term, not when erotic love and friendship are taken simply in themselves. Without that middle term, the firmer the closed solidarity becomes, the more questionable its supposed conscientiousness grows.

What is Christian is not a further refinement of what paganism and other outlooks have called love; it is a change at the foundation. Christianity did not enter the world to adjust this or that feature of your particular love for wife or friend. It teaches how you are to love all people on the common ground of being human. That fundamental change then transforms erotic love and friendship in Christian terms.

It is sometimes said that to ask someone about his erotic love is a question of conscience. The phrase is often misunderstood. It is a question of conscience because in erotic love a person belongs first and foremost to God. No one therefore resents the priest’s question, for he asks in God’s name. More often, however, people mean only that erotic love is so inward and private that no third party has any concern with it — not even God. Understood in Christian terms, that is the absence of conscience.

A question of conscience is unthinkable in a matter where a person has no relation to God, because relating to God is precisely what it means to have conscience. If God did not exist, nothing could lie upon a person’s conscience. Conscience is the relation between the single individual and God, the God-relation; that is why the smallest thing upon one’s conscience is so terrible — God’s infinite weight comes with it immediately.

Love is a matter of conscience. It is therefore not the affair of drive and inclination, of feeling, or of the calculating understanding.

The worldly or merely human view knows many kinds of love. It is thoroughly informed about the distinctiveness of each and all their differences from one another. It delves into this difference of differences — if one can be said to delve deeply while moving towards the surface. Christianity proceeds in the opposite direction. It really knows only one love: the love of the spirit. It spends little time painting all the differences through which this fundamentally shared love may appear. In essential Christian terms, the division into different species of love has been abolished.

The merely human view regards love in several ways. It may see love in pure immediacy as drive and inclination — erotic love — or as inclination in friendship. It may understand love as feeling and inclination qualified by duty, natural relationship, established custom, and so on. Or it may seek to acquire love because calculation recognises an earthly good in being loved and cherished and in having people to love and cherish. Christianity is not chiefly concerned with either this immediacy or this convenience. It leaves these things standing with their outward significance. At the same time its doctrine of love, which is not designed for convenience, means infinity’s change to take place inwardly.

There is something marvellous — and to many perhaps strange or incomprehensible — in the indifference of Christianity’s eternal power to outward recognition. This is precisely its seriousness: for seriousness’s sake inwardness plays the stranger within worldliness. At times Christians have thought it necessary to betray the secret by giving what is Christian a worldly form in the world. Marriage was to be abolished, and people lived “hidden” in monasteries. Yet inwardness itself, the inwardness of the hidden person who “keeps the mystery of the faith” (1 Timothy 3:9), is a far safer hiding-place. A monastery concealed in a lonely forest or on an inaccessible mountain, and the quiet resident concealed inside it, are childish beside true Christian inwardness — like a child who hides so that someone will come and find him. The hidden monk informed the world that he had hidden. In Christian terms, he was not hiding in earnest; he was playing hide-and-seek.

A similar misunderstanding treated outward indifference to friendship, family ties, and love of country as a Christian disclosure of the secret. Yet Christianity is not worldly-indifferent to anything; it is spiritually concerned for everything. To display indifference while eagerly ensuring that those concerned hear of it is precisely not to be indifferent. It resembles someone saying, “I do not care about you,” only to receive the answer, “Why, then, did you trouble to tell me?” This too was childishness, a childish way of putting on airs with what is Christian. What is Christian is too serious for such superiority. It seeks to bring about no outward change in outward life. It takes hold of outward life, cleanses and hallows it, and thereby makes all things new while all things remain old. A Christian may marry and love his wife — above all, love her as he ought — may have a friend and love his country. Within all these relations, however, there must be a fundamental Christian understanding between the person and God. This is Christianity.

