01 - Light
NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE CHAPTER I: LIGHT
“I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” These words, with which Thomas a Kempis begins his “Imitation of Christ,” refer to the moment in the Feast of Tabernacles at which the two great candelabra, unused at other times, were lighted up in the court of the temple, so that the light they gave shone over the whole city. Our Lord takes them as a symbol of his own position as the giver of spiritual light to mankind. He says in effect: *T am the light, not of your city only, or of your nation alone, but of the whole earth. He that followeth me, in whatever corner of the world, shall he not stumble as one that walks in the darkness. He shall have the light he needs to live by — the light that gives life.” The parable is not a new one. Light as a symbol of a spiritual blessing is recognized in all the religions of the world, especially that of Persia. In the Old Testament, notably in Job, Isaiah, and the Psalms, light is thus used. It is more spoken of in the Gospel of John than in any other part of the New Testament, and with one exception (John 5:35), always as connected with the personality of our Lord and his influence upon men. Both the evangelist and our Lord himself find in light the natural fact which most resembles that divine activity, by which he was working upon his own people and upon the world at large.
It was as a symbol of this divine influence that light itself was created. It was the firstborn of creation, for God said, “Let there be light!” before he called order out of chaos. It was even then the visible symbol of that divine word of God, by whom “the world was framed,” of him without whom “was not anything made that hath been made.” The Fourth Gospel, with that Genesis narrative kept in mind throughout, describes our Lord as the spiritual sun, sustaining a relation to the spirits of men as universal as that of the natural sun to the physical life of our planet — as “the true light, even the light which lighteth every man, coming into the world,” although too often shining in the darkness and not apprehended.
Natural light is a many-sided fact, and it is worth while to study its functions to see what help they give us to understand the workings of that divine light which it symbolizes.
I. The nature of the natural light was a mystery to those who first investigated it. They supposed it to be a very subtle substance, poured into our planet from the sun; but this we know to be impossible. The most refined material substance, if hurled upon our planet at the rate light moves — ninety-five million miles in eight minutes — would destroy it utterly. This more material conception has been replaced by the view that light is a subtle force, transmitted in waves of an all-pervading ether, and reaching every part of the universe, from the great centers of light and heat we call suns. Our Lord’s association of light with life corresponds to the natural fact. It gives force and vitality to vegetable existence, and health and joy to animal existence. It circulates in every vein and tingles in every nerve of the animal world.
Take it away, and the plant dies; the animal wilts. So the nature of both plant and animal craves the light. There are, indeed, fish in the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, which never have had a ray of light fall upon them, and their eyes have all but disappeared, having been “atrophied through disuse.” But they are a poor kind of fish, degenerate descendants of those which lived in the light of day. Those of us who have tried to live and work in rooms, whose windows open only to the north, find how needful the direct light of the sun is to physical health. The vegetable world illustrates this craving of life for light in very striking ways. I once went into a darkened cellar, which the light penetrated at but one small window, darkened by cobwebs. At the other end of that cellar lay a few potatoes, which had budded and sent out long runners, some twenty feet in length and ghastly white, toward that distant window. It was as pathetic a sight as the vegetable world could furnish, and a parable too palpable for anyone to miss. The spiritual Light of the world is the subtlest and most pervasive of the forces which act upon humanity. Like the light of day, he moves through men’s lives silently, swiftly, with no blare of trumpets or prancing of processions, but as gently as the dew falls upon the grass, or the sunlight shines into the opening flowers. He does not cry aloud In the world’s market places, nor is he heralded In Its newspapers; but he passes to and fro, in ceaseless and unmeasured energy among the hearts of men. His knock at the door is as quiet as the sunshine which awakens them every day from sleep; but if any man open unto him, there he dwells in lasting and life-giving influence, making his home. Our natures were made for this Light, and they crave it as pathetically as those potatoes craved for the light of day. As Tertullian says, “The soul is naturally Christian,” for we were made for him, and can have no lasting satisfaction apart from him. But we are not bound to him by the compulsion of natural law, for we have the fatal power to choke and deny our craving for him.
“They will not come unto me that they may have light,” he himself said of his own countrymen.
He can be no more to us than we choose to have him be. He knocks at the door, but it is ours to open. If we refuse to open it, we are shutting out the health of our spirits; for the holiness he brings is the health of the heart. It is walking in the light, and living the true life in the true way.
