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There are two notable effects of light in this part of South India. One is seen on a clear evening when the terra-cotta earth of the plains, and every brick and tile made of that earth, takes on a brief and amazing brightness. The other is still more fugitive. It is never seen except in thundery weather, and then only on the hills that run down the western coast like a spine set out of place. The sun’s rays striking up from the sea in sunrise are flung back by the thundercloud, and falling on mountain and forest turn the whole world to rose. The loveliness of such moments is unearthly. You stand speechless on some rock in the heart of that celestial rose. You can only worship. Worthy, worthy to be worshiped is the God who can imagine such beauty and command it. All your soul worships. Be still and know that I am God.
The beauty passes. The rose light melts into the light of day, and in this it is a figure of the truth. There are certain glories that are brief, like those lovely lights, but there is the common sunlight that is the life of every day. We live far too little in this light of life. What a witness to the world Christians would be if only they were more evidently very happy people. “There be many that say, ‘Who will show us any good?’ Lord, lift Thou up the light of Thy countenance upon us.” If we lived in the light of that Countenance, continually filled by the God of Hope with all joy and peace in believing, the dreary question “Who will show us any good?” would be answered.
In my copy of that missionary classic On the Threshold of Central Africa I keep a letter from C.W. Mackintosh, who edited the Journals and wrote the life of her uncle, M. Coillard. “I often think of your title ‘Overweights of Joy’ (from St. Paul’s ‘I have more than an overweight of joy’). The joy of the Lord is your strength. The saints are full of it, even when cast down and oppressed by circumstances. Love and joy breathed from them, and everybody felt they had a blessed secret to impart. I don’t think anything else but this can make much headway among the heathen, for the offer of pardon can only appeal to the sense of sin which most of them have not got. So Satan’s great efforts are to offer the world a substitute for that joy, and to deprive us of it. Do you know that saying (I think, of J.G. Belletes), ‘There is nothing puts such a lever under the soul as the sense that God’s favor is towards us’? Oh, the joy of meeting an unrebuking gaze!”
Thunderclouds are nothing to the Spirit of Joy. The only special reference to the joy of the Holy Spirit is bound up with the words “much affliction,” much pressure. It is the rose under thundercloud again.
“Joy is not gush: joy is not jolliness. Joy is simply perfect acquiescence in God’s will, because the soul delights itself in God Himself. Christ took God as His God and Father, and that brought Him at last to say, ‘I delight to do Thy will,’ though the cup was the cross, in such agony as no man knew. It cost Him blood. It cost Him blood. O take the Fatherhood of God in the blessed Son the Saviour, and by the Holy Ghost rejoice, rejoice in the will of God, and in nothing else. Bow down your heads and your hearts before God, and let the will, the blessed will of God, be done.”
These weighty words were spoken by Prebendary Webb-Peploe to a gathering of Christians many years ago. In the silence that closed the hour, the speaker—some knew it—was laying, not for the first time, his Isaac on the altar of his God. It is the life lived that gives force to the words spoken. These words were not wind and froth. They sound through the years like the deep notes of a bell: “Joy is not gush: joy is not jolliness. Joy is perfect acquiescence in the will of God.”
This, then, is the call to the climbing soul. Expose yourself to the circumstances of His choice, for that is perfect acquiescence in the will of God. We are called to the fellowship of a gallant company. “Ye became followers of us, and of the Lord,” wrote St. Paul to the men of Thessalonica. Who follows in their train?
Make me Thy mountaineer—
I would not linger on the lower slope.
Fill me afresh with hope, O God of hope,
That undefeated I may climb the hill
As seeing Him who is invisible,
Whom having not seen I love.
O my Redeemer, when this little while
Lies far behind me and the last defile
Is all alight, and in that light I see
My Saviour and my Lord, what will it be?