Light from Darkness

“If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!” — MATTHEW vi. 23.

THERE are many truths and teachings in these deep words of Jesus. I have turned to them more than once before for the help and guidance which they contain; and there are no fitter words in all our Saviour’s teaching to bring us the idea which I now wish to dwell upon. That idea is that every man has his own point of entrance for the divine life, and that if he does not let it in through that door, — nay, if his soul does not stand at that door waiting to welcome it, the divine life may pass him by and he will be responsible. He will not only be the loser; he will be to blame for the earthliness and darkness in which his life goes on. So vague and loose and unreasonable are the thoughts of most people as to the way in which men become Christians; so often it seems to most people as if it were all a mystery, without explanation and without law, as to whether God would come to men with His Spirit, and as to how He would come; that I think it must be a great help to us if we can clearly understand that there is such a principle as this: that every man has his strong, characteristic point of temperament, of occupation, or of circumstances, where, if the Spirit of God ever does come to him, it will be sure to come, and by the nature of which the nature of the spiritual life which is possible for him must be determined.

I may not be sure that the great royal guest who is travelling through the land will come into my poor house; but I know that, if he does come, he will have to come up just that homely path and through that humble doorway which lead to it; therefore I keep its passage clear and its bolts drawn back. I do not know that the sun will shine out from behind the cloud; but I know that if it does, this and this are the bright summit-points which it must kindle into flame, and from which its glory must be reflected to all the rest of the great building. I do not know that I can ever win the friendship of such and such a man, who is far wiser and more than I am; but I know that my only chance is not in trying to be something which I am not, or in pretending to be it, but solely in being frankly and thoroughly what I am, and in offering him that nature for his life to play upon and for his heart to love, if he can love it. I do not know that I can ever understand this idea which other men seem to make much of — this philosophy which all mankind are praising, this school of thought which evidently has great truth in it — I do not know that I can ever make it mine; but I do know that if I ever do get hold of it, it must be with this particular hand of my nature that I seize it, and so my study shall be to keep this hand, in which my hope lies, flexible and alert.

All these are illustrations of one truth from various regions of life. In every region there is some point through which the darkness of the whole region must be reached by any light. If light comes, it must be caught there and radiated thence throughout the whole. Upon that point, then, anxiety fastens itself, and that point becomes critical. To that point the warning applies: “If the light become darkness, how great is that darkness!”

Now, I think that what a great many men need is to realize that just that is true about religion. There is some point in their nature, their occupation, or their circumstances, something in them made up from their nature, their occupation, or their circumstances, which marks how they are to be Christians, and what sort of Christians they are to be. Religion does not fall into a nature like a shower from the clouds. It enters like a guest into the gate. Every man may say this much of himself: I do not know that I can ever be religious, but if I am, I am such a man, so built by nature and so shaped by circumstances, that it is thus and thus that my religion must come in. And when a man has realized that, then self-study must become a very serious and earnest thing, and the responsibility for the open door of his own soul a very distinct and ever-present consciousness. The watch over the light that is in him, lest it should turn into darkness, must be a continual care.

Let us follow this somewhat more into detail. I have alluded to the nature, the occupations, and the circumstances of men as the elements which decide what sort of door in them shall open to religion. And we may speak in turn of each of these.

i. And, first, about men’s natures. There are broad, deep differences of character which decide for men the nature of their Christian life. They make great chasms. He who is a Christian on one side of them, is different from him who is a Christian on the other. Lift up your eyes and look at the difference of the very essential natures of men, as they stand together in our picturesque and various humanity. One class or division of men lives in thought. Everything is to them a problem. Another class lives in action. Everything is to them a task. There are the men of solitude, who seek to be alone as naturally as the beast flees into the forest; and there are the men of society who seek to be together as naturally as the cattle collect themselves in herds. Some men are always conservative; they cannot do a rash thing. Other men are all enterprise; they cannot do a prudent thing. Some men are intrinsically self-reliant. Other men must rest their hand upon some brother’s shoulder, and then they can do valiant work. Some men are credulous and long to believe. Other men are skeptical, and to doubt is to them as native as to breathe. Everywhere are the differences of natures. There need be no end to the enumeration.

