John Doughty

“ The moon shines by reflected light, while the sun is light and heat in itself. The faith of the mind is true and bright only as it is reflected from love—only as it is a response to the deep love of the heart. The moon's light is borrowed from the sun. Sunlight, therefore, is the great natural power of life and growth which broods upon the face of the earth. Moonlight has very little to do with covering the land with corn, with filling the gardens with flowers, or with loading the trees with fruit. The moon without the sun would have neither light nor life. Faith without love is cold and dead. ”

“ And as age succeeds age a ceaseless procession of human souls is passing from every earth of this immeasurable universe of planetary spheres into the infinite world beyond. The grandeur of the thought is overwhelming. And in every time of illimitable space and in every state of each one's life in all these worlds, into the universe of nature and into that of spirit, these Divine activities are flowing, creating, sustaining, developing, recreating.
God is, therefore, not a self-glorifying Being. His happiness is in his goings forth for others, not in the contemplation of his own greatness. ”

“ Is life a mystery? Are its paths all darkness and unrest? Not to those who have made even the beginnings of a life of love and faith. Is there any light for the soul? Is there a way out of the shadows which obscure our wanderings? Yes; love throws a radiance over life which dispels all clouds; faith lights up its skies amid its gloomiest nights; true knowledge reveals bright homes in everlasting worlds beyond the one in which we linger now. And in that knowledge, faith and love the Lord lives and reigns supreme. ”

“ But now this love and faith are enkindled within the spiritual mind, and even our knowledge of eternal things are lit with living fire.
And so these lights enkindled thus serve to divide between the day and night—between the light of the true and good and the darkness of the false and evil. Error can no more deceive us; evil can no more palm itself off for good, nor selfishness for virtue. These clear-shining luminaries, love, the greater light for the day, faith the lesser light for the night, have dispelled all misconceptions. ”

“ There is a state of mind where error is as easily recognized as the baleful shadow of the night, and truth as easily seen as the light in its summer shining; where evil is as sensitively recognized as the cold of the polar zone, and good as exquisitely percieved as the sweet, soft airs of a perfect spring. To cultivate this is the object of regeneration. No excellence in the whole realm of existence is obtained without cultivation. Full regeneration, the seventh day of the new creation, is the perfection of the spiritual nature. Truth is then a perception, good an intuition. ”

“ The fish of the sea are the knowledges in the memory, the fowl of the air the thoughts which float through the atmosphere of the mind, the cattle the affections of the heart, all the earth the entire realm of mind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, the instincts and ideas that lay close to the earth in the very natural duties and pleasures which a life in the world compel us to perform and enjoy. These are the things over which the man, the regenerated manhood, are to have and hold dominion. ”

“ Spiritual knowledge becomes thus no irrational faith, no unformed scheme, no vapid array of meaningless phrases, but a grand scheme of spiritual philosophy, complete in all its parts, beautiful in its symmetry, spiritually approved by the reason of man, and worthy of God. The leviathans of the mind, its grand conclusions, its large and fully rounded philosophy, always come last. The more alive our truths are the grander they become in character and scope. Not until we enter into living relations with God, do the truth-waters of the soul bring forth their leviathans of thought. ”

“ Faith alone, faith which has not borrowed its light from love, cannot do this. But a faith that is the reflection of genuine love once ours, cannot by any possibility fail us.
So, when this belief in God which is born of love has power to sustain us amid our night-times of life, the lesser light, the moon of faith, begins to shine upon us with its silvery radiance. Set up within the spiritual region of the mind, it sheds light upon our darkness, illumines our farthest pathways, saves us from snares and pitfalls, and carries us safely on to another state of newly awakened day. ”

“ But is there any conscious thought as we see, and walk, and work amid them all, that the Lord's never ceasing inflow of Divine life is pushing up the grass on which we tread, is painting the blossoms with the pure white or flaming red, with gold or azure blue, is pouring the juicy current into the hanging fruit, or is making the world radiant with the light which illumines our daily walk? ”

“ So in matters which concern our spiritual walk, where neither love nor faith shine on our wandering way to guide our devious steps, the stars of the mere knowledge of what is true and good may afford some glimmering light to help us on. Thus, as in the absence of sun and moon, night may still have its stars, comparatively dim though their light may be, so, though our love may, for the time, be cold, and our faith may halt, the bare knowledge of what is true and good will serve a purpose in our lives, until our faith and love assert themselves once more. ”

