The Medium of the Spirit
“*The Lord came down in a cloud, and spake unto him, and teok of the Spirit that was upon him, and gave it unto the seventy elders.” NUMBERS xi. 25.
“@OD often speaks to me in a cloud — reveals Himself through that which seems an absence of revelation. The hour of sorrow becomes my hour of communion, and the silence of earth is vocal with songs of heaven. But the great advantage of my cloud is that it-breaks my solitude. It seems beforehand to be a source of solitude. It threatens to be something which will hide me from the eyes of my brother man and drive me within the temple of my own soul. In reality it has the opposite effect. The message which comes to me through the cloud, comes to me as a message for humanity. It first clothes me in the spirit of peace, and then it takes the spirit it has put upon me, and puts it on my fellow-labourers. It enables me to feel that I have one common burden with those who work by my side. It tells me that I am never so little alone, never so near to the mass of mankind, as under the shadow of the night. We do not all meet under the sunbeam, but we all meet under the cloud. The cloud is the true conductor of the electric spark of love. It carries my life into your life, my thought into your thought, my heart into your heart. It finds an entrance through the walls which prosperity has reared between man and man and unites the soul of David to the soul of Jonathan.
Son of Man, let Thy cross be my medium of human brotherhood. Under the shadow of Thy cloud let me meet face to face with the soul of my fellow-man. May we be bound together in the unity of Thy Spirit — the spirit of sacrifice, the spirit of self-surrendering love. May we be united by the fellowship of the mystery — the mystery of suffering. We have failed to be united by the fellowship of prosperity, the participation in a common joy. Join us by Thy cross, O Son of Man; unite us by Thy sacrifice; connect us by Thy cloud. Bring our hearts into sympathy by the contact of a kindred experience, by the touch of a common cross, by the pain of a united martyrdom. Let us walk through the furnace not one by one but three by three and seeing ever the form of a fourth in the likeness of Thyself. It shall be worth while to have met Thee in the cloud if the spirit which Thou there shalt give me shall be the spirit of humanity.