God is not like a human spectator who needs visible evidence in order to see whether his cause has triumphed. He sees just as well in secret. Far from your having to help God learn anew, it is God who must help you learn anew, so that you are weaned from worldliness’s demand to see the result. Had Christ required visible proof, he could have acted decisively and summoned twelve legions of angels. He refused. When the apostles wanted an outward settlement, he rebuked them for not knowing the spirit from which they spoke. Christianity does not demand an outward decision — except where it sets a sign, such as the sacramental sign, that offends worldliness. Instead, the absence of outward decision tests whether the single individual will keep and be content with faith’s secret.

The worldly mind mistrustfully demands outward settlement and otherwise refuses to believe that anything has been settled. That occasion for mistrust is precisely the trial in which faith is tested. In worldly terms the safest proof that God exists would be to set up an image of him: then we could see that he exists — or see that an idol exists, though it does not. It would likewise have seemed safer for Christ to reveal himself in a magnificent procession. Instead he took a lowly servant’s form without even looking conspicuous, appeared like any other person, and by worldly measures wholly failed his task. This is the trial in which faith is tested.

The same holds for the Christian understanding of love. Worldly misunderstanding demands outward proof that Christian love is love of the spirit. But no outward arrangement can express this outwardly, because its reality is inwardness. This offends the world, as everything Christian does. The converse also offends: Christianity makes an arbitrary outward sign — the water of baptism, for example — the sole decisive thing in the outward order. The world always demands the opposite. Where Christianity asks for inwardness, worldly Christendom wants outward display; where Christianity establishes an outward sign, worldly Christendom retreats into inwardness. Offence stands beside the Christian at every point.

Christianity nevertheless knows only one love: the love of the spirit. This love can underlie and be present within every other expression of love. How strange and wonderful! The thought belongs to Christian life but also resembles the thought of death. Imagine someone gathering every difference between all the people he has seen and then saying, as he lists them: “I see all these different people, but I do not see the human being.” Christian love stands in the same relation to love’s many forms. It may be present in them all, but you cannot point to it by itself.

You identify erotic love by the beloved woman, friendship by the friend, and patriotism by its object. You cannot identify Christian love even by its loving the enemy, for that action might conceal bitterness — love shown in order to heap burning coals upon the enemy’s head. Nor can you identify it by its “hating” the beloved, for unless you are the person concerned and know the matter with God, you cannot really see what is taking place. In one sense, what trust God shows towards a person — and what seriousness. We insist upon safe and reliable signs by which love may be known. God and Christianity provide no such distinguishing mark. Does this not show the greatest possible trust? When we give up requiring signs of another’s love, we say that we trust without limit and will believe despite every appearance. Why, then, do you think God shows this trust? Is it not because he sees in secret? What seriousness!

You never see Christian love itself, and no one ever has, in the same sense that no one has ever seen “the human being”. Yet “human being” is the essential determination, and Christian love is the essential love — the one love Christianity recognises. To repeat: Christianity has not revised what people previously knew about loving the beloved, the friend, and so on by adding a little here or removing something there. It has changed everything; it has transformed love as a whole. Erotic love and friendship are changed only insofar as this fundamental change produces a change of inwardness within them. Christianity does this by making all love a matter of conscience. For erotic love and friendship, this can mean a cooling of the passions as much as it means the inwardness of eternal life.

Love is a matter of conscience and must therefore come from a pure heart and an unfeigned faith.

“A pure heart.” We ordinarily say that love, and self-giving in love, requires a free heart. The heart must belong to no one and nothing else; even the hand that gives it must be free. The hand must not seize the heart by force and give it away. On the contrary, the heart must give away the hand. Free already, the heart is to find freedom’s fullness in giving itself. The bird you release from your hand, the arrow leaving the released bowstring, the bent branch springing back into line — none of them is so free as the free heart freely giving itself. The bird is free only because you let it go, the arrow flies because it leaves the string, and the branch rises because pressure ceases. The free heart is not liberated by the removal of resistance. It was free and possessed its freedom — and yet it found that freedom. A beautiful thought: life-giving freedom finding what it already has.

