Here we are...

The gap between real and ideal, a source of our "soul's imprisonment" is reconciled, according to Frederic Henry Hedge, by the life of Jesus. Part two of "The Soul's Deliverance:"

"And this to me is the great significance of the life of Jesus. I see it in the reconciliation of the ideal and the actual. This is the true historical atonement in Christ...Jesus expressed, as no other has done, his conception in his life; he realized his idea and turned it into fact, and made it a part of the history of man.

The greatest of Christian painters, the immortal Raphael, has figured this marriage of the real and the ideal in the life of Jesus, in his painting of the Transfiguration...

He knew how to come down from the mountain with undiminished power and glory...He has solved in his life the old contradiction, and done away with the discrepance between here and there, between the spiritual world and the actual...Jesus accepted the conditions of his lot, externally one of the humblest, and exalted himself and it, and made his life divine by perfect obedience to those conditions. He did not aspire to the place of command to which his people gladly would have exalted him, but abode in his native humility and walked with his peasant companions, and found the topics of his duty among the halt and blind and publicans and sinners, and preached his gospel to the poor. He did not seek to transcend his sphere externally by self-aggrandizement, but was satisfied to fill it completely, casting into it all the fullness of his royal nature. Thus he brought his soul out of prison,-the prison of low and bounded reality,-by ignoring its bounds, living wholly in the eternal...

Accept the actual in which you are placed. Put away selfish and sickly ambition, and find yourself in your appointed conditions. Adjust yourself with the terms of your lot. Instead of seeking to lift yourself above it by uneasy efforts, seek rather to fill it out by throwing into it the fullness of your faculty and your life...

Here we are; that is our first concern. Let us see that we be truly and wholly and beneficently here, with all our faculty and heart. It may seem brighter elsewhere, but that is an optical illusion; here, too, it is good to be. God is here, and man is here, and the calls and the topics of daily duty. And duty is everywhere the same thing, everywhere sufficient and divine...

The Kingdom of Heaven is here or nowhere. Duty is the key that unlocks it to all. Only so far as we succeed in making the will of god our meat and our drink, can we ever lay hold on everlasting life."

Blessings