Parable of Light
By A.A. Hodge
Before this is presented, I want to make two introductory remarks:-First, it would be foolish as well as irreverent for mortals under our limited conditions to attempt to penetrate the awful secrets of the divine Being, and to throw the rushlight of our poor understandings over the impenetrable secrets of the inter-relations of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost as they exist together eternally in the bosom of the one Godhead. It is of course very different when we come to what God has himself condescended to reveal to us as to the relations each divine Person severally sustains to the universe external to the Godhead, and as to the work which they each perform in their co-operative agency in the economies of creation, providence, and redemption. Our illustration is confined to this distinctly revealed region of the external relations of the different Persons of the one Godhead to the universe.
In the second place, we claim that our right to illustrate the revealed facts of the spiritual world by analogies drawn from the physical creation is founded upon a right view of the relation of the material and physical worlds a-s constituted by God. The object of God in all his works has been the manifestation of his own glorious perfections through the medium of his works. The heavens and the earth and the whole course of providence are a veil through which the perfections, designs, and methods of the several
Persons of the Godhead are more or less clearly shadowed forth to us. Hence our Savior himself spoke in parables and metaphors. Both Old and New Testaments combine in making all nature a mirror reflecting the face and activities of God, the inmost operations of his grace being represented by such natural agencies as water, oil, salt, leaven, wind, fire, a hammer, a sword, and fuller's soap.
lst. Let it, then, be marked that light in its essence is absolutely invisible and passes all apprehension. Philosophers assume by hypothesis a great interstellar ocean of highly rarefied elastic matter called the ethereal medium, which no man has seen or can see. They tell us that light is a peculiar mode of motion transmitted in all directions illimitably in this ethereal medium. But whence comes this infinite throbbing, whose restless waves, traversing the celestial spaces, break ceaselessly on the revolving worlds? They flow down upon us from measureless space through measureless time, and no genius can imagine whence they come and whither they go. Light makes manifest all things from which it is radiated or upon which it is reflected, but is itself utterly invisible and unknown.
Thus it is with God the Father. Through infinite time he fills infinite space, and he is the Abyss from which all things flow and into which all things tend; yet no man hath or can see God at any time-the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.
2nd. Light itself makes all things visible on which it falls and from which it is reflected, but it becomes itself visible only in a radiant point or disk, like that of the insufferable sun from which it floods the world. Suppose some angel or other inhabitant of an outlying province of creation, who had often heard of the wonders and splendors of light, though he had never seen them - suppose him to wander far afield through the nether darkness in search of this hitherto unseen wonder. If such a one suddenly should rise beyond the crest of some eclipsing shadow, and without transition stand face to face with our central sun, would he not with rapt wonder naturally hail the sun with language similar to that used in Scripture to express the essential relation of the eternal Word to God? “All hail! thou art the very light I seek; thou art the Word of light, its uttered form; thou art its express image in which this invisible source of all life and knowledge may be beheld; thou art the radiancy of its inexhaustible glory. All its fullness dwells in thee bodily.” Thus God the Father is never known except as he is seen in the Person of the Son. He that hath seen the Son hath seen the Father; and never otherwise or otherwhere is the Father ever seen. Angels and archangels, and all the other sons of God, who, impelled by a native aspiration, seek to know their Father, hear his voice only as it is uttered in his eternal Word, and see his image only as it is rendered visible in his express Image and is projected forth as the radiance or effulgence of his glory.
3rd. That which makes the energy and influence of the sun omnipresent is the inexhaustible volume of its rays flooding space in all directions. The rays of distant constellations come down to us through millenniums and centuries and years. The rays of our own sun flood the successive sides of the earth as it revolves daily on its axis, bearing down over the mountain-tops to the lowest valley, and over the broadest plains, heat, light, and actinic energy, the source of all life and movement. If these rays should by any reason cease, or if they should be cut off by the interposition of an opaque mass, the sun would, to us, virtually cease to exist. It would be utterly withdrawn from our consciousness, and it would entirely cease to be to us any more the source of light and life.
Thus the immanent Holy Ghost makes God the Father and God the Son, and so Christ the God-man, now glorified in heaven, omnipresent to all the Church in heaven and on earth. If the Holy Ghost were withdrawn, the Christ would be absent and of none effect to us. But if the Holy Ghost is present and active in us, we dwell in the full flood of the light and of the life of God and of his Christ.
4th. The rays of light radiated or reflected from any surface to another never reveal themselves; they only make manifest or reproduce by reflection the surface from which they come. Thus everyone sees by means of the rays radiated or reflected the very image of the sun and moon in the water and all the features of the landscape in the mirror. So it is always in the work of the Holy Ghost. He never speaks of himself, but he always receives of Christ and shows and communicates to us the Christ and his redemptive grace. The rays of light never picture themselves, but the stars from which they come. So the Holy Ghost never excites in our consciousness thoughts and emotions relating to himself, but always those which relate to the Godhead and to the incarnate Christ. Therefore it is that, although the Holy Ghost inspired the Scriptures, and although he is the immediately present and the constantly active Person of the Godhead in our hearts and lives, yet there is comparatively so little conspicuity given in Scripture and in Christian thought to the personality of the Holy Ghost. He is ever speaking, yet not of himself, but of Christ.
