ersal spaces, aeons,
eternities--what word of vastness you can find or choose--take
unfathomable darkness itself, if you will, to express the infinitude of
God, that original splendor existing only to the consciousness of God
Himself--I say He hides it not, but is revealing it ever, forever, at
all cost of labor, yea of pain to Himself. His whole creation is a
sacrificing of Himself to the being and well-being of His little ones,
that, being wrought out at last into partakers of His divine nature,
that nature may be revealed in them to their divinest bliss. He brings
hidden things out of the light of His own being into the light of ours.

"But see how different _we_ are--until we learn of Him! See the tendency
of man to conceal his treasures, to claim even truth as his own by
discovery, to hide it and be proud of it, gloating over that which he
thinks he has in himself, instead of groaning after the infinite of God!
We would be forever heaping together possessions, dragging things into
the cave of our finitude, our individual self, not perceiving that the
things which pass that dreariest of doors, whatever they may have been,
are thenceforth but 'straws, small sticks, and dust of the floor.' When
a man would have a truth in thither as if it were of private
interpretation, he drags in only the bag which the truth, remaining
outside, has burst and left.

"Nowhere are such children of darkness born as in the caves of
hypocrisy; nowhere else can a man revel with such misshapen hybrids of
religion and sin. But, as one day will be found, I believe, a strength
of physical light before which even solid gold or blackest marble
becomes transparent, so is there a spiritual light before which all
veils of falsehood shall shrivel up and perish and cease to hide; so
that, in individual character, in the facts of being, in the densest of
Pharisaical hypocrisy, there is nothing covered that shall not be
revealed, nothing hid that shall not be known.

"If then, brother or sister, thou hast that which would be hidden, make
haste and drag the thing from its covert into the presence of thy God,
thy Light, thy Saviour, that, if it be in itself good, it may be
cleansed; if evil, it may be stung through and through with the burning
arrows of truth, and perish in glad relief. For the one bliss of an evil
thing is to perish and pass; the evil thing, and that alone, is the
natural food of Death--nothing else will agree with the monster. If we