^ Edwaxd Dowden.
)
474 OPEN BIBLE AND BURNING HEART
recollection of our desertion of Him, the uncertainty of His forgiveness, and apprehension lest He should hide His face for ever. If this be so, let us not escape from our sadness by- letting our religion slip away from us or by plunging into the cares and pleasures of life. Eather let us meditate on all the Saviour has done and suffered for us, and the gracious promises He has made to us, and be assured, though we seem to be solitary, He is never really far from us. He can read our thoughts and note our sadness, but if we go on quietly, under the light of His presence, all doubt and anxiety will pass away.^ )
^ When Eobert Louis Stevenson visited the leper settlement at Molokai in 1889 he had as fellow passengers in the boat nursing sisters going to work on the island. " And when I found that one of them was crying, poor soul, quietly under her veil, I cried a little myself. I thought it was a sin and a shame that she should feel unhappy. I turned round to her and said something like this : * Ladies, God Himself is here to give you welcome.' " ^
^ How like my Master it was, to go after those two sorrowing ones on the very day of His triumphant resurrection ! He thought it worth while to walk seven miles, and spend two hours in the work of comforting two obscure, lowly, dejected disciples. He seems never to have spoken, as the Eisen One, to any but sorrowing disciples. And He spoke only comfort ; nothing else. Never a word about their sin ; never a word of reproof ; only words of good cheer, unfolding His own glory, and their glory in following Him. Living Himself in the joy of victory, He only wished them to be sharers in that joy.^
He is not far away:
Why do we sometimes seem to be alone,
And miss the hands outstretched to meet our own ?
He is the same to-day,
As when of old He dwelt
In human form with His disciples — when
He knew the needs of all His fellow-men,
And all their sorrows felt.
Only our faith is dim,
So that our eyes are holden, and we go
All day, and until dusk, before we know
That we have walked with Him>
1 M. Fuller, In Terrd Pax, 59.
2 Letters of Rohert Louis Stevenson, ii. 154.
^ G. H. Knight, 2%e Master's Questions to His Disciples, 329. * E. H. Divall, A Believer's Rest, 89.
ST. LUKE XXIV. 32 475
3. He comforted them by opening to them the Scriptures. By a single word He might have revealed Himself, as when to that early watcher at the sepulchre He said "Mary," and she cast herself at His feet ; or, as He came at evening into the midst of the disciples, saying " Peace be unto you," and showing them His hands and His side. But He chose to deal with them in a different and peculiar way, giving them at first no means of personal recognition, but leading them to a gradual discovery of His true spiritual glory through enlightening in the truth, not showing them so much what was, but what they would have known must have been, if they had understood the Scriptures which they professed to believe. He who spoke to them seemed a chance-met stranger, their eyes were holden that they should not know Him ; but as word after word of ancient inspiration came glowing from His lips, and prophet after prophet passed before them, a long procession of witnesses to that kingly glory of Christ which was to be reached through sufferings, which but through Bufferings never could be reached, it was as if a mist had passed from their eyes — all things were beheld in a new light, and through the veil of His earthly lowliness as they remembered it, could they discern not only the light of the indwelling glory, but in the very crisis of His self-abasement, and sorrow, and weakness as He hung, desolate and forsaken, on the cross, as He cried, " It is finished," and gave up the ghost, as He was borne in the touching helplessness of death to the grave and left there — in all this they could see that which was essential to the consummation of His redeeming work. That lowest, darkest step of all was the necessary initial step to His manifest exaltation. /
Tl Jesus Christ is not only the Interpretation, He is the Inter- preter of the Scriptures, for the Scriptures contain the various efforts of men in different ages and differing degrees of religious development to find God, and Jesus Christ is the solution of this supreme problem of the human spirit. We find in Him to-day the fulfilment of the law and the prophets: we find in Him the explanation of human history; we find in Him the key to all the tragedies of human suffering and shame and sorrow. He is our interpretation of life and death, grief and joy, success and failure. In His light, life grows to us more reasonable, and its mystery more clear. He gives purpose to its least intelligible