I am speaking almost like a poet. That is permissible if the chief matter is not forgotten and the poetry serves to illuminate it. We have tried, as beguilingly as possible, to speak about what people generally delight to hear. No one should be tempted to think that we avoid such speech because we lack the sensitivity or ability for it. Nor, however, should we speak of it alone as though it were the highest and forget the principal matter: what is Christian.

A pure heart is not a free heart in this sense — or at least that freedom is not the question here. First and last, the pure heart is a bound heart. It is therefore less delightful to discuss than freedom’s life-giving sense of itself and the daring pleasure of self-surrender. The heart that is to be pure is bound in the deepest sense. No ship lying at every anchor is bound so securely, for this heart must be bound to God.

No king bound by the strictest charter limiting his rule, no person under the heaviest obligation, no labourer contracted by the day, and no tutor engaged by the hour is bound in this way. Each can state the limit of the obligation; the pure heart must be bound to God without limit. No earthly power binds in this way. The king may die and leave the charter behind; the employer may die and release the labourer; the teaching hour comes to an end. God does not die, and the bond that binds is never broken.

The heart must be bound in this way. You who burn with erotic love’s delight or friendship’s longing: Christianity has never denied the freedom of which you speak. But if the beloved’s heart and yours are to be pure, limitless obligation must come first. First the infinite bond; only then may the talk of freedom begin.

A foreign word is common in scholarship and even more common in commerce and everyday dealings. It is heard in the streets, among the busy, and in every businessperson’s mouth: “priority”. Scholarship speaks often of God’s priority; businesspeople speak of priorities. Let us use their word in the sense most likely to make the point: Christianity teaches that God has first priority. Scholarship does not put the matter quite this way, for it easily forgets what business knows — a priority is a claim. God has the first claim, and everything, absolutely everything, a person owns is pledged as security for it. Remember this, and then speak as much as you please of freedom’s delight. But if you truly remember it, that delight will not tempt you.

The free heart takes no account of anything; heedlessly it plunges into the delight of self-surrender. But the heart bound without limit to God has one infinite consideration. A person forced at every moment to take countless things into account is not so bound by them as is the heart bound to God. Wherever that heart may be — alone with itself, absorbed in thoughts of others, or among other people — and whatever else may occupy it, this one consideration is always present.

You speak beautifully of what the beloved means to you and of what you mean to the beloved. But remember: if a pure heart is to be given in erotic love, this consideration must first stand before your soul and before the beloved’s. It is the first and the last. To part from it is transgression and sin.

The free heart has no history before it gives itself away; only then does it acquire its history of love, happy or unhappy. The heart bound without limit to God already has a history. It therefore understands that erotic love and friendship are only an interlude, an episode within the one history of love that is both first and last. You know how to speak beautifully of erotic love and friendship. But if you understood that they form only a very short passage in that eternal history, your telling would be as brief as the passage itself. You begin your story with the beginning of love and end it at a grave. The eternal history of love began much earlier: it began when you did, when you came into being from nothing. And as surely as you do not become nothing, so surely that history does not end at a grave.

When death’s bed has been made for you, you have lain down never to rise, and all that remains is for you to turn to the other side and die, the silence grows around you. One by one those near to you depart, and the silence grows because only the nearest remain, while death draws nearer. Then the nearest quietly go, and the silence grows because only the very nearest remain. At last the final person bends over you for the final time and turns away, while you turn towards death. Yet on that other side one still remains: the last at the deathbed, who was there first — God, the living God — provided that your heart was pure, as it could become only by loving him.

This is how we must speak of the pure heart and of love as a matter of conscience. Erotic and earthly love may be the delight of life. The happy lover may say truthfully, “Only now am I alive,” and merely to hear such a person speak of happiness — of life and its delight — may itself be a delight. But conscientious love must be described by someone who has died to the world: not someone who grew tired of life, but one who gained eternity’s joy in life.

