On the chalk downs of Wiltshire, in sight of the town of Westbury, there appears a great white horse, which presumably marks the sight of one of the battles between Alfred the Great and the Danes. As you look at that white horse upon the hill from the road approaching it it is perfectly drawn—it is so accurate that I doubt if any painter of a horse could improve upon it; but some time ago when I was in that neighborhood, I went up to the white horse to see it on the spot. There I found that this cutting in the green turf which revealed the chalk below was so extensive that if I walked round the outline, I could cover about a mile, and the shape as it lay along the slope of the hill had no resemblance to a horse whatever. Like the long shadows cast by the setting sun, its sprawling limbs went down the hill, and were so much greater than the width of the body that you could not have told in walking over it that the artist—for an artist he was—who designed it could possibly intend to be drawing a horse; that perfect horse upon the hillside, to the traveler approaching from Westbury, appeared to have no existence at all—it was a great perspective drawing upon the hill, which, when seen close at hand, did not even suggest a horse’s form. Taking that as an illustration, does it not often strike you how the whole pageant of earth and sky, which delights our eye, is just as unreal as the scenery of the stage? Those clouds that drape the setting sun, and form lofty mountains and shimmering seas, making a landscape in the sky so beautiful that no painter on earth could reproduce it; those clouds that charm us with their beauty, if we were in the midst of them, would be merely like the drenching rain of an April day, without beauty, without charm. And those starry heavens which are to us all of the earth a subject of endless delight because of their beauty and their incomparable grandeur, are not in the least what they appear.—Robert F. Horton, Christian World Pulpit.
(1511)
The other day I came across the letter which Galileo wrote to Kepler, when he was afraid to publish the discoveries which had been made by the first telescope, and he uses this extraordinary language: “Fearing the fate of our master Copernicus, who, altho he has earned immortal fame among a few, yet, by an infinite number, so only can the number of fools be measured, is hissed and derided.” It was a peril in the seventeenth century even to say what those starry heavens are. They have no relation at all to the objects that we see. That little group of the Pleiades, which look like fireflies hung in a net in the sky, in which a very keen eye can perceive seven distinct stars, is really a group of between 400 and 500 suns, many of them larger than our own. And that genial sun himself, whose light we love, which gives to our planet its life, its warmth and its joy—if we could approach it would terrify us the more we approached it—a mighty mass of incandescent matter so awful that the imagination dare hardly entertain the reality of what it is. It may be said, however, that while these distant objects of the universe possibly mislead us, our eyes at any rate can trust the things which are close at hand. But that is quite a delusion, too. The matter which is close at hand, and which our fathers thirty years ago treated as the one certainty in the world, is a complete illusion. I took up in my hand some time ago a few grains of dried mud from a river-bed. To all appearance they were like grains of gunpowder, but they were put under the microscope, and there to my amazement every one of these tiny grains was a shell, as beautiful and as perfect in form as a nautilus sailing upon the sea. Not only does the matter we see delude us, but the delusion is greater from the fact of what we do not see. Now, the physicist seriously tells us he is using the strict language of science, and not the language of a fairy tale, when he says that all the matter we touch, including our own bodies, is made up of molecules, and the molecule is made up of atoms, an atom far too minute for the eye to see; and yet that atom, of which all matter is built up, is itself composed of electrons, so minute that they dart with inconceivable velocity from end to end of that tiny atom like a mouse in a great cathedral—such is the proportion of the electron to the atom.—Robert F. Horton, The Christian World Pulpit.
(1512)
ILLUSTRATIONS FROM CANDLES
Mr. Spurgeon had occasion, some time ago, says the Hartford Courant, to speak to a company of theological students on the importance of using illustrations in preaching.
A student observed that they found it difficult to get illustrations, whereupon Mr. Spurgeon remarked that illustrations enough might be found in a tallow candle. This was regarded as an extravagance of speech, whereupon the great preacher prepared a lecture to show what might be illustrated by candles. In delivering his lecture he used candles of various sizes and colors, together with lanterns and other suitable apparatus. A nicely japanned but shut-up box filled with fine unused candles illustrated an idle and spiritless church. Several colossal and highly-colored but unlit candles were shown, and with them a tiny rushlight shining as best it could. The big, handsome, unlit candles might be archbishops or doctors of divinity, or other persons of culture without piety, and the bright rushlight might be some poor boy in a workshop whose life is beautiful. Mr. Spurgeon showed an unlighted candle in a splendid silver candlestick, and then a brightly burning one stuck in a ginger-beer bottle. He showed what a few people might do by combining their good efforts, by exhibiting the combined light of twelve candles. The folly of trying to light a candle with the extinguisher still on was shown, and the dark-lantern illustrated the care of people who make no effort to let their light shine before men. The lecturer then placed a candle under a bushel, and afterward placed the bushel-measure under the candle—the point of which was obvious. In snuffing a candle he extinguished it, and remarked that Christians often did a like mischief by unwise rebukes and criticisms. The folly of burning the candle at both ends was illustrated. The last illustration was a number of lighted candles of various hues placed together on one stand, representing the Church’s true diversity in unity, all the different branches burning from one stem, and for one purpose. Some one in the audience asked if the “dips” did not give the best light, whereupon Mr. Spurgeon said he was not sure of that, and thought many of the “dips” would be the better for another dipping.
The man of genius can find illustrations in common things—sermons in stones or in candles. Every preacher should work these mines of natural analogies.
(1513)