Oh, my brother, be content; ’tis only waiting! Receive the kingdom of God as a little child. “Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?” If we enter the lists with Him as equals, He will mock us, and let us be puzzled, and bring to nothing the understanding of even the prudent and intellectual. Thus did our Lord with the cavilling Pharisees, perplexing them with the question how Messiah could be David’s son, and yet his Lord. But if we sit at His feet as learners, He will teach us much that the humble alone may know. Granted that in this dim light some of His ways puzzle us, and seem inexplicable. Granted that His own words are true, “What I do thou knowest not now.” But there is no need to understand His counsels, for the attaining salvation. And let us take it on trust, as well we may, that what may seem God’s harshness, is kinder than man’s kindness; that what may seem God’s foolishness, is wiser than man’s wisdom; that what seems God’s weakness, is stronger than man’s strength.
I have mused in the twilight, near the boundless, restless, ever-tumbling sea, and under the vast canopy of heaven; I have mused in the twilight, until the darkness has fallen, and the heaven is eloquent with its sign-speech of stars. Sitting in a speck of one of those myriad worlds that, flying along with inconceivable velocity, yet appear to me intensely still in the dark, I catch a glimpse of the immensity of the plans and designs of God. Star whirls by star, system fits into system, all in an astounding complex order; none clashing, each kept in its due place and its right proportion by the Infinite Mind. And I gather a hint of a reply to many questions that perplex us, many problems that weary us here; questions that are often best answered by the confession that here we cannot answer them; questions worst answered by an inadequate attempt resulting in an inadequate explanation; questions that we may perhaps quiet with such thoughts as these:—Who knows into what other schemes and systems this life of our globe and of ourselves may be fitted; who knows, seated in this isolated planet, in this narrow twilight of time, how the vast day of Eternity before, and the vast day of Eternity behind, may make at once evident things that here were deepest, seemingly shapeless, mysteries to our mind? The moon rolls round the earth, and the earth round the sun, and this again, with all its planets, round some greater centre; and so on, perhaps, who shall guess how far? For space, as well as time, is infinite, boundless, with the eternal God. And thus, too, I divine, with that vastness and complexity of scheme which we shall not begin to understand until we gain the standing-point of Eternity; thus too, I seem entitled to prophesy, with the infinite designs of God, and with the interwoven system of His counsels. How can we, how should we, understand the different bearings, the linked relations, of His eternal plans? A fly perched on one nut in the enormous machinery of some manufactory, and deciding upon the plan and purpose and working of the whole, from the twistings of the point on which he stood; nay, this is not even a poor analogy with the position of man standing on this speck of Time, and complacently deciding concerning the tremendous counsels of Him who inhabiteth Eternity.
Heaven is revealed to us as night deepens. Thus, as the Twilight of the good man’s life dusks towards night, stars, unperceived before, stars of certainty, of knowledge, of hope, of trust, steal out one by one into his sky, until the heaven is one glitter above him. Earth dies out, and becomes indistinct; its colours are toned down, its scenery becomes less absorbing and obtrusive; it begins to take its proper place in that eternal glittering dust of worlds. And so amid that speaking silence he falls asleep. I suppose that then, in Paradise, a clear morning breaks, which afterwards, in Heaven, becomes the full light of noon.
But the Twilight has gone: night has come down upon the sea: the earnest silence of those infinitely multiplied stars becomes oppressive: I am getting chilly also, and want my tea. Therefore I go indoors, close the shutters, and rest my strained thoughts with the sight of the cheery lamp-lit room; and, asking and obtaining of my wife some half-dozen of my favourite “Songs without Words,” call back my musings from those exhausting mysteries of our twilight state, and lull them with the gentler and more peaceful mystery of music.
