146 LIFE AND LIGHT
of earth he wants the heavenly light. He says you cannot interpret your own skies without it. "We often say that in the light of eternity earthly objects will fade from our sight. But the Psalmist says that, until we get the light of eternity, earthly objects will never be in our sight. It is by the light of the Celestial City — the City which has no need of the sun — that alone we can tell what here is large and what here is small.
^ Jesus knew the streets of Jerusalem and the lanes of Galilee and the history of His mysterious Hebrew people, and the hearts of the lilies and the souls of men ; but He knew them all differently from the way in which the Hebrew scribes and scholars knew them. To Him they were all full of light. There is no other description of His knowledge that can tell its special and peculiar character like that. It was all full of light. And the other peculiarity of it was just as clear. It was full also of God. He knew everything as God's child in God's house. The history of the prophets and the heart of the lily both meant something about His Father. These two peculiarities belonged together. The world was full of light to Him because it was full of God. It was God's light in which He saw the deeper light in everything.^
2. If we need God's light to appreciate natural beauty and to grasp intellectual truth, much more do we need it to apprehend spiritual realities. It is in communion with Him who is the Light as well as the Life of men that we see a whole universe of glories, realities, and brightnesses. Where other eyes see only darkness, we behold " the King in his beauty, and the land that is very far off." Where other men see only cloudland and mists, our vision will pierce into the unseen, and there behold "the things which are," the only real things, of which all that the eye of sense sees are the fleeting shadows, seen as in a dream, while these are the true, and the sight of them is sight indeed. They who see by the light of God, and see light therein, have a vision which is more than imagination, more than opinion, more than belief. It is certitude. Communication with God does not bring with it superior intellectual perspicuity, but it does bring a per- ception and an experience of spiritual realities and relations, which, in respect of clearness and certainty, may be called sight. Many of us walk in darkness, who, if we were but in communion with
' P. Brooks, Sermons Preached in Emjlish Churclus, 105.
PSALM XXXVI. 9 147
God, would see the lone hillside blazing with chariots and horses of fire. Many of us grope in perplexity, who, if we were but hiding under the shadow of God's wings, would see the truth and walk at liberty in the light which is knowledge and purity and joy.
(1) It needs a God to make God knoivn. — Light has this pro- perty, that it is at once the vehicle and that which is borne by the vehicle ; it is the revelation and its channel, and this twofold property of light remains the same whether we regard it as the old school of physicists did — as an actual emanation of particles ; or as the new school do — as only an undulation or vibration of some invisible ether itself at rest. The oft-quoted line of the poet, that we may rise from nature up to nature's God, then, is either a truism or a sophism ; a truism if we mean only that nature reveals something of God's character while it conceals the rest ; a sophism, if we mean that man, by the unassisted light of his natural faculties, is able to discover the invisible things of God. We can know God only by Himself. The light must be Divine by which we see that there is anything whatever Divine to see and behold.
^ When Dante has reached the Ninth of the Heavenly Spheres he catches his first glimpse of the Godhead, the Central Point on which " Heaven and all Nature hangs," surrounded by nine circles of fire, which he is told are the nine choirs of angelic beings. But though he can see them in their operation, his virion is too imperfect to see them as they are. He must drinl< of the Eiver of Light. Then he beholds the Eose of the Blessed, with its myriads of saints. But still he is unable to see God. The Virgin Mary procures this grace for him, and gazing on the Central Point he sees three circles, like rainbows, and, being illuminated by a flash of Divine Light, he comprehends the mystery of the Holy Trinity and of the Incarnation.
(2) Only in God's light can we tridy see ourselves. — We wish really to know ourselves, our own real being and position. What are we ? Where do we stand in the scale of God's creation, as God sees us? We are so many things wrapped up in one; we are, alas ! a mass of contradictions — so very different at different times. What am I ? What am I, as an angel sees me ? As truth sees me ? As God sees me ? What am I ? I grow so perplexed when I go down into the dark depths of my own soul.