And what do these differences mean? What shall we say about them? What shall we think when, out of the confusion of our own self-watched lives, there comes gradually forth a consciousness of what we are, of what the special nature is in us that separates and distinguishes us from other men? Shall we merely be fascinated and dazzled with the sparkling variety of life in general? Shall we simply be humbled or exalted with the smallness or the glory of the separate distinctive quality which we discover in our own selves? If there is a higher life for man to live, if there is a sunshine which may break over all this human landscape and transfigure it, then to any man who knows that such a sunshine is, and who expects its dawning, the landscape as a whole, and every bit of it, must get its value from its actual or possible relationship to that sunshine. Every variety of character must be prized because it can catch the life, the love, the authority, of God, in some way especially its own; and every man’s own nature, as he comes to know it, must interest him because he knows, in knowing it, how he is to know God, whom truly to know is truly and thoroughly to live.

Our modern novels study character with wonderful acuteness. Our essayists depict the infinite variety of men which exists within the evident unity of man. Men pore over themselves, and make themselves proud or miserable with understanding or misunderstanding what they are. It is poor business, unless man knows what man is for; and is seeking to know himself only that he may open himself more abundantly to God. Take for instance the last of the kinds of character of which I spoke just now: a man studies his own nature, and says as the result, “Yes, I am skeptical. I question everything. I cannot help it. It is innate. I did it when I was a child. I shall do it till I die. I shall do something like it after I am dead and am gone to heaven. What then? Is that a sign that there is no Christian faith for me, and an excuse from all responsibility to seek it? Surely not. That very skepticism must be the door by which I must stand to keep the passage pure and clear. I must be responsible for it. I must not merely doubt men’s affirmations; I must doubt my own doubts. I must question the denials that men bring. I must keep my questioning faculty pure of conceit, and so out of this sifting of doubt on doubt, at last the precious kernel of truth may lie there shining and manifest, — not wrapt in so many envelopes, perhaps, as some other men wrap their belief in, and so not looking as if it were as large as theirs, but yet all there, and all the more clearly there, all the more strongly held, because of the very, native skepticalness of the soul that holds it,”

This must be so. Either the questioning temper is a disease, and not a nature, which all our experience tells us is not the truth; or else there are some souls built by the God that made them as if one built a house for himself to dwell in, but built it standing on its outside, and left no door for him self, its destined occupant, to get in at when it was done. Either one or other of these things is true. Or else a doubting temper, if it be pure and not dimmed and blocked up with self-conceit, may be itself a window for God to shine through, a door for

God to come through. There was a faith in Thomas by reason of his doubt, not merely in spite of his doubt. His doubt was the light that was in him.

Here is a kind of self-study and self-knowledge which is precious indeed. Here is a value for our own peculiar nature which brings to one who has it a quiet, grave, and lofty self-respect and joy, in being what he is, that is as pure of self-conceit as it is filled with solemn responsibility.

Why is it that you love the house where you have lived from your childhood, — that you honor it and would be very sorry to live in any other? You know it is not the best house in town; there are better houses by the score; but this is yours. In it your life has taken shape. In through its window the sky and sun and stars have looked at you and given you impressions of themselves. In through its doors your friends have entered with their influences. The shapes of its rooms, the windings of its passages, have formed the habits in which the joy and sorrow of your life have taken coloring. And so the value of your home is in the way in which life has come to you through it.

Very like indeed, I think, to men’s relations to their homes is their relation to their natures. In the qualities of their natures, as in the walls of their houses, their selves abide, which are one with and yet are other than the natures they abide in; and through them to this inner self comes God. And the soul that has learned to love God forever honors and loves the nature through which God came to it, with that special manifestation of Himself which is its life.

