III.
God as Comforteb.
1. The last touch in this picture sets forth the Eternal God as the Comforter of His saved people. "And God shall wipe away every tear from their eyes." Through all earthly vicissitudes He had been their light and salvation, illuminating their gloom, turning their mourning into joy, and appointing them beauty for ashes. It is an old relationship that He resumes and consummates. Not only is He the object of worship upon the throne ; He comes nearer still to the redeemed multitude, heaHng all the smarts of earth, and dispersing the last memory of pain. The great tribula- * D. S. Schaflf, The Life of PUlijp Schaf, 448.
2i6 THE LAMB AS A SHEPHERD
tion leaves no scar or tear-stain upon the ransomed universe. The description reaches completeness in this exquisite and com- prehensive promise. We can imagine a man placed under sunlit skies, breathing the exhilarating air of a new-created world, look- ing forth upon domains of unshadowed beauty, secure against privation and distress, welcomed into rare and gladdening fellow- ships, and yet sighing at some plaintive memory of the past, or chilled by the uprising of a bygone trouble. But these final words of the text leave no room for such forebodings. In winning and gentle friendship, God comes to each spirit of the redeemed from among men, and sweetens every hidden spring of bitterness and distress. We may be tempted to think that there are tragic and haunting memories which will steal into the high and holy place. Some griefs are so vast and mysterious that they threaten to make us pensive amidst the angels. It is difficult to see how some distresses can be obliterated, for no finite ministry can conjure them into oblivion. But the things impossible to the uttermost human sympathy and gentleness are possible to God. When God puts His hand upon the fountain of mortal tears, the fountain is sealed up for ever.
If The eldest of the three [Ladies of Sorrow] is named Mater Lachrymarum, Our Lady of Tears. She it is that night and day raves and moans, calling for vanished faces. She stood in Kama, where a voice was heard of lamentation — Eachel weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted. She it was that stood in Bethlehem on the night when Herod's sword swept its nurseries of Innocents, and the little feet were stiffened for ever which, heard at times as they trotted along floors overhead, woke pulses of love in household hearts that were not unmarked in heaven. Her eyes are sweet and subtle, wild and sleepy, by turns ; oftentimes rising to the clouds, oftentimes challenging the heavens. She wears a diadem round her head. And I knew by childish memories that she could go abroad upon the winds, when she heard the sobbing of litanies, or the thundering of organs, and when she beheld the mustering of summer clouds. This Sister, the elder, it is that carries keys more than Papal at her girdle, which open every cottage and every palace. She, to my know- ledge, sat all last summer by the bedside of the blind beggar, him that so often and so gladly I talked with, whose pious daughter, eight years old, with the sunny countenance, resisted the tempta- tions of play and village mirth, to travel all day long on dusty
REVELATION vii. 17 217
roads with her afflicted father. For this did God send her a great reward. In the spring-time of the year, and whilst yet her own spring was budding, He recalled her to Himself. But her blind father mourns for ever over her ; still he dreams at midnight that the little guiding hand is locked within his own ; and still he wakens to a darkness that is now within a second and a deeper darkness. This Mater Lachrymarum also has been sitting all this winter of 1844-45 within the bedchamber of the Czar, bringing before his eyes a daughter (not less pious) that vanished to God not less suddenly, and left behind her a darkness not less profound. By the power of the keys it is that Our Lady of Tears glides, a ghostly intruder, into the chambers of sleepless men, sleepless women, sleepless children, from Ganges to the Nile, from Nile to Mississippi. And her, because she is the first-born of her house, and has the widest empire, let us honour with the title of " Madonna." ^
2. What need that God should wipe away the tears when the Lamb has led to the living waters ? Would not joy follow as a matter of course ? If our hunger and thirst have been taken away, if our eyes have already rested on the sparkling fountains, surely God need not interpose to dry our tears ; will not Nature do that ? No. One's first joy is not brought back by restoring one's first surroundings. Grief itself robs us of something; it breaks the elastic spring. The child cries after it has ceased to be hurt. The hurt has put it in the valley, and the painlessness cannot at once lift it to the mountain. Someone must put right the spring, must restore the capacity for joy. The fountains in vain will sparkle if the heart has lost it« shining. And so, this one ray, the tenderest of the heavenly vision — one bar, the sweetest of the heavenly music — marks the close of the text. It reminds us of perhaps the noblest passage in Handel — the Dead March in " Saul." When the music surges free and escapes all gloom in the great burst of joy after the funeral wail, then at its highest there comes in a tremulous minor strain which makes the glorious vision of the swelling triumph more heroic and exultant as we see it through tears. Another touch could not be added to the vision ; but it can be made more thrilling and pathetic by a hint of the " great tribulation " that is gone, by flashing it for a moment and unexpectedly through the dimming tears once so sad and familiar ; * De Quincey, Suspiria De Profundis ( WorkSy xiii. 365).