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So there is in this name the same devout, reflective laying-hold upon experience which we have observed in the preceding. There is also the same individualising grasp of God as his very own; for 'Israel' here is, of course, to be taken not as the name of the nation but as his own name, and the intention of the phrase is evidently to express what God had been to him personally.
Woe to the nation or the society in which this individualising and separating process is going on in the human mind! Whether it take the form of a religion or of a philosophy, it is at once the sign and the cause of senility, decay, and death.
Yet he managed wholly to avoid that fault of some creative imaginations which consists in personifying and individualising their figures by some easily recognisable label of mannerism.
It ran: "Life altogether is an activity and active process, preceding from an inner source and working itself out according to an inner impulse, producing and by an eternal change of matter, reproducing, organising and individualising, and, since it by a certain material or substratum constitutes itself a certain exterior, within which it reveals itself, it simultaneously constitutes itself as the subsisting activity and endeavour in this, its exterior, of which it may further be inquired how far a soul can be said to live and subsist in it, as a living entity appearing in such a life."
And so the very fact of His saying 'I will abide at thy house, is to me an indication that, deep down below Zacchaeus' superficial and vulgar curiosity, there was something far more noble which our Lord fosters into life and consciousness by this offer. Many large truths are suggested by it on which we may touch. We have in Christ's words an illustration of His individualising knowledge.
Surely amidst all the encouragements that we have to believe that our cry is not sent up into an empty heaven, nor into deaf ears, and that all the multitude of creatures that wait before that Throne do not prevent the individualising knowledge and the individualising love of Jesus Christ from coming straight to every one of us, this little incident is not the least instructive and precious.
And it seems to me that to a very large extent the difference between mere nominal, formal Christians and men who really are living by the power of faith in God as revealed in Jesus Christ, lies in that one little word, 'the Lord your God. That a man shall put out a grasping hand, and say, 'I take for my own for my very own the universal blessing, I claim as my possession that God of the spirits of all flesh, I believe that He does stand in a real individualising relation to me, and I to Him, is surely of the very essence of faith.
To illustrate the way in which a chief may exert influence in matters in which he has no footing for the exercise of formal authority, we cite the following bit of history. The Kayans of the Baram, under the individualising influences of trade and increasing stocks of private property, neglected to renew these communal mats; and thus the good old custom was in danger of dying out.
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