2. Think, secondly, about the occupations of our lives, and see how they, too, get their real significance and value as the entrance-points of God into us, and the exhibition-points of God through us to other men. You sit here in church, in this Sunday promiscuousness, the representatives of very various occupations. You did different things yesterday. You will do different things to-morrow. One of you sells goods, another builds houses, another pleads causes, another counts money, another cures sickness: what does it all mean? Is it merely a convenient distribution of the work that has been done in the world, as if the master of a house said to one servant, “You sweep the sidewalk while another piles the wood”? Must it not be far more than that? Remember how we spend our lives in doing these different things. Remember that the powers which the doing of these different things calls out in us are widely different. And if the giving of God’s life to a man’s life is always in connection with some human activity, some action of its powers, — if God cannot give Himself to a totally passive creature, — must it not follow that according to the sort of activity that prevails in our lives, so will be our reception of God, our relation to His authority and love and teaching, which is our religion?

Let any religious man among you suppose that the whole occupation of his life had been different from what it has been; suppose that all these years you had been tilling the ground instead of selling goods, or building houses instead of teaching schools; could your religion have been just what it has been, just what it is to-day? If so, then your religion must have been a very limited and partial thing, a candle burning in some shut and sacred chamber of your life, not a true fire burning all though your life and keeping it all ablaze. And what a terrible waste there has been if all your professional life, all your life in your trade or occupation, has been kept so purely secular that it has given no character to your religion! It is sure to be equally true that it has got no character from your religion either. No; in a true sense a man’s occupation is his living. It is the true front door to his life. By it the visitor or the occupant of the life must come in.

What you ought to teach your boy, when he makes the selection of his work in life, is that the deepest and most critical value of that selection is that he is really choosing in what way he shall ask the God to whom his life belongs to come and take possession of his life. And when his selection is once made, you ought to make him know that there, in his profession, is where he is to look for God to come to him. It is in the power to resist its special temptations that he is to learn what wonderful strength God can give. It is in the training of the peculiar powers of usefulness which it develops that he is to receive God’s gracious education. It is in the consolation of its peculiar sorrows that he is to lay hold of God’s abounding comfort; and it is in the character which his profession, at its best, demands, that he is to manifest the life of God before mankind.

Such a conviction about any man’s profession, filling his soul as he went into it, would have two good results. It would at once enlarge it and sanctify it. To the Christian merchant, the man who is so thoroughly a merchant that he sees clearly that if he is to be a Christian at all, it is a merchant Christian that he must be, — to such a man his mercantile life enlarges itself until it becomes for him the type of all service of God, and puts him into communion and sympathy with all God’s servants everywhere; and, at the same time, being his special form of ser vice, it acquires a sacredness and is done with a scrupulousness that no merely secular occupation, considered only as secular, could command.

It is this union of largeness and specialness that makes the truest beauty of all human life. The man whose sense of his own personalness is most intense, and yet who in it reads the parable of the greater personality of Man, and through it is kept in truest sympathy with all his race; he always is the richest and most interesting man. The landscape that fascinates you with its own clear beauty, and at the same time suggests the beauty of all the variously beautiful world, is always the most powerful to satisfy the soul. And so the task that twines your conscientious interest into its minute details and at the same time makes you one with all workers in all faithful work, — that is the task which most feeds the life of him who does it. And such a character belongs not to any one occupation or class of occupations, but to any occupation occupied religiously, to any duty done in conscious obedience to God, and valued as the means by which He with His help and authority and teaching may come in and take possession of the soul.

3. I spoke of the natures of men and of their occupations as making them special points for the reflection of the light of God, and I spoke also of their circumstances. ‘’If the light that is in thee be darkness how great is that darkness!” says Christ, and I think that His words may well apply to any peculiar condition into which He leads one of our lives, and by which He means to make at once a deeper entrance into that life, and a larger illumination from it. There is something lost when any experience which God meant to have burn with Himself is allowed to stand dark in irreligiousness.

