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These thoughts are presenting themselves only to reverent and loving souls.
When love interprets what the eye discerns, When mind discovers what is really meant,
When grace improves what man from Nature learns, Each sight and sound becomes a sacrament.
^ There is an experience which I remember well. The time was evening, the scene a valley in a foreign land. The crystalline sky stretched above, lit by the summer moon ; the wide, still lake spread beneath, surrounded by the summer woods; not a cloud in the air ; not a rustle in the leaves ; not a ripple to stir the glassy expanse or break the reflection of the tiny church where it glimmered on its birchen knoll — the whole such a picture of perfect, ethereal, and dreamlike rest that it seemed ready to pass off into spirit before one's very gaze. It was an hour when talk about common things was hushed, and the thoughts went back to the distant and banished. " What a beautiful sky ! " said one of the company. " Yes," was the sudden reply of another, whose words breathed the longing of these lone mountain lands, yet fitted themselves to the mood of us all, — " yes, if we could only see behind." So near may Nature bring us to the heart and the secret of things ! So clear are her tokens ! So thin is her veil ! The spell of the eternal lies upon her. The mystery of the eternal breathes through her. Thanks to faith, we may pass beyond, and, entering through the outer curtain, gaze, and wonder, and worship in the inner shrine ! ^
The world is round me with its heat,
And toil, and cares that tire; I cannot with my feeble feet
Climb after my desire.
But, on the lap of lands unseen,
Within a secret zone. There shine diviner gold and green
Than man has ever known.
And where the silver waters sing,
Down hushed and holy dells. The flower of a celestial spring —
A tenfold splendour dwells. * W. A. Gray, Laws and Landmarks of the Spiritual Life, 20»
124 THE SEEN AND THE UNSEEN
Yea, in my dream of fall and brook
By far sweet forests furled, I see that light for which I look
In vain through all the world.
The glory of a larger sky.
On slopes of hills sublime. That speak with God and Morning, high
Above the ways of Time ! ^
2. It is the unseen things that give meaning to the things which are seen. A man who studies the universe without his thought outrunning hia eye, and his heart distancing his thought, is like a child who fumbles over the letters in his primer without drawing an idea from the word in which the letters meet or an inspiration from the sentence in which the words combine. The body takes its beauty from the invisible spirit that is sheathed in its features of expression and organs of action. The single life gains meaning and becomes worth living because of the subtle threads by which it is bound into the general life and the silken meshes that make it part of the fabric universal. This earth of ours is interesting because inaudible messages flash between it and the farthest star, and because it moves in rhythmic tread with all the flashing host that throng the ethereal plain. History first draws to itself our interested regard because it bends upon an invisible axis, and because its events are spelling out in ever-lengthening lines the wisdom, power, and tenderness of God. Each smallest thing everywhere and always wins character and grace from the ties that relate it to the distant and unsounded, as the bay is tremulous with the tide that throbs out in the bosom of the sea.
^ There is a remarkable passage in Prince Bismarck's Con- versations where he attributes the steadfastness of the German soldiers in the ranks to the deeply-rooted belief in God as order- ing duty. But the virtue of heroes or saints or martyrs tran- scends this. What is its ultimate justification ? How is it defensible that a man should lay down his life for duty, if the law of duty is relative only to this present life ? I do not see a fair escape from this dilemma. Either life is the highest prize that a man possesses, or there is something beyond and above this
* H. C. Eendi^ll, Songs from the Mountains..
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present life, and, if so, something which belongs to the world of things unseen. But the Christian martyr lays down his life, and lays it down rationally, -because in his eyes duty receives its justi- fication not in this world but in the world for which he looks. Hence, self-sacrifice never seems to him a failure. He that loses his life shall save it. There is no possibility of a final antinomy between the law of duty and the law of interest. God has eternity in which to work out His purposes ; and here on earth we touch but the hem of His great providence. The rest is faith. " What I do thou knowest not now ; but thou shalt know here- after." But if this present life is all complete in itself, then we stand face to face with moral contradictions. Virtue does not always succeed. Vice triumphs. It is not always best to do our duty. The poet of to-day, in the new Locksley Hall, has seen with the eye of genius that to deny the eternity of the moral law is to deny the moral law itself —