5th. All the fullness of light is exhibited and conveyed in the sun bodily; so all the fullness of the Godhead is exhibited and conveyed in the Person of the God-man bodily. The form is human, but all of God is here. The Infinite has kept back nothing but has given us THE ALL in giving us his Son.
6th. The sun conveys his fullness to the attendant spheres only ray by ray in successive periods of time. So we live only as we continue to live in God and receive from him our life “grace for grace.” But the immeasurable ocean of the interstellar ether ever contains in its depths, latent yet potential, the infinite stores of historic light and heat. Looking up athwart the evening sky, we see the inflowing streams of radiance which have been invisibly pulsing in the bosom of that ocean for years or centuries or millenniums. All the secrets of the worlds from creation downward through the aeons, all the heat or light of life-force they have ever received or shed forth, are beating in the depths of that impenetrable ether across the black bosom of which we look out at night. So is the eternal and infinite Holy Ghost an absolutely measureless and inexhaustible source of light and life. In him all the sources of our life lie latent as in the being of God; from him all the elements of the creature's life, and pre-eminently of the Christian's life, spring in spontaneous freeness and in transcendent perfection.
7th. The fullness of the sun, brought out into the circle of the dependent worlds by radiation, is brought into the knowledge of the creature only by the refractions and reflections to which this radiance is subjected in the worlds themselves. If we could place ourselves beyond the atmosphere, in the interplanetary space, we would on every side, except that toward the sun itself, behold the whole hemisphere absolutely black, with the stars simply as points without size - themselves visible, but spreading no light around. If we should turn and face the sun itself, we should see only a dull blue disk of lambent flame. It is only after we have descended within the volume of the atmosphere, and come to the surface of the earth itself, that the hitherto latent myriad-hued beauties of the sun first come out to view. Refracted by every successive stratum of the earth's atmosphere, and by the vapors of various densities which canopy our hills and streams, this hitherto latent radiance is broken and expanded into the infinitely varied hues of the rainbow and of the imperial retinue of clouds which attend the alternate rising and setting of the sun. And the whole earth, its hills and vales and plains, and all its innumerable tribes of plants and flowers and birds and beasts, reflect each one a separate color or shade or tone of light, and by their infinite variety collectively articulate the incalculable beauties latent in the sun's radiance, which could not otherwise be known.
Thus it is that the radiance of the effulgent Image of the invisible God - that is, the ever-present Spirit of the Son of the Father - exhibits to us the infinite fullness and variety of his grace; not immediately in himself, but by refractions and reflections through the intelligent spirits in which he dwells - in no single Church or person, but in all the endlessly varied spiritual beauties and graces of all the saints of all nations and ages, and in the angels of all ranks. Thrones and dominions, principalities and powers, circle the throne and reflect the first gush of the white light. But all down the lines of vision, in interminable perspective, poets and philosophers, artists and musicians, prophets and priests, and all the saints of very various shade and tone, analyze and reflect all the perfections of their Lord, which otherwise no eye hath seen or can see.
8th. But the sun of our physical system is the inexhaustible source of all life as well as all light. When he moves southward toward the winter solstice, he leaves all our northern hemisphere comfortless and dead. The leaves wither and fall, the birds depart for the genial south, the springing fountains are sealed up, the whole earth freezes into solid, obdurate stone, and death reigns supreme. When again, at the vernal equinox, the sun returns and pours his warm rays over the world, then all nature is quickened to life and wakes, the fountains are unsealed, the softened mould is impregnated, and every germ unfolds, and the singing birds come back, and the trees blossom, and all the earth rejoices and bears fruit.
So when the Holy Spirit is withdrawn from our midst, and consequently God and Christ are absent, the fountains of our spirits close, our minds are darkened, our strength withers, and the winter of our souls enfolds us, and the whole Church with us, in death. But when the Holy Ghost returns again, and sets for us once more the returning sun in our sky, new life from on high thrills through our veins, our hearts sing, our eyes take the heavenly light, our hands are made strong, and the work of the Lord prospers everywhere.
9th. Once again: it belongs to the mystery of light that each ray tends to reproduce everywhere in the object upon which it falls the image of that from which it radiates. This general secret of photography was known ages before the time of Daguerre. Engravings reproduce themselves upon the blank paper which shades them from the light. The sun, striking the wind-ruffled river or lake with its radiance, reproduces on everyone of the myriad wavelets a perfect image of himself. As we stand face to face, the image of each is reproduced on the eye and face of the other. This energy of light in the long run cuts deeper than the surface: in the sunny side of hospital wards it moulds anew the shriveled limbs of the palsied, and like a sculptor fashions them after the forgotten ideal. So after long lives of mutual contemplation husbands and wives and familiar friends, however dissimilar at the first, come to look, as well as to think, alike under the plastic and assimilating power of light. Often has the mountain traveler seen this miracle wrought in a lake between the forest-clad hills. The sky is cloudless; the air as clear as crystal, and windless; the water lying like glass), pure and placid as a mirror, under the bending skies. There you see the very heavens, the vast spaces, the g1'eat depths, the brilliant stars in their celestial perspective, all reproduced in the bosom of the lake. So when our souls lie in holy contemplation under the rays of Christ the heavenly Sun, our passions stilled, our hearts calm and purified from their lower springs, “we also, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord " (2 Cor. iii. 18).
