^ Donald Macleod, Christ and Society, 243.
32 LET THERE BE LIGHT
been taught to trace, can be linked on to what we behold at Pentecost. It is the same Spirit who filled St. Peter and St. John with the life and power and love of Christ, who also " dwells in the light of setting suns, in the round ocean, and the living air." There is no opposition. All are diverse operations of the same Spirit, who baptized St. Paul with his glowing power, and St. John with his heavenly love, and who once moved over the face of the waters, and evoked order out of chaos. The Bible calls nothing secular, all things are sacred, and only sin and wickedness are excluded from the domain which is claimed for God. But if we believe that He has never left Himself without a witness, and that the very rain and sunshine and fruitful seasons are the gifts of Him whose Spirit once moved over the waters and brought order out of confusion, then are we entitled to go further and to say that in the love of parent and child, in the heroic self-sacrifice of patriots, in the thoughts of wisdom and truth uttered by wise men, by Sakyamuni or Confucius, Socrates or Seneca, we must see nothing less than the strivings of that same Divine Spirit who spake by the prophets, and was shed forth in fulness upon the Church at Pentecost.
^ In the Life of Sir E. Burne-Jones, there is an account by his wife of the effect first made upon her by coming into contact with him and his artist friends, Morris and Eossetti. She says, "I wish it were possible to explain the impression made upon me as a young girl, whose experience so far had been quite remote from art, by sudden and close intercourse with those to whom it was the breath of life. The only approach I can make to describing it is by saying that I felt in the presence of a new religion. Their love of beauty did not seem to me unbalanced, but as if it included the whole world and raised the point from which they regarded everything. Human beauty especially was in a way sacred to them, I thought; and a young lady who was much with them, and sat for them as a model, said to me, ' It was being in a new world to be with them. I sat to them and I was there with them. And I was a holy thing to them — I was a holy thing to them.' "
Wherever through the ages rise The altars of self-sacrifice. Where love its arms has opened wide. Or man for man has calmly died,
GENESIS I. 2, 3 33
I see the same white wings outspread, That hovered o'er the Master's head! Up from undated time they come, The martyr souls of heathendom; And to His cross and passion bring Their fellowship of suffering.
So welcome I from every source The tokens of that primal Force, Older than heaven itself, yet new As the young heart it reaches to, Beneath whose steady impulse rolls The tidal wave of human souls; Guide, comforter, and inward word, The eternal spirit of the Lord ! ^
iii. Cosmos.
1. The Spirit of God was brooding upon the face of the waters. The word rendered " brooded " (or " wa^ brooding," RV.m.) occurs elsewhere only in Deut, ixxii. 11, where it is used of an eagle (properly, a griffon-vulture) hovering over its young. It is used similarly in Syriac. It is possible that its use here may be a survival, or echo, of the old belief, foimd among the Phoenicians, as well as elsewhere, of a world- egg, out of which, as it split, the earth, sky, and heavenly bodies emerged ; the crude, material representation appearing here transformed into a beautiful and suggestive figure.
2. The hope of the chaotic world, and the hope of the sinning soul, is all in the brooding Spirit of God seeking to bring order out of chaos, to bring life out of death, light out of darkness, and beauty out of barrenness and ruin. It was God's Spirit brooding over the formless world that put the sun in the heavens, that filled the world with warmth and light, that made the earth green with herbage, that caused forests to grow upon the hillsides, with birds to sing in them, and planted flowers to exhale their perfume in the valleys. So God's Spirit broods over the heart of man that has fallen into darkness and chaos through sin.
(1) As the movement of the Holy Spirit upon the waters was the first act in the six days' work, so the work of the Holy Spirit
^ Whittier. GEN.-NUM. — 3
34 LET THERE BE LIGHT
in the soul is the first work of grace in that soul. It is a very humbling truth, but it is a truth notwithstanding its humiliating form, that the best man that mere morality ever produced is still " waste and void " if the Spirit of God has not come upon him. All the efforts of men which they make by nature, when stirred up by the example of others or by godly precepts, produce nothing but chaos in another shape ; some of the mountains may have been levelled, but valleys have been elevated into other mountains ; some vices have been discarded, but only to be replaced by other vices that are, perhaps, even worse ; or certain transgressions have been forsaken for a while, only to be followed by a return to the selfsame sins, so that it has happened unto them, " According to the true proverb, The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallow- ing in the mire " (2 Pet. ii. 22). Unless the Spirit of God has been at work within him, the man is still, in the sight of God, " without form and void " as to everything which God can look upon with pleasure.