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" searching all the inward parts of the moral nature." This inward lamp " lighteth every man that coraeth into the world." The multitudes of our race destitute of the written revelation have nevertheless this inward revelation. The human spirit instinctively apprehends certain great spiritual truths without reasoning upon them. " For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves ; which show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile accusing or else excusing one another." The human spirit is a revelation from God and is itself a Divine Scripture as sacred as the written "Word itself. It may be darkened by the mist and ♦miasma arising from the corruptions of our nature, so also may the written revelation be perverted and beclouded by ignorance, prejudice, by selfish passions and unbelief, but this inward lamp is extinguished in none, not even in the most savage or debased of the human race. Under every possible condition of life, the spirit of man witnesses, with voices more or less distinct, to certain great funda- mental verities relating to both God and man.
% In the " Odes of Solomon," we read (Ode 25) : " Thou didst set me a lamp at my right hand, and at my left, and in me there shall be nothing without Light, and I was clothed with the covering of thy Spirit, and I have risen above that of skin, for thy right hand lifted me up, and removed sickness from me, and I became mighty in the truth, and holy by thy righteousness." Again we read (Ode 40) : " My spirit exults in His love, and in Him my soul shines."
The Spirit of Man is a Lamp.
The ancient world believed that fire and life were one and the same thing. Life was a flame, a lamp, a torch. The human soul was of the nature of fire ; and fire, being the common element of the gods and their creatures, was the soul of the universe. Now the ancients were entirely right as regards animal life, for that depends upon the constant burning up of the food which we eat, by the help of the air which we breathe. Our bodies move about
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and are warm, just like so many locomotive steam-engines because of the fire that is always burning within them. Life is really a fire, and the food we eat is the fuel that feeds it. And so one of the heathen images for death, which we see sometimes on gravestones and cemetery gates, is a torch turned upside down.
But man is a complex, compound, mysterious being, possessing a threefold nature, — body, mind, spirit — these three, and the greatest of these is the spirit. The hocly demands light, air, food, clothing, a habitation to dwell in. The mind is the thinking, the reasoning power ; with this he acquires knowledge of men, of things, of the universe, of its laws and forces. The spirit is the religious, the worshipping part of his nature. This renders him capable of receiving God, of enjoying God, of communing with God, and of resembling God. " There is a spirit in man : and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding." God may pass through a rock, but that rock cannot be inspired, for it has no spirit. God may pass through the animal, but the animal cannot be inspired, for it has no spiritual nature. It would be out of place and unnatural to speak of an inspired dog or an inspired horse ; but man, in the possession of spirit, may be conscious of the incoming, the indwelling of the Spirit of God. That Divine Spirit can, and does occasionally, communicate to the human spirit thoughts and feelings that can find full expression only in ex- claiming with Paul " whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell : God knoweth."
1. The spirit is a lamp because it is endowed with the light of reason. The Book of Proverbs lays great stress upon in- struction and understanding ; it commends knowledge as one of the main paths that lead to a full and worthy life, and that because all true knowledge culminates in the knowledge of God. Religious people have not always had a fitting appreciation of the worth of knowledge : they have occasionally talked as if reason were the enemy of faith, and as though we had to choose between head and heart — or rather as though the head had to be cut off in order that the heart might beat the more strongly ! But there is no conflict between faith and reason, between religion and science ; we need not turn down the lamp of the understanding in order to
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luxuriate in some dim religious light, so-called. As the Apostle says, " Ye are all sons of light, and sons of the day : we are not of the night, nor of darkness." All truth is from God — all truth leads to God ; let us welcome it and trust it ; let us " hear instruc- tion, and refuse it not."