In the Light of God

“In thy light we shall see light.” — Psalm xxxvi. 9.

The picture in the mind of him who wrote this psalm is very clear. Men are looking for light. With that insatiable passion which belongs to their humanity, they are running hither and thither seeking to know. And he who writes is in true sympathy with their search. To him too light seems the most precious thing on earth. Knowledge appears to him the treasure which is most worth possessing. But it seems to him that there is something which needs to be suggested to these searchers after light. They appear to him to be questioning this thing and that thing, as if the secret of its being, its power to be understood and comprehended, the light with which it ought to shine, were something which it carried in itself. He sees things differently. To him everything is

1 Preached in St. Margaret’s Church, “Westminster, Sunday morning, 3d June 1S83.

comprehensible and capable of being understood only as it exists within the great enfolding presence of God. To him it is only in their relations to the perfect nature that all other natures can become intelligible. He does not question the flower for its colour, or the mountain for its majestic form, or the river for its sparkling movement, as if each of them by its own action could clothe itself with light and shine out of the darkness, a clear and independent spot of glory. He looks up and waits and prays for sunrise. He expects the clement in which alone the mountain and the flower and the river can display themselves. When the sun shall have risen and the sunlight shall be bathing everything, then everything shall glow with its own radiance; then he can study everything and understand it in its true element. Until that clement is formed around all things, there is darkness even-where. Is not this his meaning as he stands in the midst of the light-seekers and looks up to God and cries, as if in commentary on their eager scarchings, “In thy light we shall sec light.”

The truth which these words thus include is one which we are constantly meeting, and which finds its illustrations everywhere. It is the truth that only within the elements where they belong, only as they arc held inside the atmosphere of larger natures to which they bear essential and sacred relationships, can the finest and truest natures of many things be understood. See what are a few of the familiar illustrations of this truth. Have you not each of you some friend who, dull and dry by himself, becomes fresh and sparkling in the presence and under the influence of some other friend? That other friend is his element. When you are going to meet your dull companion you go and seek out first his elemental friend, and say to him, “Come with me, for I cannot know or understand this man except when you are there. In your light I shall see his light.”

So the man toiling at his business has for his element the love for wife and child who live at home, and whom he loves. Looked at apart from them his life is dreary, and each act of his daily toil is dull and heavy as a stone. Looked at in the light of his love for them, every detail of his dusty energy glows like a star.

Or to take a wholly different illustration: a purpose of study, a great conception of what study is for, a true valuing of truth either for its own pure worth or for its noble uses, is the element within which the drudgery of learning, which otherwise would be all dark and dreary, shines with illuminations which make us its willing slaves.

So the prevailing moods and tempers of our lives hold within themselves the specific actions of our lives, and give them their significance and worth. So every public deed, every turn of public policy, every action of our public men, exists within the enfolding atmosphere of the genius of our nation, and is to be appreciated and discriminated, is to be distinguished from the quite different thing which such an act or policy would be in Turkey or in France, only by an understanding of the national genius or nature within which it takes place. So the general’s character and skill make up the element within which the soldier’s bravery and labour live. Only by knowing the general’s plan of the campaign can you tell what the soldier’s hard work means. So the accepted doctrine, if it be really and spiritually accepted, gives colour to the acts which it inspires. Faith is the element of works. So what we think of man decrees what we shall think of men. The illustrations would be endless. Everywhere there is this cnfoldmcnt of the little by the great. Everywhere it is in the light of the elemental life that the life which lives within it and is its special utterance can be understood. Everywhere the act in its true clement grows live and buoyant as the log grows buoyant in the water where it swims.

Do there not occur at once two earnest and v.] IX THE LIGHT OF GOD. 93

important warnings here, which we may well notice as we pass? If this be true, then you and I have no right to judge any life until we have called upon the element in which it lives to come and shed its light upon it. Not by itself, but as part of some great purpose, as the utterance of some intention, as the expression of some general character, so we must estimate and value every act, and all the active part of any fellow-creature’s life.

And for ourselves, in our own lives, surely it is good that we should be conscious of and value the larger regions within which our specific actions are comprised, and from which they get their meaning. To be aware of purposes and allegiances which bind us, which make our lives great units, which hold us to the universe of things, thus to feel the pressure and the inspiration of our element about us, this surely is the secret of the best success and happiness of life.

