Just on the outside of man's dream,
In diapason slow we think.
To hear their pinions rise and sink
While they float pure beneath His eyes
Like swans adown a stream.
Things nameless, which in passing so, Do touch us with a subtle grace, We say, Who passes ? They are dumb, We cannot see them go or come ; Their touches fall, soft, cold as snow Upon a blind man's face.
^ It is a marvellous but familiar fact that, when an orchestra is playing, the ear of the listener can so concentrate itself upon one particular class of sounds in the united harmony — the note
2 COR. IV. i8 121
of the clarionet, the note of the violoncello — as to hear that alone ; the rest subordinate, if not all but extinguished. Mysterious truth, showing that even in the realm of physical nature we do not see with the eye only, or hear with the ear only, but with the brain, or something more spiritual still that lies behind eye and ear. And so it is, not less but more so, with the visions and melodies addressed to man's eternal part. We see what we wish to see among all the sights that tempt our souls; and we hear what we wish and set ourselves to hear. We can see only the temporal, if all we wish is to see the temporal ; and we can see the eternal, if our desire is to see the eternal.^
2. Both worlds minister to us. If we were to track the first steps in the growth of a flower just emerging from the seed we should discover, upon the cracking open of the seed, that one minute vegetable fibre commences presently to be pressed thence away up through the overlying soil into the air and the light, and another vegetable thread begins, at the same time, to wind itself away down through the underlying soil into the ground beneath. If now we sink a single delicate thought into the botanical fact just stated, we shall see that that very process of groping up into the air of one part of its nature, and at the same time groping down into the deep places of the earth with the other part of its nature, is a statement in miniature, and a quiet prophecy, of the double affinity with which the plant is endowed, and the twin congeniality with which it has been by God made instinct.
Man similarly buds in two directions; he, too, is underlaid with a twin tendency. He is divinely endowed with one impulse that tends to push him out into the world, and into the association of things that lie easily in sight, and he is endowed also with a companion impulse that inclines to conduct him into the fellow- ship of things upon which the sun does not shine. But each, like the soil under the plant, offers to become to him the means of his life, and the material for his fixity, his power, and his hope.
^ The idealizing of the outer world is one of God's ways of
teaching us to see the beauty and fineness that lie hidden in the
uncouth and rough and commonplace ; the victory that waits our
grasp within every difficulty. It spells out for us the great
^ A- Ainger, The Gospel and Human Life, 161.
122 THE SEEN AND THE UNSEEN
simple secret Paul had learned : while we look not at the things that are seen, but at the things that are not seen ; for the things that are seen are often coarse and commonplace and are only for a passing hour ; but the things that are not seen are full of beauty and power, and last for ever. The God-touched eye sees through fog and smoke to the unseen harbour beyond. It insists on steering steady and straight regardless of the storm overhead, and the rock or snag underneath. There is a victory in hiding in every knotty difficulty. Every trying circumstance contains a song of gladness waiting to be freed by our touch. Each disheartening condition can be made to grow roses.^
II.
The Seen Interprets the Unseen.
1. Only by looking at the things that are seen do we gain any idea of the unseen. " All visible things," said Carlyle, " are emblems. What thou seest is not there on its own account; strictly speaking, is not there at all. Matter exists only spiritu- ally, and to represent some idea and body it forth." And so John Kuskin : — " The more I think of it, I find this conclusion more impressed upon me — that the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think ; but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion — all in one."
Nature is a mirror of the Unseen. The world around is an ever-present witness to us of the existence of things unseen. The world of Nature — that ever-changing world, the world of that which is ever being born out of the life of God, the world in which we may look upon ever-new manifestations of the great life of the Divine One — that itself is an ever-present token of a Presence Divine. The Sacramentalism of Nature — for such is the name we may give to this great principle — is presenting itself to the minds of men with increasing vividness. "The things that are made " are being more and more discerned as suggestive to the human mind of thoughts respecting " the invisible things of God." ' S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Home Ideals, 17.