01.38. Dying Flashes

Chapter 38 DYING FLASHES. When a candle is about to expire, it has been often observed to send up one or more gleams of light, that were brighter and stronger than the preceding flame, but only to be followed immediately by extinction and darkness. When a building is being consumed, we have all noticed the same phenomenon. Just as we thought all was over, a sheet of fire burst forth and towered up that reminded one in its energy, brightness and height of a far earlier period of the conflagration. It looked like the spectators were to be treated to a greater display than ever, when suddenly the flame went down, the glow ended and blackness came upon the smoldering heap. The explanation in the candle’s action was some little source of strength that had not been touched until that moment; and the transitory outburst of fire, heat and light from the doomed dwelling was the falling in of some wall or roof hidden by the smoke, giving for a few moments only, the fuel for one more burst of dying power, a farewell flash of antecedent force and greatness that was now being ended forever. The same thing is noticeable in the intellectual life, where gifted authors, after having delighted the world, will pass into third class work, become prolix, common-place and tedious, and then just before the light goes out in the grave, will write some of their best paragraphs, pages and chapters. Generals who are acknowledged military geniuses show the same temporary brilliancy just before defeat, exile, or death, puts out the candle entirely. Something grotesquely analogous can even be seen in lunacy, that has its flashes of mental brightness from the disorder and shadows of a long mental gloom and coming night of death. A similar manifestation is beheld in the action of the sun at the close of day. Its race through the skies is ended, and the great monarch is sinking out of sight behind a bank of leaden colored ordinary looking clouds. It is anything but a remarkable or beautiful close of diurnal life, when suddenly, on glancing again toward the west, the horizon seems to be on fire, and the sun, with a closing stroke of power, has dyed the heavens with his blood, and gone down on a funeral pyre of crimson and gold. This is the sun’s dying flash. It is as wonderful as anything he has done in all the preceding hours of the day, but it is his last for that day. A startling likeness to these happenings in the natural world and intellectual realm is frequently to be beheld in the spiritual life. There can be a glorious sunrise, a useful day to follow, then a declination of experience, a cooling off of heat, a lessening of light, a steady sinking earthward, and then just before the backslidden life sinks out of sight, a few dying flashes of power may precede the disappearance of the man from the ways of righteousness or from the world itself forever.

All this is strikingly seen in the lapse and ruin of Balaam. For after repeated disobediences to God in his treatment of the angel, we hear him uttering some of the sublimest prophecies in the Bible. It is impossible to recall without emotion his words, "I shall see him but not now; I shall behold him, but not nigh," and remember that they were uttered after he had sinned, and just before his final, moral ruin and death on the plain.

Repeatedly we have beheld the same strange happenings in the lives of Christians who have gone or are going astray. A most remarkable prayer, or a most wonderful sermon has been known again and again to fall from lips that had already been untrue to Christ, and false and sinful in the gravest way. The candle was down in the socket and was giving one final upward leap.

Some piece of untouched goods like the hidden wall, suddenly surged and fell forward, giving a momentary glare. The sun was sinking, and just before he disappeared sent a dying flash that streamed up to the very zenith and looked for a while as if the day was coming back. But it was the last glance as well as gasp of an ended day; and night with a sable mantle of grief came softly forward, and with glistening starlike tears on its robe, bent over the casket in the west, and gazed silently and mournfully upon the departed form.

It is possible, however, to invest the last gleaming of the day with another and happier meaning. The sunset of the Occident we know is the sunrise of the Orient. The dying flash in the west of one land is a morning flash of glory on another shore. This is not always the case in the spiritual life, but it may be so. The tearful, melting, kindling hope, new resolution, a strange, unexpected energy, and sudden burst of power, short-lived and evanescent as all may be, can only come from the presence and work of the Holy Spirit. Left to itself the backslidden and sinful soul would never feel a pang of contrition nor realize a single pulsation of goodness. The wandering sheep would die on the dark mountains of iniquity but for the seeking divine shepherd. The slumbering soul would sleep on in its unconscious apathetic state, but for the voice that wakes the dead.

It is well for the drifting, staggering, falling, dying Christian to study properly these last flickerings of godliness in his heart and life. If he insists on regarding them as the final flare of the exhausted candle, then his own despair will hasten the coming utter darkness and ruin. But if he will realize that the sudden blaze and upward movement in his soul, was not so much the consuming of a wall of some remaining excellence and virtue in his character, as the warm breathing and quickening power of the Holy Ghost upon his fainting, sinking spirit, then has he ground indeed for fresh hope, good determinations, new efforts and the beginning of a better life with higher aims, deeper love, profounder humility, mightier faith and grander results than ever known before. That which he and others considered a sunset, can be a glorious sunrise on the remaining years of the life, and making a more beautiful day in the spiritual sense than was beheld in the other that may have ended in evening shadows and gloom. The Spirit of God does not work with the soul to tease and disappoint, but to fulfill and bring to pass. If he shows the pattern of a life sanctuary to the mind in some exalted moment, it is that a temple of glory should go up and not a den or a hovel. The Bible says God works in us to will and to do of his good pleasure. First, he stimulates the man to will, and then he energizes him to perform that which is right.

God cannot compel a man in moral conduct, or decide for him in the choice between good and evil. The utmost that the Spirit can do is to woo and urge, and this he will and does do.

Now as God has made us for his glory as well as our happiness; as he certainly must value property created in his own image, and does not want a single soul to perish and so declares in his Word--it is evident and conclusive that when he works upon an individual to forsake sin, and make a new start for duty, righteousness and heaven--such a divine movement is made with the design and desire that the man be recovered and set on his heavenward way. In other words, what is supposed to be the twilight of a closed day, is intended to be the dawn of a new epoch, the beginning of a fresh and glorious religious history. The scarlet of evening is to become the crimson of morning. The Past may be looked back upon as an Occident with melancholy surf breaking upon rocky shores; while the Future stretches out before the eyes like a golden Orient with dimpled seas, sunny harbors, groves of palm and strands of coral. The dying flash of the evening, turns out to be the flood of light and dash of glory of the morning.

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