11. Light is the parent of color, and color is the natural symbol of joy. We have come to know what color is through the study of light. We now know that nothing has color in itself, but only through the fitness of its surface to absorb some of the rays of which light is composed, and to reflect the rest. “All cats are black in the dark,” it has been said. So are all flowers; so are all people. It is only under the light that differences ’ in color exist. What would have been a dull, colorless, and cheerless world, is arrayed by light in all the colors of the spectrum. So in the human world, joy is the child of the light. Counterfeits of joy there may be without it — amusements, diversions, pastimes, and distractions. But, as each of these words confesses by its first and strict sense, these are but devices to kill time, and to keep us from thinking with the gravity and sincerity which befit human beings.
It is impossible that they should fill our hearts or satisfy our inborn craving for joy. We are so made that the whole world, apart from God, is not enough for us. That is our glory and our pain. That is the hunger which devoured the heart of the prodigal in the far-off land of riot and waste.
God means joy for us. He does not mean us to accept what George Macdonald calls “the gray look of life” as the true one. It is not for a colorless and cheerless existence, even of duty, that he has made us, but for gladness and happiness. So his Son is the joy-bringer. He established a kingdom, which is not only “righteousness and peace,” but “joy in the Holy Ghost.” The truth of this is seen in the lives of the first Christians, who had very little of what the world calls wealth, who stood daily in peril of their lives; who were despised by their fellow-men as little better than mad. There is no body of literature in the world that is pervaded by such an uplift of a great joy as is the New Testament. They abounded in joy, and even “took joyfully the spoiling of their goods.”
III. Photography shows that there are rays of color in the spectrum both above and below those which our eyes can distinguish. In some, the vibration of the waves of the ether is too rapid for our eyes to follow; in others too slow. If our eyes had a wider range, we should discover in the natural world a wealth of color, as real as our reds, blues, and greens, in addition to that which we now see. When we get better eyes than we now have, we will see them. So in the spiritual world, we are told, there are heights and depths of joy of which we in this life can know nothing. We cannot even imagine them, the apostle says after having had a glimpse of them (1 Corinthians 2:9). But as the color we see suggests and makes credible to us the color which is beyond our seeing, so the joy we already have makes it possible for us to believe in a gladness and a delight beyond our experience, and we come to look for a rapture of peace and contentment better than earth has at its best. “Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord,” are the words which lo NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE welcome faithful servants into the life beyond death. What that joy is we are able to guess from the language of our Lord, when he speaks of “joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.” It is the joy of lifting up the fallen, comforting the sorrowful, welcoming the lost — the rapture which lights up heaven with a fresh gladness to its uttermost bounds, when the Father welcomes back a lost son. In that great fellowship of joy and service, the boundless yearnings, and the unsatisfied capacities of our human nature, will find their fit satisfaction —
“New senses, new rewards of sense, The spectrum filled, all dark lines bright.”
IV. It is through light that we learn the real magnitude of all things in our natural life. We are dependent upon sight for our sense of size and distance. The baby grasps at the plaything either too far or too near to catch it, until he learns to measure distances by focusing his eyes.
If we waken in a dark room and try to find the door, especially if the room and its contents be not familiar to us, we seem to go miles in search of it. It is through light that we perceive the bulk of things.
It is in the Light which Jesus Christ is and imparts that we learn the true magnitudes of life, and discover the smallness of the small and the greatness of the great. Very much of our Lord’s own teaching is directed to this difference. He labors to bring his hearers to discern what is great enough to be worthy of their attention, and what is small enough to be a negligible quantity. This, for instance, is his leading purpose in the parables of the precious pearl, and of the treasure hid in the field. He applauds the business man’s sense of what is best worth having, and his acting promptly and without reserve on ascertained values. On the other hand, he warns us all against the mistake of assuming that the best worth our having is what the world counts as such, and rebukes men for taking the measures of the market place for those which really test success in life. Not the honor of men, but the approval of God; not the meat and clothing which cherish material life, but life itself, which is more than a living; not the “much goods laid up in store,” but the riches a man can carry beyond death, he insists are worthy of our aroused attention. “True religion,” says Jonathan Edwards, “is nothing but to know small things to be small, and great things to be great, and to act on that knowledge.”