I have dwelt thus long upon these first definitions, because it seemed to me as if in them there were the key to the experience of David, which he utters in my text, and of which I wish to speak to you this morning. He saw the world all full of seekers after light; he was a seeker after light himself. What he had discovered, and what he wanted to tell men, was, that the first step in a hopeful search after light must be for a man to put himself into the element of light, which was God. The first thing for any man to do who wanted knowledge was to put himself under God, to make himself God’s man; because both he who wanted to know and that which he wanted to know had God for their true element, and were their best and did their best only as they lived in Him.

If David’s discovery was true, it was a great discovery; it was a discovery which could never lose its value. It is just as precious for the students of this knowledge-seeking age, for the students assembling in our universities to-day, as it was for him back in the infancy of science, among the crude fantastic schools of old Jerusalem. But I beg you to think, also, what a noble and inspiring thought it gives us also about God! Too often have the minds both of religious and of irreligious men conceived of God as the great hinderer of human knowledge. Even those men who thought they honoured Him supremely have talked about Him as if He loved the darkness; they have dwelt upon mystery as if it were something which God treasured, and which His children were to treasure for itself, as if they did not wish it cleared up and made light. They have imagined Him almost standing guard over whole regions of knowledge and forbidding them to the impatient intellect of man. That is not the idea of David; that is not the idea of the Bible anywhere. Against all the folly of the Church, and all the ignorance of unbelief which declares that God is darkness, stands up the protest of John, who cries, “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all;” and the glowing ascription of the light-loving David, who declares, “In thy light, O Lord, we shall see light.” I have talked of light as if it were identical with knowledge; and yet I am sure that the words make somewhat different impressions on you, and you will understand that they are not entirely identical. At any rate, you will understand that light means knowledge only when knowledge is most largely and deeply conceived. There is a knowledge which is not light but darkness, just as there is a lustre on the surface of the ocean which keeps you from seeing down into the ocean’s depths. There is a superficial knowledge of the things to which men give their study — of nature, of history, of literature, of man — which, while it is wonderfully accurate in the facts which it recites, does not help to reveal, but glosses over and shuts away from our intelligence the depths and the essential glories of the things to which those facts relate. To such a sort of knowledge all laborious and minute study is always liable; but such a sort of knowledge is not light but darkness. When

David says, then, and when we say after him, that it is only in God’s light that any man can see light, he does not mean, we do not mean, to say that the accumulation of facts and the thorough study of the surfaces of things may not go on in the most godless atmosphere and under the most blasphemous of students. What he does mean to say, and what the experience of man has borne its constant testimony to, is this, that the profoundest knowledge, the appreciation of the real meaning and radiancy of things — that this, which alone is really light, comes to man only within the light of God. I want to remind you of three or four facts concerning human knowledge which seem to me to give their confirmation to the doctrine of the old Hebrew singer’s song.

i. First of all stands the constant sense of the essential unity of knowledge. Men study many things. Each man finds for a time contentment in his special science in the mastery of his peculiar facts; but as each man goes deeper into the knowledge of the chosen subject of his study-, lie becomes aware of how impossible it is for him to know that subject well, unless he knows far more than that. The student of the history of man finds that this wonderful theatre of the earth, upon whose surface the long drama of human history has been played, demands that it too must be understood before the fortunes of the man whose life has been lived upon its stage can be properly valued. The study of the human body and the human mind are incomplete, each of them without the other. Each branch of natural science is twisted and twined in with all the rest. The most transcendent art has the roots of its methods in the human frame, and in the material of the earth itself. Everywhere this is the issue of man’s study as he goes on farther and wider in any department; the conviction that no art or knowledge stands alone, that each is bound up in a whole with all the rest, and that to study any art or any branch of knowledge in entire independence of all others, is to come not to light but to darkness — to misconceptions of the true nature of things, and of the best conduct of life. All truth makes one great whole; and no student of truth rightly masters his own special study unless he at least constantly remembers that it is only one part of the vast unity of knowledge, one strain in the universal music, one ray in the complete and perfect light.

