Remember the servants in the parable of the tare-field (Matt. 13)? Are not tares a hindrance, sharing the strength of the soil with the good seed, while they themselves are good for nothing? The common sense of man, the right moral judgment, would say all this, but the mind of Christ says the very contrary: “Let both grow together until the harvest.” Christ judged only according to divine mysteries. That is what formed the mind in the Master, perfect as it was, and that is what must form the like mind in the saint. God had purposes respecting the field. A harvest was to come and angels were to be sent to reap it, but as yet, all was the patient grace of the Master. The Lord will have the field uncleared for the present. The mysteries of God, the counseled thoughts and purposes of heaven, precious and glorious beyond all measure, demand this, and nothing is right but the path that is taken in the light of the Lord, in the knowledge of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven. The call of God now demands that the tare-field be left unpurged, that the resources and strength of the flesh and of the world be refused rather than used, and that the church should reach the heavens, not through the judgment of the world by her hands, but through the renunciation of it by her heart and separation from it in company with a rejected Master.
J. G. Bellett (adapted)