ring out and out
and out from Himself, as the rays of the sun stream out from its great
orb, pouring out from Himself the light and the perfectness and the
beauty of His own self revelation. And I think we may fairly translate
and paraphrase the first words of my text into this: God's great way of
summoning men to Himself is by laying out His love upon them and letting
the fulness of that ineffable and uncreated light, in which is no
darkness at all, stream into the else blinded and hopeless lives and
hearts of men. Then the other side of the Apostle's thought seems to
me--if we will only strip it of the threadbare technicalities associated
with it--as great and wonderful, God's glory and God's virtue. A
heathenish kind of smack lingers about that word, both as applied to men
and as applied to God, and so seldom found in the New Testament; but
meaning here, as I venture to say, without stopping to show it--meaning
here substantially the same thing that we mean by that word energy or
power. You know old women in country places talk about the virtues of
plants. They do not mean by this the goodness of plants, but they mean
the occult powers which they suppose them able to put forth. We read in
one of the gospels that our Lord Himself said at one singular period of
His life that virtue had gone out of Him, meaning thereby not goodness
but energy. So I think we get a sufficient equivalent to the Apostle's
meaning if for the second two words of my text we read, 'He hath called
us by the glory, the raying out of his love, and He hath called us by
the activity and the energy, the power in action of His great and
illustrious Spirit.' So you see these two things, the light that streams
out of an energy which is born of the streaming light. These two things
are really at bottom but one, various aspects of one idea. Modern
physicists tell us that all the activity in the system comes from the
sun, and in the higher region all the activity comes from the sun, and
there is no mightier force in the physical universe than the sunlight.
Lightnings are vulgar, noisy, and limited in contrast. The
all-conquering force is the light that streams out, and so says Peter in
his vivid picturesque way--not meaning the mere talk of philosophy or
theology--the manifestation of the glory of God is the mightiest force
in the whole universe. It is not like the play of the moonbeam upon an
iceberg, ineffectual, cold, merely touching the death without mel