Alas, it is nevertheless one who has died in this sense who speaks. Many find this so repellent that they dare not hear the joyful message, though everyone gladly listens to the person of whom we say in the fullest sense, “He is alive.” Yet one who has died in this sense is needed. At the very moment when the happy person’s companions joyfully cry “Long live!”, eternity says, “Die” — if the heart is to become pure. A person has certainly become happy, indescribably happy, or unhappy through loving another human being. But no human heart has ever become pure except by loving God.

“An unfeigned faith.” Could any combination be more abhorrent than love joined to falsehood? Yet the combination is impossible, for to love falsely is to hate. This is true not only of outright falsehood. Even the slightest want of sincerity cannot be reconciled with love. Wherever sincerity is lacking, something is concealed; and within that concealment selfish self-love is hiding. To the extent that it is present in a person, that person does not love.

In sincerity the lover shows himself to the beloved. No mirror registers the smallest detail more exactly than true sincerity — the lovers’ genuine faithfulness in reflecting themselves in the mirror of openness that erotic love holds between them.

Two people may become transparent to one another in sincerity. Is Christianity therefore being arbitrary when it speaks of “unfeigned faith” in another sense, meaning sincerity before God? If two people are to love one another in unfeigned faith, sincerity towards God must first come before it in each of them.

Hypocrisy is not only the conscious deception of others or of oneself. Is it not also hypocrisy when a person does not know himself? Can such a person promise love in unfeigned faith, or keep what he promises? He may perhaps keep it; but if he cannot truly make the promise, can he keep what he cannot even promise? A person who does not know himself cannot promise love in unfeigned faith.

Confidential intimacy contains a doubling within itself. The person with whom one has one’s most inward relation is also the person whose relation to oneself would seem the most fitting subject for confidential disclosure — and yet only to that very person can one fully confide oneself. Confidence therefore turns back upon itself. Its essential content includes something unsayable, though we might have supposed that intimacy consisted precisely in saying it.

Humanly speaking, a wife’s most inward relation is to her husband. She may tell her parents various things in confidence, but that is confidence about her confidence. She will feel that she cannot confide everything to them, or confide in them as she does in her husband. Her relation to him is both her most inward and her most confidential relation; he alone is the one to whom she can properly confide herself concerning that relation. External affairs and indifferent matters cannot sensibly be communicated as confidences. If she wished to tell someone else of her inmost concern — her relation to her husband — she would herself recognise that there is only one person to whom she could communicate it completely in confidence: the very person to whom and with whom she has the relation.

With whom does a person have — or could a person have — the most inward relation, if not with God? All intimacy between one person and another therefore proves in the end to be intimacy about intimacy. God alone is confidential intimacy, just as God is love.

When two people sincerely pledge faithfulness to one another, are they truly pledging it to one another if each first pledges and has pledged faithfulness to Another? Yet this is necessary if their love, in the Christian sense, is to come from unfeigned faith. When two people confide themselves completely to one another, are they truly doing so if each first confides in a Third? Yet this too is necessary if they are to confide themselves completely to one another, even if something unsayable remains within each person’s intimacy with God. This is precisely the sign that the relation to God is the most inward and the most confidential.

How inviting and appealing it sounds to speak of two lovers’ intimacy with one another — and yet there is hypocrisy in both the talk and the intimacy. When love from an unfeigned faith is to be described, someone who has died to the world must speak. At first this sounds as though a separation were being placed between two people who are meant to be joined in the most inward and intimate life together. It is indeed like a separation; and yet what is placed between them is eternity’s intimacy.

Many, many times two people have found happiness in an intimate relation with one another. But no one has ever loved from an unfeigned faith except through that separating intimacy with God — which in turn is God’s consent to the lovers’ intimacy. Only when love is a matter of conscience does it come from a pure heart and an unfeigned faith.