The Spirit's Solution of Mysteries

For the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God,* — 1 COR, ii, 10.

unfathomable to everything but love. Why should the good Father send so many crosses to His children? We look in a hundred directions for the answer and from ninety and nine the answer comes not. Eye hath not seen it; ear hath not heard it; imagination hath not conceived it. The crosses of life are the deep things of God, and thought cannor explore them. But love can; the spirit of love can interpret the acts of love. You want to know why the Father gives you pain; the memory of parental love will search out that depth for you. Did you never get pain as a direct gift of parental love? Did you never receive a task when you wanted an hour of play, or sigh within school-house walls when you panted for green fields? Yet your fetters have become your wings; your tears have made your rainbow; your prison-house has led captivity captive. You would not part with that gift of pain for all the other gifts of your universe; it was a bondage that enlarged your soul.

Spirit of love, Spirit of the All-Father, Thou alone canst interpret the dark places that surround Thee. Only when I learn that this world is Thy school-house shall I find the vindication of its pain. I cannot penetrate the deep things of Joseph’s dungeon except by the light of Thy Fatherhood; it seems so hard to see the vanishing of youth through the iron entering into the soul. But the education of Thy Fatherhood explains all. There is no gift of parental love like the iron of the soul — the strengthening of the inner man. It is love’s brightest jewel given in its roughest casket. Thou canst not send it to me through the flowers of Eden; it can come only through the tears of Gethsemane. Thy gift of iron to my soul interprets its Gethsemane. It justifies the long dark night with its desertedness and its agony. It vindicates the withered palm-leaves, and the hushed hosannahs, and the fading of Jordan’s morning glow. It explains the dropping of the curtain over that transfiguration glory which earth would fain interpret as the promise of perpetual mountain heights. In the light of Thy love the valleys are themselves exalted; the deep things, the dark things are illuminated by Thee.