^ Milton, in Paradise Lost, wrote these words about the sun- beams and the dew: "Morn advancing sowed the earth with orient pearl." And when, with this thought in our minds, we
272 LIGHT AND GLADNESS
look up on a winter night to the starry sky, does that not seem like an immense concave field sown all over with light ? ^
I.
Sown Light.
1. It is no merely fanciful use of the words, " light is sown," to suggest that, in a literal sense, light has been sown for our harvesting in those vast buried forests which constitute our coal- fields, and are the source of nearly all our artificial light and heat. The sunbeams that streamed through long millenniums upon our planet were absorbed by those giant ferns and conifers that flourished in what geologists call the Carboniferous period, and were afterwards submerged and overlaid with other deposits ; and after having been imprisoned in the depths and the darkness for long ages, like seed in the soil, the light of those beams is now breaking forth once more for the illumination and service of man.
^ George Stephenson, the inventor of the locomotive engine, was once standing with Dean Buckland, the famous geologist, and others upon the terrace of Sir Robert Peel's mansion at Drayton Manor, when a railway train flashed along in the distance, throwing behind it a long trail of white steam. " Now, Dr. Buckland," said Stephenson, "can you tell me what is the power that is driving that train ? " " Well," said the Dean, " I suppose it is one of your big engines." " But what drives the engine ? " " Oh, very likely a canny Newcastle driver." " What do you say to the light of the sun ? " " How can that be ? " asked the Dean. " It is nothing else," replied the engineer ; " it is light bottled up in the earth for tens of thousands of years and now, after being buried in the earth for long ages in the fields of coal, the latent light is again brought forth and liberated ; made to work, as in that engine, for great motive purposes." That answer was itself a flash of illumination to the mind of the man of science, and there is more meaning in it than even Buckland or Stephenson himself ever dreamed. For, since that day, not only has light produced by the combustion of coal gas become the chief means of artificial illumination to all civilized nations, but mineral oils derived from the same source are also largely used, and it is the pent-up force of the sunbeam locked up in the coal
' C. Jerdan.
PSALM xcvii. II 273
that drives our motor-cars, and, transformed into heat, generates the power which we transmute again into light in the form of the electric beam. Hundreds of thousands of years ago the light was sown, and now the harvest is being reaped.^
2, A seed is a germ. When, therefore, we say that God has sown the light for us, we mean that He gives us our blessings in germ, not in full form — that they come to us, not developed into completeness of beauty, but as seeds which we must plant, wait- ing, sometimes waiting long, for them to grow into loveliness. A seed does not disclose all the beauty of the life that is folded up within it. We see only a little brown and unsightly hull which gives no prophecy of anything so beautiful as springs from it when it has been planted. These facts in nature have their analogies in the seeds of spiritual blessing which God sows for us. The blessing does not appear : what does appear is often unlovely in its form, giving in itself no promise of good. Yet it is a seed carrying in it the potency of life and the possibilities of great blessing. Every duty that comes to our hand in the common days is a seed of light which God has sown for us. Some seeds are dark and rough as we look upon them ; so there are duties that have in them no promise of joy or pleasure as they first present themselves to us. They look hard and repulsive, and we shrink from doing them, but every one knows that there is in the faithful doing of every duty a strange secret of joy; and the harder the duty, the fuller and the richer is the sense of gladness that follows its performance.
God's angels drop like grains of gold
Our duties 'midst life's shining sands. And from them, one by one, we mould
Our own bright crown with patient hands. From dust and dross we gather them ; We toil and stoop for love's sweet sake To find each worthy act a gem In glory's kingly diadem Which we may daily richer make.
*[j It has been said that faith in God and belief in immortality were Browning's sources of inspiration. It is not possible to say that of all our poets — perhaps not of any in the same degree as of
1 J. Halsey. PS. XXV.-CXIX. — 18
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him. One other great poet of the Victorian age, Tennyson, may be very properly described as a religious poet. He, too, treats of the eternal mysteries of God and the universe, and the awful problems of life and death ; but where Tennyson whispers, or speaks with bated breath. Browning sends forth a clear, distinct, ringing voice — where the former " faintly trusts," the latter avows a confidence which nought can disturb, and which int:.pires faith in the more timid and halting of his fellows around him. What Browning makes the Pope say in " The Eing and the Book," he might have said of himself with perfect truthfulness :