ting or
warming it, but it rays out like the sun in the heavens, and the work
done by the light is mightier than all our work. By His glory, and by
the transcendent energies which reside in that illustrious manifestation
of the uncreated light, God summons men to Himself. Well, if that is
anything like fair exposition of the words before us, let me just ask
you before I go further to stop on them for one moment. If I may venture
to say so, put off your theological spectacles for a minute, and do not
let us harden this thought down with any mere dogma that can be selected
in the language of the creeds. Let us try and put it into words a little
less hackneyed. Suppose, instead of talking about calling, you were to
talk about inviting, summoning, beckoning; or I might use tenderer words
still--beseeching, wooing, entreating; for all that lies in the thought.
God summoning and calling, in that sense, men to Himself, by the raying
out of His own perfect beauty, and the might with which the beams go
forth into the darkness. Ah! is not that beautiful, dear brethren; that
there is nothing more, indeed, for God to do to draw us to Himself than
to let us see what He is? So perfectly fair, so sweet, so tender, so
strong, so absolutely corresponding to all the necessities of our
beings and the hunger of our hearts, that when we see Him we cannot
choose but love Him, and that He can do nothing more to call wandering
hearts back to the light and sweetness of His own heart than to show
them Himself. And so from all corners of His universe, and in every
activity of His hand and heart and spirit, we can hear a voice saying,
'Son, give me thine heart.' 'Oh! taste and see that God is good.'
'Acquaint now thyself with Him and be at peace; thereby good shall come
unto thee.'

But great and wonderful as such a thought seems to be when we look at it
in the freshness which belongs to it, do you suppose that that was all
that Peter was thinking about? Do you think that a wide, general, and if
you leave it by itself, vague utterance like that which I have been
indulging in, would give all the specific precision and fulness of the
meaning of the word before us? I think not. I fancy that when this
Apostle wrote these words he remembered a time long, long ago, when
somebody stood by the little fishing-cobble there, and as the men were
up to their knees in slush and dirt, washing their nets, said to them,
'Follow Me.' I think that was in Peter's est