^ ^ In that famous picture which Holman Hunt has painted of this wonderful scene and utterance in"Hie Saviour's life, there is one fatal blunder, as it appears at least to those who read Jesus with clearest eyes. The Saviour stands in the encu'cling gloom, lamp in hand, through which rays of light stream out upon the dusky archways of the Temple, upon the shadowy forms in the background, and upon His own sad, beautiful face. But it is from the lamp which He carries that the illumination comes. That is the mistake. It ought to have been shown as the irradiation from His own person, the glory of His own face, the sunlight of His own matchless purity, grace, and love. He Himself is the light of the world — not what He taught, but what He was and did. His very incarnation is the world's light. The fact that God could and did dwell in a human form, could speak through human lips, and think through a human mind, and feel the beatings of a human heart, and suffer all human pangs, and render into perfect beauty a human life ; the fact that God's great, awful, mysterious, holy, and loving nature could have its abode in the flesh in a body like our own and glorify it, — that to begin with, and more than all things else, is the light of the world, for it lightens the face of every man that comes into the world.^ ^
2. Christ has. made clear not only the idea of God, hxit the idea of man.
""^(1) The two ideas everywhere interchange, and react the one upon the other. The glory of Christ is that He seized so clearly the spiritual essence of both, and set the great realities of the spiritual life in man in front of the Supreme Spiritual Keality whom He revealed. There is nowhere for a moment any doubt in Christ as to what the true life of man is. He is here and now, a creature of nature, like all other creatures ; but his true life is not natural, like that of the fowls of the air or the lilies of the field. He is essentially a moral being, with relations beyond nature, and wants and aspirations and duties which connect him with a Divine or Supernatural order. From first to last this spiritual conception underlies the Gospels, and makes itself felt in them. There is no argument, because there is no hesitation. " Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment ? "
* J. G. Greenhough, The Cross in Modem Life, 90.
ST. JOHN VIII. 12 353
The possibility of a negative answer is not supposed. The claims of the natural order, some have even thought, are unduly depressed. The spiritual life seems to overshadow and displace them. But this is only by way of emphasis, and in order to rouse man from the dreams of a mere sensual existence. " After all these things do the Gentiles seek " — those who know no better, to whom the meaning of the spiritual and Divine order has not come. " But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteous- ness ; and all these things shall be added unto you." The spiritual must be held in its true place as primary; after this the natural has also its place, and is to be recognized in addition.
(2) But the great thought is, that man is the dependant of a Divine kingdom, everywhere transcending the visible and present world. God has made him in His own image, and loves him, however far he may have degraded that image and wandered away from Divine good. He claims man as His own — as right- fully belonging to the higher world of spiritual intelligence, of which He is the Head. And so Christ came "to seek and to save that which was lost."
Surely this is a higher conception of human life than that of either ancient or modern secularism — a conception truer to the radical instincts of human nature, ever looking beyond the present, and owning the power of more than earth-born thoughts. From the fact of sin itself and a sense of wrong there comes a voice which speaks of something better — of a life akin to angels and to God. The very misery of man attests his greatness, and that there is more in his life, which "appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away," than the experience of a day. Towards this thought the yearnings of all larger hearts, and the searchings of all higher minds, had pointed for centuries. It was the dream alike of Plato and of Cicero, of Egypt and of Persia. Hebrew Prophecy and Psalmody had grasped it more firmly as the Divine shone upon them more clearly. Yet withal it remained a comparative uncertainty before Christ. He, as no one before Him had 'done, held forth before men the conception of a higher life, greater than all the prizes of earth, and more enduring than all the accidents of time. That which was but faintly apprehended by Gentile philosopher, or even Jewish seer ST. JOHN — 23 »
354 THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD
was made manifest by the appearing and resurrection of our Lord, "who hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel." As St. Peter says in his First Epistle, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath be- gotten us again irnto a lively hope, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible, and unde- filed, and that fadeth not away."