2. A second fact with regard to human knowledge is its need of inspiration and elevation from some pure and spiritual purpose. It is a fact which is assured by all the testimony of man’s experience of study, that, not upon the lower grounds of economy and the usefulness of knowledge to

H man’s physical and social wants, but by some sense of a preciousness inherent in itself, of a fitness between it and the nature of man, of a glory in seeking it and a delight in finding it for its own pure sake, that only so have all the great revelations of truth come to mankind. The lower motives come in, no doubt, to lend their aid. The student finds a pleasure in the thought that his discovery, if he can accomplish it, will make him and his brethren safer and more comfortable in their daily life; but the most patient search and the most enthusiastic seizure of knowledge does not come from those motives alone. The knowledge which is sought as light must be sought with an enthusiasm which gets its fire from the pure value of the knowledge for its own pure sake. If among the young men who in our various colleges are pursuing their higher education there are any who are destined genuinely to enlarge the bounds of human knowledge, and to be recognised as lightgivers by their fellow-men, this we arc sure of concerning them, that they are among those who know something of the true passion of knowledge; they are of those to whom the opening doors of stud)’ bring exaltation and enthusiasm and delight; for it is only to such that light is given, and so it is only such that can give light to their fellow-men. 3. I think that another characteristic of the best search after wisdom is the way in which it awakens the sense of obedience. I will not attempt to explain its meaning, but no man who thinks carefully and wisely will fancy that he has adequately explained it when he has attributed to mere superstition that sense which is always reappearing in the thought of man, that the knowledge which is highest in its nature and which it is most necessary for man to have, always comes to man by revelation, and can be attained only by the learning man’s obedience to the revealing power. Very vaguely, very impersonally often, this idea has been conceived and stated. Sometimes it has seemed to mean no more than that man, in order to understand Nature, must be in sympathy with her and watch her ways instead of forcing her action into his ways. At other times it has taken sharp, crude, intense shapes like those which it has assumed when man, abandoning all use of his own powers, has seemed to think that there was nothing for him to do but to stand listening before a smoky oracle, or to peer into the entrails of slain birds in order to know the truth. But still, however vaguely or however crudely it has shown itself, the fact is very certain that man, when he has been moved most earnestly to seek for truth, has always thought of himself and talked of himself as of one who must be obedient to something, somebody, some ioo IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. [v.

power who held the truth which he desired, and who either would give it or could give it only to the obedient heart. In other words, all of man’s loftiest search for knowledge has always seemed to be aware, not merely of two parties to the great transaction, but also of a third — not merely of a knowledge to be sought and of a man to win it, but also of a knowledge-giver, who was to stand between the treasure and the needy human life, and give to the obedient humanity the boon it sought.

4. Closely allied to this fact is the other one which yet remains to be mentioned with regard to the search of man after knowledge, which is the constant tendency which it has always shown to connect itself with moral character. It is easy enough to say that the whole affair of knowledge-seeking is a question of the intellect — easy enough to say that a clever libertine or a bright drunkard can learn and teach the facts of science or of history as perfectly as if his life were pure and sober; but yet the fact is clear that mankind in all ages has tended to believe that moral purity and uprightness were genuine and necessary elements in the most perfect insight even into the problems of the world’s construction or of the history of man, — that, at any rate, however mere facts might be learned by any acute and patient observer, the meanings of those facts, the soul and inner substance of the things they studied, could only come to men who loved the right and tried to do it, and kept their hearts pure, unselfish, and serene with truth. All the old initiations to the mysteries of knowledge bore witness to this instinct. The man to whom the deepest known secrets of things were to be opened to-morrow must be purified to-night by lustrations that should signify his inner baptism. I do not ask now what was the philosophy which, more or less consciously, underlay this demand. I cannot doubt that it was some sort of assertion of the essential and inviolable unity of our human life, some sort of protest against the separation of the intellectual and moral life in man, as if such a separation made us two men and not one. What I want now to notice is merely the fact, the abundantly witnessed fact, that man in all times has had this feeling about the highest and completest knowledge, that one of its necessary conditions was morality, that only the pure in heart could see the fullest light.

See, then, what we have reached. These four conditions belong everywhere and always to the true light-seeker — the sense of the unity of knowledge, the perception of the preciousness and glory of knowledge for its own pure sake, the consciousness of discipleship and loyalty, and the persuasion of the need of moral fitness for the highest insight. In various proportions, in all degrees of clearness or of cloudiness, these are the convictions which have always filled the minds and inspired the souls of the seekers after light all through the world, all through the ages. The Hindu dreamer waiting for his vision, the young Jew at the footstool of his rabbi, the Greek listening for his oracle, the monk over his manuscript, the modern investigator of Nature and her wondrousness, the college student in his class-room — is it not true that all of them are men of light and not of darkness just in proportion as they keep alive and precious these profound persuasions, the unity of truth, the preciousness and dignity of truth, the need of obedience, and the sacred worth of purity. To him who lives in all of these persuasions, holding them all not merely as proved propositions, but as making together the element in which all his thought and study lives; to him everything grows luminous and opens its heart, and in the light of these, his four convictions, he sees the light of all the things with which he deals.

