(4) The water of the fountain is always seeking to rise to the level from which it came. This makes the very life and beauty of the fountain. So will it be with " the fountain of life." It will
^ James Vaughan.
* J. Robertson, in Sunday Magazine, 1881, p. 704.
144 LIFE AND LIGHT
always be mounting to the height, the heavenly height from which it sprang, bearing us up and up to that world from which it came; and though it never reaches it, it will aspire to it ; it will always be nearing it, continually approaching the heaven of its birth, the God of its creation.
^ It is difficult to be always true to ourselves, to be always what we wish to be, what we feel we ought to be. As long as we feel that, as long as we do not surrender the ideal of our life, all is right. Our aspirations represent the true nature of our soul much more than our everyday life.^
Alas ! long-suffering and most patient God, Thou needst be surelier God to bear with us Than even to have made us ! Thou aspire, aspire From henceforth for me ! Thou who hast Thyself Endured this fleshhood, knowing how as a soaked And sucking vesture it can drag us down And choke us in the melancholy Deep, Sustain me, that with Thee I walk these .waves, Eesisting! — breathe me upward, Thou in me Aspiring, who art the way, the truth, the life, — That no truth henceforth seem indifferent. No way to truth laborious, and no life, Not even this life I live, intolerable ! *
11.
The Source of Light,
" In thy light shall we see light."
God is " the Father of lights." The sun and all the stars are only lights kindled by Him. It is the very crown of revelation that " God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." Light seems to the unscientific eye, which knows nothing about undulations of a luminiferous ether, to be the least material of material things. All joyous things come with it. It brings warmtli and fruit, joyfulness and life. Purity, and gladness, and knowledge have been symbolized by it in all tongues. The Scripture uses light, and the sun, which is its source, as an emblem for God in His holiness and blessedness and omniscience.
' Max Milller. ' E. B. Browuing.
PSALM XXXVI. 9 145
The Psalmist saw the World all full of seekers after light ; he was a seeker after light himself. What he had discovered, and what he wanted to tell men, was that the first step in a hopeful search after light must be for a man to put himself into the element of light, which is God. The first thing for any man to do who wanted knowledge was to put himself under God, to make himself God's man ; because both he who wanted to know and that which he wanted to know had God for their true element and were their best and did their best only as they lived in Him.
^ When I try to describe to myself this thought of David about man's seeing all light in the light of God, no picture like the picture of a true and docile childhood seems to me to express it. A child in his father's house learns everything within the intelligence and character of his father, who has provided all things there, and is perpetually throwing light upon their proper use. Everything has its own qualities, but those qualities are made distinct and vivid to the child by their relation to the master of the house. Not purely in themselves, but in his father's use of them and in their relationship to him does the child come to know the tools of the workshop, the furniture of the parlour, and all the apparatus of domestic life. So, I believe, it is with the child's knowledge of the larger house, the world-house, of which God is the Father.i
1. Nothing is seen in its own light — not even a visible thing. A landscape is not seen in its own light ; it is perceived very much in the light of yesterday. How little of what you see is mere perception ! Every sight of nature is tinged with the light of memory. The poet looks from the bridge at midnight upon the rushing waters ; but what he sees is not the flowing tide ; it is a tide of memory that fills his eyes with tears. You listen to the babbling of the brook ; but what you hear is not the babbling, it is the utterance of a dear name. You visit Eome, you visit Jerusalem, you visit Greece ; do you see any of these by its own light ? No ; they are all beheld by the light of yesterday ; there is their glory, there lies their gold ! " Even so," cries the Psalmist, " it is with this world ; if you want to see it, you must look at it by the light of another world — God's coming world." He does not mean that when we quit the scenes of earth we shall have bright light in heaven. It is more than that. It is for the scenes ^ P. Brooks, Sermons Preached in English Churches, 104. PS. XXV.-CXIX. 10