Tedious, sterile, and lonely periods may serve us eminently by concentrating for a while our thoughts upon ourselves. When the environment is full of movement and colour, of incident and interest, our mind is naturally occupied with it; and not rarely occupied with it to the total exclusion of introspection and self-acquaintance. When our circumstances cease to absorb our thought, the opportunity is given to commune with our own heart, and to become acquainted with the facts of our personality. Richard Semon has an instructive passage on the intellectual benefit of isolation and monotony : “The immense Australian bush offers genuine solitude. At first this solitude was new and interesting to me, and it used to bring me lonely hours and a sense of abandonment; but finally I felt it like a great and mighty revelation, a thing as vivid and intense as the witnessing of the most varied scenes amongst foreign lands and nations. It gives a man time and a chance to look into his innermost self, to see himself, not as he appears in the eyes of his neighbours, but in his relation to great, ever-creating, everdestroying nature." This naturalist merely considers the intellectual advantages of the wilderness life in self-acquaintance, and a better appreciation of our relation to nature; but those lonely and dreary passages of life from which we shrink give us time and a chance to look into our heart, to become acquainted with the secrets of character, to know our relation to God. As a rule the world is too much with us to allow either time or energy for introspection; but outward stagnation and insipidity give opportunity for a greater and mightier revelation than Semon received, even the

more perfect knowledge of ourselves in the sight of God. "Therefore, behold, I will bring her into the wilderness." The context shows that God marred the glory of Israel and brought her into dreary conditions, that she might see her real self and prepare to meet her Lord.

God brings His people into dull and desolate surroundings that they may be fitted for the greater tasks which await them. "I will give her her vineyards from thence." How strikingly that law has been illustrated in the history of many great historic characters! Moses kept the flock of Jethro behind the desert. After his conversion Paul withdrew to Arabia for purposes of reflection. John at Patmos beheld his splendid vision. Luther shut up in the Castle of the Wartburg translated the Bible. John Bunyan was imprisoned that he might dream his glorious dream. And John Wesley in squalid Georgia was disciplined for his great mission. Let us never be impatient when brought into desert places. The Pentateuch, the Epistles of St. Paul, the Apocalypse, the German Bible, the Pilgrim's Progress, the Evangelical Revival, and a thousand other purple vineyards of moral and spiritual wealth were vouchsafed to us from the wilderness. We may not be likely to do things after this heroic measure; but our future success in life depends far more on the faithful improvement of disappointing days, uncongenial circumstances, dreary tasks, and unfruitful strivings than youth imagines. He who is faithful, diligent, and hopeful when life stretches around

All dark and barren as a rainy sea,

will bring his barque to the golden isles; he who bravely ploughs the sand and casts his seed into the dull furrow shall find it at length a garden of vines, fig-trees, and pomegranates.

Earthly life is sometimes sobered that the heavenly world may the better assert its existence and claims. When human life is excited, distracted, and absorbed by terrestial things, the heavenlies are liable to be forgotten and obscured. Living on the wide, unattractive plains of Mesopotamia the ancients turned their attention to the stars, there so conspicuously in evidence. Mr. Hudson, writing of the scenery of Patagonia, remarks: "On the wild flying clouds appeared a rainbow with hues so vivid that we shouted aloud with joy at the sight of such loveliness. . . . I do not suppose that the colours were really more vivid than in numberless other rainbows I have seen; it was, I think, the universal greyness of earth and heaven in that grey winter season, in a region where colour is so sparsely used by nature, that made it seem so supremely beautiful, so that the sight of it affected us like wine." The tameness of earth fascinated the Babylonians with the magnificence of the stars; the greyness of the landscape intoxicated the naturalist with the glory of the rainbow; and the dullness, weariness, and sterility of this earthly life give the eternal world a better chance to command the thought and affection of the soul.

XXIII

ELEVATION AND VISION

After these things I saw, and behold, a door opened in heaven, and the first voice which I heard, a voice as of a trumpet speaking with me, one saying, Come up hither, and I will show thee the things which must come to pass hereafter. -REV. iv. I.

T is a serious error to suppose that we can rightly apprehend the highest truths whilst we live on

I

a low plane of thought and conduct, and yet it is a very common error. Those who grovel in the dust, nay, who wallow in the sensual mire, yet believe themselves competent to discuss the most solemn problems of existence and destiny; they conclude that the truths concerning God-His existence, laws, government, revelation, and purpose-are apprehended and understood mentally like theories of mechanics and mathematics. It is a profound mistake; divinest verities are revealed only to the upward gaze and the uplifted life.

It is a matter of popular knowledge that the human eye, as an organ of vision, is not commensurate with the whole range of solar radiation, and that it is incapable of receiving visual impressions from all the rays emitted by the sun. Beyond the violet at one end of the spectrum are rays so intense as to be invisible, and

beyond the red at the other end of the spectrum are rays whose feebler action render them equally invisible; beyond the violet and the red the vibrations in the light ether make no appeal to the optic nerve, we are unconscious of colours actually before our eyes, of beams of light which the chemist knows to be of the first consequence. So a world of truth exists which in the very nature of things is for ever hidden from the secularized soul. The carnal eye may distinguish certain great religious and ethical facts and distinctions, but eternal realities of the very first importance are inaccessible to the blurred and feeble sense. "The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually judged."

To see eternal realities with open vision we must preserve a pure and sensitive soul. Only as the Spirit of God refines our perceptions, works in us clearness of insight, endows us with spiritual imagination and sensibility, are we qualified to apprehend, mirror, and appropriate the truths by which men live. Recently in some experiments in colour photography it was attempted to reproduce the colours of the spectrum. The experiment succeeded so far as the bars of colour in the interval between the violet and the red were concerned; but the camera failed to represent the ultra hues, the film was not sufficiently sensitive to seize the hidden mystery of colour, and a couple of blotches alone witnessed to the existence of the unseen rays. Thus a coarsened soul in its dark misgivings bears witness to unseen things, yet it lacks the subtlety to discern and realize the glorious realities of the