THE CHAPTER OF DARKNESS. "Night, sable goddess, from her ebon throne, Her leaden sceptre o'er a slumb'ring world. Silence how dead! and darkness how profound!” WHEN this beautiful world came from the forming hand of its Almighty Architect, it rolled upon its axis, obedient to the law which has ever since regulated, with wonderful uniformity, its diurnal rotation. Morning, therefore, came then just as it comes now, when the far horizon gleams with golden light, dewdrops sparkle on the blades of glass, and birds begin their song-was followed, just as it is now, by the burning glory of a noontide sun; this, in its turn, by the calmness and the beauty of his dying light; and this again by night, with its darkness and its chills, its silence and its stars. The earth, in its daily rotation, withdrew, successively and periodically, every portion of its surface from the sun's enlightenment; and therefore, through all its regions, here at one time and there at another, there was night. The darkness was caused (and this is the gist of our illustration), not by any diminution of the lustre of the sun, or by any departure of the sun himself, but by the removal of the earth, portion after portion, from his beams: and thus there was darkness then, just as there is now, in the world that is material. But no corresponding result had been produced as yet in that which is moral and spiritual, simply because no corresponding cause had there been as yet in operation. Man had not withdrawn himself from God, and that God, like the glorious luminary to which He is so often compared, never, never withdraws Himself from us. The creature, therefore, enjoyed, as we have seen, the light of the countenance of his Creator; and there was day-clear, cloudless, and continued day. But Adam, by disobedience, departed from the Lord. He turned away from his Creator-that "Sun of Righteousness," in whose beams he had ever, till then, been rejoicing; and thus began that long, long night, in which, ever since, his race has been involved. But when our Saviour says, "I must work the works of him that sent me while it is day: the night cometh when no man can work," he attaches to the words day and night a meaning directly opposite to that in which they are used by the Apostle when he tells us that "the night is far spent, the day is at hand." The language of our Lord intimates that life is, as it were, the daytime of our being, the time not for repose but exertion, and that eternity is the night of our existence, the period when activity is succeeded by rest, and opportunities are ended. But the Apostle reverses this, the usual signification of these different figures, and teaches that the now, both of earth's history and our own, is but night, while that eternal period that must succeed it shall be day. Nor is this employment of the same words in contrary meanings without significance. It shows that now is the accepted time, to-day is the day of salvation," while it also shows that substantial life and essential realities are not for this life, but for that which is never to terminate. And this latter truth is the more deserving of attention from what would seem, if we were to judge from the actions of men, to be a very popular opinion. It would appear that with only too many the present is regarded as the period, and the only period, of realities. To them, all upon the life-side of the sepulchre would seem solid land-all beyond it, a region of vapour and of mist, of fancy and of dreams. How consistent, then, is Scripture with itself in saying that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen! But it tells us that a time is coming in which faith will end in sight-the deep sleep of those infatuated dreamers be broken up, and they themselves, awake at last, be convinced that the now present is strangely unsubstantial, while the then present is intensely real-since night, with all its shadows and delusions, will then have passed away, and eternity, with all its glories or all its horrors, have begun. Adopting, then, the metaphor of the Apostle, we contend that it is now night; and the fact that the world in general fancy it to be day only shows how happy is his illustration, for the deeper the dream, the profounder the conviction of its reality. The soundest sleeper, if he dream, is the sleeper who never imagines, even for a moment, that he is sleeping at all. It is the silent hour of solemn midnight when he fancies it is noonday; and it is only when the thought first flashes across him, that what he hears so vividly and sees so distinctly is, after all, a mere illusion, that he awakes. We have seen how apt is the comparison between the cause of natural night, and the cause, as explained in Scripture, of that disastrous change which is generally called the Fall. Nor is the resemblance between the effects of these different causes less striking than that between the causes themselves; for all the facts of human experience for thousands of years may be justly regarded as nocturnal phenomena. It was nightfall when Adam sinned, and his race have ever since been wanderers through the darkened scenery of an apostate world, seeking with various lights, and in different directions, the lost land of the morning. Thus the history of man is the story of a pilgrimage by night. He has moved along, with stumbling steps and deceitful guides, under a cloudy firmament, but not without stars, through regions of gloom and of danger, irradiated with a light which though feeble at first was to shine with increasing brightness, and in the "fulness of time" to render distinctly visible the right path-Christ the "way," as well as "the truth and the life," by whom true believers in every age have had access, though under different circumstances, "by one spirit to the Father"—to the God of light and to the land of light for ever. The events which distinguish his biography are like the occurrences which often happen at the season to which we have thus compared his momentous lifetime, and, therefore, to give them their real character, we have only to follow out the Apostle's illustration. The proofs of its propriety are the proofs of the fall of man, and without this His whole story is a dark and terrible enigma. The tale of redemption is a fabulous episode in the gloomy narrative. The preaching of apostles is vain, and the faith of their followers is vain also. The good news which, like " songs in the night," has cheered so many sorrowing hearts, is a mere delusion. If man have not fallen Christianity cannot be a true religion, for it presupposes and provides for a fact which has never occurred. The doctrine of human apostacy is so inseparably interwoven with the whole scheme of salvation, as revealed in Scripture, that they must stand or fall together; and therefore, if that doctrine be false, we are left at this hour without a Divine revelation, for it can hardly be denied that our choice lies between Scripture and no revelation at all. Consequently, if Christ has not come to seek and to save that which was lost, and has not conveyed from heaven messages of mercy to the fallen, neither has He authoritatively brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel. They remain in the obscurity in which He found them, to be guessed at or guessed out by human reason, without one written sign from heaven that its conjectures are correct. Some of the best and wisest men that ever existed have been in gross and grievous error on points of the utmost conceivable importance, and after the most patient and laborious efforts in the candid search after truth. The light that has so often cheered the distressed, the desponding, and the dying, has been an ignis fatuus; and for anything we can certainly tell to the contrary, there is no hereafter, so that, possibly, the wisest philosophy after all may be just "let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we |