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This truth is a lighted stronghold. We must dwell therein or perish. Without the light that streams from the windows of that tower the history of mankind is one long, dark confusion, an almost unbroken riot of evil and callous cruelty. God has always had His little sanctuaries; homes of tranquility and even sometimes “choirs and places where they sing”; but everywhere life shows a tortured face. Everywhere we see chaos, feel suffering, and hear the cry of questions. All literature echoes those questions:
O Zeus, for our lords is there
Naught but despair?
No path through the tangle of evils, no loosing
Of chains that have bound them?
“Now gods that we adore, whereof comes this?” “Do you see this, O God?” “When didst Thou sleep when such a deed was done?” “Lord, how long wilt Thou look upon this?” “Are there demons among men, clothed with humanity?” Strip the veneer and illusion from our own age and what do we see? A chasm opens at our feet and we cannot cross it....
“I write unto you, little children, because ye have known the Father.” To know our Father is to know that He is in charge of the universe. “I bear up the pillars of it, I uphold the order of the world, I, not you, My burdened child. All souls are Mine”—that is His word to us in the hours of our oppression.
There must have been such hours for all thinkers from the earliest ages onwards. But men were not left to grope in bewilderment. Night unto night showeth knowledge. Before the sure word of prophecy shone like a light that shineth in a dark place, the seers of God saw in the skies the signs and tokens of His purpose and providence. When our Lord Jesus Christ stooped down and wrote on the floor of this dusty earth no man read what He wrote there, and the wind soon blew the dust away. But when He wrote in the skies that starry dust was not blown away, nor were the great words hidden from man. Tradition has it that Enoch read the writing of the stars. Perhaps God taught it to him when he walked with Him. When we study that writing (the signs of the Zodiac and their decans) we find that all around the circle, from Virgo to Leo, close by every symbol of evil there is a symbol of good. And the good is always shown as conquering the bad: “For this, for this the lights innumerable as symbols shine.”
So we come back to rest: There may be darkness about our ways as there has always been and still is about the ways of the world. There are times when neither sun nor stars in many days appear, and no small tempest lies on us and all hope that we shall be saved is taken away, and yet—blessed paradox—we are never left without that which the old Scottish minister likened to moonlight. (“It is possible to gather gold, where it may be had, with moonlight.”)
There comes a liturgy,
Even for a little span,
Great voices Christian,
Songs of my Lord to me,
To me, a simple man.
The sea-wave crashes in my ears:
Again their viols cease:
I have been here for endless years,
And the room is full of peace.
Dim-sliding harmonies
And dreaming voice of seers
Come past all barriers.
With God I have no fears,
And round me roll His seas,
sang God’s fool, the Mystic, in his hour of exultation. Not dreaming voices only, but strong vibrant voices, the voices of the gallant, the crusaders of the spiritual world who have preferred Jerusalem above their chief joy; and His hidden ones, God’s violets among souls—they come too. No barriers can forbid them. And when they come the room is full of peace.
This for today; what of tomorrow? We have no doubt about tomorrow: there is always something in the thought of our Father that is more profound and more beautiful than anything that we can imagine. Who has seen, who has described the lilies that grow in His Garden of Tomorrow? Not even the angels of God, who from time to time have told so much to man, have ever told him anything about those lilies.