SHADOWS. He sendeth sun, He sendeth shower; SINCE in a land not barren still, And since these biting frosts but kill Blest be Thy dew, and blest Thy frost, The dew doth cheer what is distressed; HENRY VAUGHAN. SHADOWS. WE "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief." MARK ix. 24. E cannot advance uninterruptedly in our spiritual, any more than in our bodily life, from one degree of brightness to another. The shadow of the earth will ever and anon fling the darkness of night over us; sleep will creep upon us; we flag and grow weary, and yield to it; and we should sleep on self-indulgently, unless we were awakened again and again by the light of the Sun of Righteousness, piercing through our night, and bursting the bands of our sleep. There should, indeed, be a progress in our spiritual life: else that life will too plainly be giving way before the manifold influences which try to check and destroy it. But our progress, so long as we continue in the flesh, will never be unbroken; nor shall we make any real progress at all, without fresh impulses from the Power which first set us in motion. Our noon should keep on growing brighter and brighter; but it will only do so when we live under a perpetual dawn, when new influxes of light are ever pouring upon us from the same celestial Foun tain. For, as it is a law of all life, that every creature, while it is the offspring of all former generations, shall yet have a new germ of life in itself, so, in our moral life, every act is at once the result of our whole previous moral being, and springs immediately and freshly from the will. And as in our moral, so in our spiritual life, no moment stands alone. There is no moment in it, which is not connected by indissoluble ties of motive and impulse with all that we have hitherto, felt, and thought, and done. At the same time no moment in it will have any true spiritual energy, unless we are immediately prompted and animated by the life-giving Spirit of God. Hence it is not enough for us to be convinced of the sin of unbelief once for all, even though that conviction be the work of the Comforter. When a body is put in motion, we know, unless its motion were checked by retarding forces, it would continue to move on without limit; but we know no less surely that these retarding forces will soon lay hands on it and arrest it. So we might fancy that when the soul is once lifted up from the earth, and projected into the free atmosphere of faith, it would continue to soar into the heaven of heavens, nor rest until it reached the throne of God. But we know too well that this is not so, that it gravitates to the world of the senses, and that it has a leaden weight of self-will bearing it downward. Against these hindrances we cannot even strive, much less rise above them, unless the Comforter be continually helping us onward, by convincing us |