A man goes down a street as night comes on, and lights the long row of lamps so that by and by the whole street is bright. But in the long row there is one lamp which refuses to be lighted, and will not burn, or which goes out after the man with the torch has passed on his way. What is the consequence? Will there not be all night a dark spot in the street, where that unlighted lamp comes? Will not each passenger stop there or stumble? Will not the stones or pitfalls that lie just there be the most dangerous? and will not that one unlighted spot make the whole street unsafe, no matter how brightly all the rest may shine? So God, I think, goes down our life and touches every experience with Himself, and as every experience becomes conscious of having come from Him and of possibly revealing Him, it burns with Him. With the burning of all those experiences with God, our whole life becomes gradually alight.

But now, suppose that there is one experience which, as God touches it, refuses to be lighted, or, after He has lighted it, goes out. There is one thing which has happened to us which we never can think of as having come from God; what will the consequence be? Will there not always be one dark spot just there in the long street of our life? Will not the temptations and the doubts which arise in connection with that one event be always specially dangerous, and will not our whole life, no matter how bright the illumination of all the rest may be, be always unsafe because of that one unlighted experience?

Oh, how many lives there are which have some such unilluminated experience somewhere in them! Something happened to you once which you never could believe that God sent, or which you have never been able to keep associated with Him. Your child died, and you could not believe that He took it. Your child recovered, and you could not believe that He restored it. You made a fortune, and it seemed the triumph of your own shrewdness. You made a friend, and it seemed the triumph of your own attractiveness. You rose up from a sick bed, and thanked nobody but the doctors. You did a hard duty, and congratulated yourself upon the self-respect that had kept you from being mean or cruel. What is the consequence? Just at that point there is a lamp unlighted in your life. Whenever your memory goes by that point, it stumbles; for it walks in darkness. Whenever you have to meet those same emergencies again, to welcome back another child from the grave’s mouth, or to see another child depart from you to God, or to make another friend, or to resist a new temptation, no light comes streaming out from the old experience to make the new one plain. What is there left for us but to cry out after Him who is the Light-giver that He will come back, and even now touch that old dark experience with His illumination, so that it may be a help and not a hindrance, a light and not a darkness, in our lives?

This is the way, then, in which circumstances or experiences become interpreters of God, His points of introduction to our lives. And here again there is the same meeting of specialness with generalness of which I spoke before. God comes into our life through one experience, but having come through that experience He spreads Himself then through all the life, He occupies the entire house. There are many histories among you, my friends, that will bear testimony to this. God revealed Himself to you first when He cured you of your sickness, but the God who then came to you, you have found since, is One who can do many another thing besides making sick people well. Nay, so complete is the knowledge of Himself that He gives us, when He has once entered into us, that very often the God who showed Himself first as the Healer of sickness has appeared by and by again as the Sender of sickness, and even as the Summoner of souls by death, and has been recognized through all the tears of sorrow by that first knowledge of Him which was won in the bright atmosphere of joy.

Before I close let me say one word more. I have dared to talk to-day as if the special care of God for every man, and for every act and experience of every man, were not too great a thought for man to think, not too vast or incredible a faith for man to hold. To some people, to many people, it does seem incredible. But, oh, remember that unless we believe that, there is no real vitality in our religion. And ought it to be incredible if we understood what God is? The sun shines down upon a mountain side, and every pebble catches its splendor and shines back its answer. And if you say, “But the sun has no feeling, no affection,” then think of a great fam ily and, tell me, does a true father grow bewildered among his children, and love or protect the least less than the greatest? Only make fatherhood perfect and infinite, and you have God. It is only the essential difficulty of grasping the infinite that makes it so hard to conceive that God can care for all His children personally, and never forget the feeblest of them.

And yet, hard as it is, men do believe it. Christ makes men believe it. We cannot live with Him and not believe it; because He believes it so intensely, He knows it so clearly. Let us try to live very near to Him, and then we cannot help believing it, cannot help knowing it; and then we cannot walk in darkness, but shall surely have the Light of Life.