The New Name

George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons
The White Stone-

I will also give him a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to him who receives it. Revelation 2:17

White because the man who receives it is accepted and chosen. In its whiteness is purity, and in its substance indestructibility.

The true name is one which expresses the character, the nature, the being, the meaning of the person who bears it. It is the man's own symbol,--his soul's picture, in a word,--the sign which belongs to him and to no one else. Who can give a man this, his own name? God alone. For no one but God sees what the man is, or even, seeing what he is, could express in a name-word the sum and harmony of what he sees.

In every man there is a loneliness, an inner chamber of peculiar life into which God only can enter. I say not it is the innermost chamber--but a chamber into which no brother, nay, no sister can come.
Every moment that he is true to his true self, some new shine of the white stone breaks on his inward eye, some fresh channel is opened upward for the coming glory of the flower, the conscious offering of his whole being in beauty to the Maker. Each man, then, is in God's sight worth. Life and action, thought and intent, are sacred.

Surely to know what he thinks about us will pale out of our souls all our thoughts about ourselves! And we may well hold them loosely now, and be ready to let them go.

"God has cared to make me for himself," says the victor with the white stone, "and has called me that which I like best; for my own name must be what I would have it, seeing it is myself. What matter whether I be called a grass of the field, or an eagle of the air? I am a stone to build into his temple. I am his; his idea, his making; perfect in my kind, perfect in his sight; full of him, revealing him, alone with him. Let him call me what he will. The name shall be precious as my life. I seek no more."