The vision of the unseen has this power. It interprets and transforms life. In this way "our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory." We are to get the clue to the mystery of life, we are to cease to be puzzled by the pain and suffering. The meaning and end of the seen are hidden in the unseen. To see with any clearness the end will help to interpret the ways by which it is reached. Light from the unseen will give an inter- pretative value to life and its trials, and with the vision will come the transformation. That which was a tangled puzzle will solve itself when viewed from a right standpoint. Now St. Paul was always a traveller through the seen to the unseen, where he found the Aladdin's lamp which revealed the meaning of his present affliction, which, though often sore, became " light," working not sores in him, but rather great glory. And so it is that here the mind of the Apostle is overwhelmed by the contrast between the seen and the unseen, and, as he rises in his flight of contemplation, the calamities of earth dwindle into insignificant smallness till there is nothing visible but glory.
Yet, strange to say, he describes the glory by an old earthly metaphor, by the very metaphor, indeed, which he used to apply to his afflictions ; he calls it a weight. We speak of a weight of care, a weight of sorrow, a weight of anxiety; but a weight of glory ! — surely that is a startling symbol. We do not think of a man as being crushed, overwhelmed, weighed down by glory. We should have thought that the old metaphor of care would be repulsive, that it would be cast off like a worn-out garment
2 COR. IV. 17 109
and remembered no more for ever. But the old garment is not worn out when the glory comes, it is only transfigured; that which made our weight of care is that which makes our weight of glory. We need not a new object but a new light — to see by day what we have seen only in darkness.
^ What is the use of all our reading and writing and speaking and thinking about God, and His love, and His care over us, if we are to see in an affliction nothing more than the distress which it brings ? There is something else in the affliction besides this distress, and that something is God's love and eternal life. And the only use of all our reading, etc., is to fix our attention on this which is enclosed within the affliction, instead of having it engrossed by the envelope — the outward form in which God sends it.^
^ If from the shores of eternity we cast back our ga^e over the path we have travelled in this world, which regions will shine most brightly and beautifully in the view ? Not, I think, those that have seemed to be joyous in the passing — not the years of youth and health and strength and earthly happiness — but much rather the spaces that here have seemed perhaps the darkest and dreariest ; for these have drawn us nearer to God, these have been fullest of prayer, on these have fallen the purest, brightest rays from the Father of lights and from Him who is the brightness of that Father's glory and the Light of the World.^
II.
The Duration of Affliction.
1. Affliction is often life-long, as the Apostle well knew. Why then does he call it momentary ? He compares it with what is unseen and eternal. He looks away from seen vicissitudes to unseen possessions. These vicissitudes may be manifold. They may be constant. There is the change from health to sickness. There is the change from wealth to poverty. There is the change from companionship to solitude. But let a man look away from them all, from the seen mutations to the unseen certitudes, and what then ? Why, then he thinks of a place prepared where the inhabitant says no more, " I am sick " ; of a treasure laid up
1 Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, i. 246. '^ Bishop Walsham How, Pastoi- in Parochid.
no AN ETERNAL WEIGHT OF GLORY
"where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal " ; of a friendship that neither fails nor falters, but is always faithful, always sure, and always near. Who shall separate us from the love of God ? Who shall exclude us from the grace of Christ ? Who shall deprive us of the communion of the Holy Ghost? These form abiding realities, which the shocks of circumstance are as powerless to change as the rocking earthquake is to ruffle the pure blue sky, or disturb the solemn marching of its silent stars. So may we all, receiving a kingdom that cannot be moved, serve God acceptably and with godly fear.
2. Although St. Paul places the emphasis on the eternal, he does not despise the present. He was far too healthy-minded a man to rail at a summer day because it does not last, or to depreciate the beautiful home in which the great God has placed us here because this, some day, has to make way for another ; he was far too human to depreciate friendship or love because there are partings and families are broken up. He was not so much absorbed in the thought of death as to forget the warmth, the majesty, and the mystery of being alive at all ; and therefore those completely travesty St. Paul's philosophy of life who fix their eyes so exclusively on another world that they take no interest in this, or who are so absorbed in thinking of the God whom they have not seen that they have no eyes to see and care for the brother whom they have seen. No, he calls these things, not unimportant, but temporal. And what he means evidently is this : that underneath the seen and passing things, here and now and in our midst, is a world of unseen reality ; that " heaven lies about us," not only, as the poet says, " in our infancy," but all our days ; that these unseen realities make use of the seen, but exist independently of them ; that it is possible as we walk the earth day by day to have our head above the mists in heaven ; that our calling is to be eternal beings in a world of time, and that the real test of the use of life is what life leaves us when it has passed away.