My heart is yearning:
Behold my yearning heart, 4
And lean low to satisfy
Its lonely beseeching cry, For Thou its fulness art.
* C. Stanford, Symbols of Christ, 344. - Coventry Patmore.
^ The Life-Htory of 2'hovias Champness, 29.
292 THE VISION OF GOD
Turn, as once turning
Thou didst behold Thy Saint
In deadly extremity ;
Didst look, and win back to Thee His will frighted and faint.
Kindle my burning From Thine unkindled Fire;
Fill me with gifts and with grace That I may behold Thy face,
For Thee I desire.
My heart is yearning,
Yearning and thrilling thro'
For Thy Love mine own of old, For Thy Love unknown, untold,
Ever old, ever new.^
IL
The Higher Heavenly Experience.
The soul's desire for a vision of God will be satisfied by a full revelation hereafter.
1. Death is not a sleep hut an awaking. — The representation of death most widely diffused among all nations is that it is a sleep. The reasons for that emblem are easily found. We always try to veil the terror and deformity of the ugly thing by the thin robe of language. As with reverential awe, so with fear and disgust, the tendency is to wrap their objects in the folds of metaphor. Men prefer not to name plainly their god or their dread, but find round-about phrases for the one, and coaxing, flattering titles for the other. The furies and the fates of heathenism, the super- natural beings of modern superstition, must not be spoken of by their own appellations. The recoil of men's hearts from the thing is testified by the aversion of their languages to the bald name — death. And the employment of this special euphemism of sleep is a wonderful witness to our weariness of life, and to its endless
^ Christina G. Rossetti,
PSALM XVII. 15 293
toil and trouble. Everywhere that has seemed to be a comforting and almost an attractive name, which has promised full rest from all the agitations of this changeful scene. The prosperous and the wretched alike have owned the fatigue of living, and been conscious of a soothing expectance which became almost a hope, as they thought of lying still at last with folded hands and shut eyes. The wearied workers have bent over their dead, and felt that they are blessed in this at all events, that they rest from their labours ; and, as they saw them absolved from all their tasks, have sought to propitiate the Power that had made this ease for them, as well as to express their sense of its merciful aspect, by calling it not death, but sleep. But that emblem, true and sweet as it is, is but half the truth.
We shall sleep. Yes ; but we shall wake too. We shall wake just because we sleep. For flesh and all its weakness, and all its disturbing strength, and craving importunities — for the outer world, and all its dissipating, garish shows, and all its sullen resistance to our hand — for weariness, and fevered activity and toil against the grain of our tastes, too great for our strength, disappointing in its results, the end is blessed sleep. And precisely because it is so, therefore for our true selves, for heart and mind, for powers that lie dormant in the lowest and are not stirred into full action in the highest, for all that universe of realities which encompass us undisclosed, and known only by faint murmurs which pierce through the opiate sleep of life, the end shall be an awaking. The spirit, because emancipated from the body, shall spring into greater intensity of action, shall put forth powers that have been held down here, and shall come into contact with an order of things which here it has but indirectly known. To our true selves and to God we shall awake.
^ Heaven will not be pure stagnation, not idleness, not any mere luxurious dreaming over the spiritual repose that has been safely and for ever won ; but active, tireless, earnest work ; fresh, live enthusiasm for the high labours which eternity will offer. These vivid inspirations will play through our deep repose, and make it more mighty in the service of God than any feverish and unsatisfied toil of earth has ever been. The sea of glass will be mingled with fire.^
» Phillips Brooks.
294 THE VISION OF GOD
Ofb have I wakened ere the spring of day, And from my window looking forth have found All dim and strange the long-familiar ground; But soon I saw the mist glide slow away, And leave the hills in wonted green array. While from the stream-sides and the fields around Eose many a pensive day-entreating sound, And the deep-breasted woodlands seemed to pray.
Will it be even so when first we wake Beyond the Night in which are merged all nights, — The soul sleep-heavy and forlorn will ache. Deeming herself mid alien sounds and sights? Then will the gradual Day with comfort break Along the old deeps of being, the old heights?^
2. Death is the revealer of the great reality. — " I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness." "Likeness" is properly "form," and is the same word as is employed in reference to Moses, who saw " the similitude of the Lord." If there be, as is most probable, an allusion to that ancient vision in these words, then the " likeness " is not that conformity to the Divine character which it is the goal of our hopes to possess, but the beholding of His self -manifestation. The parallelism of the verse also points to such an interpretation. If so, then we have here the blessed confidence that, when all the baseless fabric of the dream of life has faded from our opening eyes, we shall see the face of our ever-loving God. Here the distracting whirl of earthly things obscures Him from even the devoutest souls, and His own mighty works which reveal do also conceal. In them is the hiding as well as the showing of His power. But there the veil which draped the perfect likeness, and gave but dim hints through its heavy swathings of the outline of immortal beauty that lay beneath, shall fall away. No longer befooled by shadows, we shall possess the true substance ; no longer bedazzled by shows, we shall behold the reality.