And what then? Is there no one conception in which these four convictions all unite, and in whose embrace they become not scattered discoveries or results of various experience, but parts of one complete idea which needs and which harmonises them all. If it be true that in the thought of God most simply and broadly apprehended — in the thought, that is, of a great, strong, loving Father, who knows all truth, and loves all men, and feeds men with truth as a father feeds his children with bread, making them with each new food fit for a richer food which He has still to give them — these four conceptions find their meeting -place; if as the young light-seeker goes with these four convictions working together in his soul they almost necessarily seek one another and unite into what is at first the dream, and by and by becomes the faith of a personal presence, lofty, divine, loving, and wise; if this is true, have we not reached as the result of all this long analysis something like that which David puts with such majestic simplicity in his glowing verse. The combination of these consciousnesses makes, almost of necessity, the consciousness of God. As they are necessary to the search for light, so is the God in whom they meet the true inspirer and helper of the eternal search. You see how great the doctrine is. It is no low and unintelligible and incredible pretension, claiming that only to the holders of certain special doctrines can the truths of science or of history be made known. It is the lofty assertion of the divinest necessity of the human soul, that only

IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. [v.

under the care and guidance of the God in whom abide the unity and preciousness of truth, and whose pure-hearted disciple and obedient servant man, the searcher for light, can be, — in and under Him alone can the great fulness of truth be known or understood.

I have tried thus to analyse the causes which underlie the necessity of man for God in the search after the truest knowledge with regard to the earth he lives in, or the history of man, or his own nature. But, after all, in every such necessity there is much that entirely eludes analysis, and is recognisable only by the consciousness. It is in what we must always recur to as the filial consciousness, the sense of childhood, that man’s perception of God always takes its clearest shapes. And when I try to describe to myself this thought of David about man’s seeing all light in the light of God, no picture like the picture of a true and docile childhood seems to me to express it. A child in his father’s house learns everything within the intelligence and character of his father, who has provided all things there, and is perpetually throwing light upon their proper use. Everything has its own qualities, but those qualities arc made distinct and vivid to the child by their relation to the master of the house. Not purely in themselves but in his father’s use of them and in their relationship to him does the child come to know the tools of the workshop, the furniture of the parlour, and all the apparatus of domestic life. So, I believe, it is with the child’s knowledge of the larger house, the world-house, of which God is the Father. The young clerk in the counting-house, the young sailor on the seas, the young student at his books, the young mechanic at his bench, each of them finds the things which make his world shine forth with new clearness and with new glory, if he dares to think of himself as God’s child, and of these things with which he has to do as the furniture of his Father’s house and the means for the doing of his Father’s will. No channel of direct investigation is closed up. Still the dictionary must be questioned for the language, and the market studied for the laws of trade, and the rock inquired of by the hammer and the microscope, and the sky and winds and ocean scanned with watchful eye; but over and around and through and through the whole process of inquiry, giving it dignity, hopefulness, dearness, and meaning, is thrown the pervading consciousness that it is always the child inquiring of the Father’s things, and with the Father’s watchfulness and care and love behind him.

Look at the life of Jesus Christ and you will see exactly what I mean. He knew the streets io6 IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. [v.

of Jerusalem and the lanes of Galilee and the history of His mysterious Hebrew people, and the hearts of the lilies and the souls of men; but He knew them all differently from the way in which the Hebrew scribes and scholars knew them. To Him they were all full of light. There is no other description of His knowledge that can tell its special and peculiar character like that. It was all full of light. And the other peculiarity of it was just as clear. It was full also of God. He knew everything as God’s child in God’s house. The history of the prophets and the heart of the lily both meant something about His Father. These two peculiarities belonged together. The world was full of light to Him because it was full of God. It was God’s light in which He saw the deeper light in everything.

