The Eainbow.
1. What is it that makes the rainbow? You must have a cloud or rain, and you must have light. Now, every drop of rain is a little prism. The prism divides the pure ray of light into its several parts. You know that if you mix all the colours together you get what we call white. And if you were to mix together all the colours that are in the rainbow, that is to reunite them, so that they blended together perfectly, you would have the pure ray of light. All those hues are only different parts of the pure white ray. And so whenever you see one of those colours appear through the prism, you may depend upon it, it is because the prism has divided the pure ray of light, and has let you have only a portion of it.
-^ The rainbow does in another way what the flower does in the garden. It is another way, but with a similar result. You have a beautiful rose, it may be, in your garden ; how charming it is in scent and colour ! Well, what does that rose do ? It takes in the light of the sun. Yes, but not all of it: it takes certain hues of that light ; and what it does not take in, it gives
^ Henry Vaughan,
GENESIS IX. 13 169
back again. Now that which makes it beautiful is not what it takes in, but what it reflects back again. So that the flower is beautiful because it is not selfish enough to take to itself all the light of the sun that descends upon it. The prism is in that respect even more self-denying than the flower, because it does not take any colour to itself, but sends all the colours forth at diiferent angles ; and of these one colour or more reaches your eye.i
^ I find the explanations of science very interesting, and I do not find that they necessarily destroy the realities of faith. My rainbow is not less beautiful to me when I have learned how it is formed, nor need it tell me less of God. May it not indeed tell me more ? Thomas Hood's lines —
I remember, I remember
The fir trees dark and high; I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky; It was a childish ignorance,
But now 'tis little joy To know I'm farther off from heaven
Than when I was a boy,
have a pathos which we all feel, and yet may we not urge that they are based on a misconception ? Do not I now know heaven to be nearer, not farther off, than I thought it was when a boy ? Surely it is now nearer to me than the fir-tops !
I grieve not that ripe Knowledge takes away The charm that Nature to my childhood wore,
For, with that insight, cometh, day by day, A greater bliss than wonder was before.^
2. The business of science is to observe and to experiment, to understand and to explain, not to go into raptures ; and she finds matter to observe in the clods as in the clouds, in the freckled skin of a toad as in the cheek of the fairest of Eve's daughters. She ignores my feeling of the beauty of the rainbow. To her the purest blues and the softest rose-tints are simply examples of decomposed light, incomplete light. It is the colourless — containing all colour — that is complete, the sunlight that is ever and everywhere streaming upon and into our life. And may I 1 D. D»TieB. * ▲. J. Bamford.
I70 THE RAINBOW
not welcome this fact and gather comfort from it ? So gracious has God ever been that I will not forthwith assume that He could not appoint as His token what may, in a sense, be termed imperfect. He manifests Himself in ways adapted to our receptive powers, and if our attention is more readily arrested by the more exceptional than by the more usual, He may graciously make the more exceptional His sign. But how comfortable a thought that it is the imperfect that is exceptional and rtie complete that is common ! The decomposed light is seen under certain special conditions ; the perfect light is ever being poured upon our daily tasks.
^ Quite recently I happened to pass through one of the most crowded parts of Loudon, when, of a sudden, a rainbow of wondrously intense colour and of unusually perfect form became visible, and changed the whole prosaic scene. It was marvellous to see little knots of busy people, their eager movement arrested, their worldly preoccupations forgotten for the moment, standing in admiration before the gracious apparition. The rainbow lingered but for a brief space, and then slowly faded away. But it remained long enough to tinge with a Divine splendour the homely face of the city, to cheer many a heart with a vision of rare beauty, nay, to create the thought that God does not abandon any part of His world, or wholly sever the bonds of love that link Him to His human children.^
^ Poor Thomas Carlyle, dyspeptic and morose, once looked up
at the stars and said, with a growl, "It is a sad sight ! " But a