V. The natural light not only moves on straight lines, but is reflected and refracted into Spaces it would not reach directly. If it were not, there would be entire darkness wherever the rays of the sun did not fall. The electric light has very Httle power of refraction, so the shadows it casts are very deep, and it is necessary to clear away the branches of the trees on streets lighted by it, where these come in its way. The sunlight shines around corners and into rooms whose windows face only to the north, though not so clearly or healthily, as I found from using a room of that aspect for a library. The spiritual rays of the Light of the world are reflected and refracted in much the same way, to the spirits of those who turn their mental windows away from him, but who are living in a Christian community, where his presence and his influences are welcomed by others. It is sometimes objected that the Christian virtues cannot be dependent upon faith in our Lord, since such people as John Stuart Mill and Francis Power Cobbe exemplified many of those virtues while rejecting his claim to be the Light of the world. Let us not forget that they lived in a society pervaded by the influences of the Christian gospel, and in intimate relations with those who cherish those lofty ideals of character which are realized in the person of our Lord. It would have been otherwise if they had lived in a community which shared their denials;* and they would have been better and happier if they had lived ’’by faith upon the vSon of God.” They lost much and gained nothing by having the windows of the mind turned to the cold north of unbelief, and by being dependent upon others to reflect to them that which they should have received directly from the Son of man.
VI. In the natural world, as we see it on the surface of our planet, light and darkness appear to balance each other. We get more light in summer, and more darkness in winter, but taking the round year they seem to be equal. But this is a delusion, due to our being badly placed for a true observation of the matter. On the earth’s
* “When the microscopic search of skepticism, which has hunted the heavens and sounded the seas to disprove the existence of a Creator, has turned its attention to human society, and has found a place on this planet ten miles square where a decent man can live in decency, comfort, and security, supporting and educating his children unspoiled and unpolluted; a place where age is reverenced, infancy protected, manhood respected, womanhood honored, and human life held in due regard — when skeptics can find such a place ten miles square on this globe, where the gospel of Christ has not gone and cleared the way, and laid the foundations and made decency and security possible, it will be in order for the skeptical literati to move thither and then ventilate their views.” — James Russell Lowell. surface the darkness seems to equal the Hght, and yet it is but the shadow of our planet, which diminishes and dwindles as it passes out from the sun until it vanishes, and the light passes beyond it to meet the light of other suns. Jakob Boehme says that the planets, as God made them at the first, cast no shadow, and darkness was not. The shadow, he says, came with sin, and is part of the anguish from which creation is to be redeemed.
We are equally liable to be misled in our judgment of the relative extent of spiritual light and darkness. In our less hopeful moods we are disposed to think that moral evil exceeds goodness in our world’s life, and sin is more abundant than the grace which is fighting against it. We even incline to think it always must be so in this world of ours. Here also we need to be lifted above our common level, to get the right position for a judgment. That position is by the riven tomb of the risen Saviour. His rising again from the dead is the symbol, and more than the symbol, of his triumph over the powers of spiritual darkness. It is the proclamation that life is mightier than death, good than evil, grace than sin. It is the earnest and the prophecy of the final and substantial victory of the kingdom of light over all antagonistic influences. Without it, hope would have to be struck from the list of the Christian virtues, as having no basis in truth and reality, and as being but a make-believe. In our age, Christian hope has arrayed against it the pessimism which is almost the intellectual atmosphere of the time, and which seduces us into an unchristian estimate of the worth of human life and its outlook on the future. It proclaims that man is a contemptible creature, governed only by the lowest motives, and perennially capable of lawless crime, as well as of selfish cowardice. It echoes Satan’s estimate of us, “All that a man hath he will give for his life” — a lie which is contradicted on every page of human history. To escape this insidious anti-gospel, we must remember how poorly placed we are for a true estimate of the spiritual facts, and how much more readily we come into knowledge of the evil in life than of its good. We must have faith, in spite of any appearances to the contrary, that the good cause is forever advancing, that grace is always gaining ground upon sin and will “yet more abound,” and that the light is vaster and mightier than the darkness. For that is involved in our faith in our Lord and Master, the Light of the world, the conquering King, who is subjecting all things to himself.