Just think of this, just think of how, this being true of Jesus, the more He saw of all the world, the more His Father’s light must have become real to him, and then consider if there is not here the key to that difficult question, which perplexes us all, the question of how we can keep from outgrowing our religion as we grow up from childhood into manhood, and the world grows more complicated around us. The child is full of reverent and happy faith. God is to him everywhere. He prays as naturally as he talks, lie worships as spontaneously as he sings. But by and by he is a child no longer. The silver gates are open and the whole world lies beyond. The elaborate manifold delightful life of manhood takes him in. A thousand things to know, a thousand things to do invite him. The simplicity of life is broken into most bewildering multiplicity. Then is the time when the boy’s faith almost always halts and is puzzled, when very often it falters and falls. What can preserve it? What can carry it safely through that first perplexing acquaintance with the immensity and variety of life and art and science, and bring it out a broader and a stronger faith beyond? Nothing, surely, except a demonstration by his faith of its capacity to comprehend and make its own all this bewilderingly various life. Let the boy just coming to be a man discern that the God in whom he has believed in his small boyish way is the real element by which, in which stars shine, states grow, and all the complicated life of men goes on, and must he not then grasp his faith anew as he goes on to greater things and the larger relationships which are awaiting him? Let the growing youth, as he passes through the door into the new world, see the candle which he carries, and which he is just about to throw away because he thinks its work is done with the lighting of his io8 IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. [v.

nursery where he is to live no longer, gradually open and expand until it seems to be the sun which lightens everything, and without which nothing can be bright or beautiful, and then must he not grasp his candle the tighter as the fascinating richness of the world begins to display itself before him? There is no other hope. No man carries his robe with him through the river unless he believes that he shall need to wear it on the other side. No man really preserves his religion simply from the memory of how it used to help him. It must help him now. No man keeps his boy’s faith unless it opens new greatness to him as he grows older, and shows him how his full-grown manhood, like his earliest childhood, cannot do without it.

Picture Jesus of Nazareth set down in Rome with all the flashing splendour of imperial power all around him; or in Athens, with the wisdom of the philosophers on every side. Would the young Jew have cast his faith away? Too real for him the visions that had come to him in Nazareth! Too real for him the glory of His Father, which had filled His Father’s house! He would have laid fresh hold upon that truth and love which he had never so needed until new. He would have stood undazzled in the Roman glory, unpuzzled in the Grecian wisdom, because he would have known that in his heart he carried the light by which they should give light to him. It would have been like David calmly saying in the presence of the terrors of Goliath, “The Lord that delivered me out of the paw of the lion and out of the paw of the bear, he will deliver me out of the hand of this Philistine.”

There are men whose faith thus goes with them and becomes the power of inspiration for everything they do. Everything else shines with the light and works with the strength of their religion. I hope that many of you have read the interesting book which gives an account of the Personal Life of David Livingstone. It is a noble record of a noble history. But the great beauty of his life as it comes out there is in the centralness of his religion. Two of the greatest interests of the human mind and soul were always with him — science and philanthropy. He opened the desert and traced the mysterious rivers, and watched the wanderings of the stars. He trampled out the slave trade in whole regions of its worst brutality; but, at the heart of them, the man’s science and philanthropy both got their light from his religion. He was first, last, and always and above all things the Christian and the Christian Missionary, carrying the glorious Gospel of the grace of God to the most miserably benighted of His children. He no IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. [v.

refuses to be called the mere scientist or the mere philanthropist. In the light of God he sees light, and he makes light in the mystery and sin of the Dark Continent. Therefore his fame has among the scientists and the philanthropists its own peculiar beauty.

The knowledge of God lies behind everything, behind all knowledge, all skill, all life. That is the sum of the whole matter. The knowledge of God! And then there comes the great truth, which all religions have dimly felt, but which Christianity has made the very watchword of its life, the truth that it is only by the soul that God is really known; only by the experiences of the soul, only by penitence for sin, only by patient struggle after holiness, only by trust, by hope, by love does God make himself known to man. So may he give us all the grace to know Him more and more. There is an evidence of religion which may be written down in books and learned from books, and when it once is learned it is all mastered. That evidence is good; but there is another evidence of religion which is never mastered and exhausted. It grows and deepens for ever and for ever. As the man becomes more pure, more penitent, more sensitive to the least touch of sin, more passionately eager to be good, so docs he grow for ever more and more sure of v.] IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. m

God. And to him, thus growing ever surer of God, the world he lives in becomes clothed with an ever diviner light, and the pursuit of truth becomes more and more full for ever of enthusiasm and of hope.

Of heaven it is written that “the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the light thereof.” I should be glad, indeed, if anything we have thought to-day could make us see that this part of heaven at least may be begun below; that not merely the earth we live in but our own especial life — our work, our study, our profession, our daily toil — may live already in the light of God, and become earnest and dear and sacred because of the depth and richness of our love and consecration to Him and to His Son, who shows Him to us!