“ No pent of fires of self-satisfied glory burn within his soul. All He is goes forth. He creates worlds; his ceaseless going forth of life sustains them. Creation never stops. In a single world once made, it is seed-time and harvest forever, an endless succession of efforts on the part of the Divine energies for the benefit of man. He creates man; and again it is a ceaseless working on the spiritual plane of his being for his constant elevation. He not only forms the world of nature and man as a physical being, but He forms the world of souls and man as a spiritual being. ”

“ It can neither warm the heart, enlighten the mind, nor give salvation to the man. But faith that is kindled at the shrine of the heart's best love, faith which borrows its light from love, faith which reflects the sunny glow of the heart's true love on every pathway of life—that is at once the sign and seal of a soul that is saved. ”

“ Can the poet's sensibility detect a flaw in the rhythmic measure of a line, the artist's eye descry the untrue in the drawing of a picture, the musician's ear discover the slightest deviation from exact harmony in a band of a hundred pieces, and this by the intuition of a moment, and the spiritual nature have no instant intuitions of its own—no ear for the true, no sense for the good, that is as undeviating as the lines of light? But, you say, the intuition of the poet, the artist, or the musician comes by cultivation. ”

“ A day, in scripture symbolism, is a state of mind. This evening and this morning, this first breaking of the spiritual light upon the mind's dark earth, in its beginning shadowy, in its progressions brighter, constitutes with every one his first state of regeneration.
How true this is. All mental progress is from darkness into light; all spiritual progress, from evening unto morning. It matters not that the light now is but a dim glimmering in comparison with what it may be. All success proceeds from first steps; all achievements begin at the beginning. ”

“ We stand among the sheaves of our garnered grain; we taste the rich fruits of a better life than once we had even dreamed of; but we look earnestly forward, lovingly higher, and wonder what better things the Lord has yet in store for us, in states of regenerative experience of which we have dim visions but have not reached as yet.
And so we see how beautifully the parable of the creation, when viewed in its inward meaning, sets forth the regeneration of the human soul. ”

“ He may lead it, guide it, but even a self-inflicted bullet through the brain will not cause the throbbings of a once created mind to cease. It still works on and it works forever. It is the energy of God within and behind this individuality of ours. Yet who thinks of it? Who takes conscious cognizance of its presence? Who does otherwise than live and work, as though this life was all his own? True we have individuality, and we influence the course, each one of his own life, but who looks behind, in common thought, at the concealed springs of existence which lie within that individuality? ”

“ We may learn concerning science in the rock-ribbed earth, and trace the courses of the stars by the mathematics learned of man. But the Word of God is given that He may reveal Himself amid the weary ways of earth, build eternal hopes in the heart of fallen man, point the path to the higher life which reigns in heaven, and bathe the soul with the love and truth Divine. ”

“ Then those beautiful knowledges of eternal things, in their vast variety, thoughts of God the Lord, conceptions of a true life, ideas of mercy, love and truth, far off glimmerings of a heaven beyond—all these shine down, help our faith to illuminate our mental world, maintain our light when faith itself is dim, but silently disappear to conscious view, when love irradiates the mind with so large a light and warmth, as to point the way to all things without manifest intellectual aid. ”

“ The memory is the store-house of the soul. Reflection gathers from it its food for thought. Reason selects from its treasures the best elements for the development of mind. Wisdom looks down into its treasury of facts and weaves from them a heavenly life. ”

“ But creation is progressive. In this also it is made to typify regeneration. In another parable our Lord has told us how the attainment of the kingdom of heaven, that is, the regeneration of the soul, is a progressive work. It is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man—the Lord—took and sowed in the earth—in the human mind; which at first is the least of all seeds, in that spirituality at the beginning of our regeneration is very small, but growing, becomes a great tree, in that as regeneration progresses, we become great in spiritual perceptions, power and goodness. ”

“ So when the heart is open to Divine influences, they silently steal in and warm it up to a livelier appreciation of the beautiful and good; and a sense of yearning for something better than all this selfish toil and trouble thrills through its every energy, and a ray of light flashes through the mind giving it to comprehend somewhat of those better things and that better way for which the heart has yearned. ”

“ But when all is dark and hope is waning, and evils overflow our heart-land, and even outward life seems all unhinged—when it is night time on the soul, then the faith we have that God is true, the faith we hold in his mercy and love as things that never die, the faith we still maintain that the night will pass away and the day will come—that faith sustains us in adversity, in trial, in temptation, in doubt, yea raises us even from the depths of despair. ”

“ Of what avail our knowledge, our activity, our energy, our enthusiasm, unless it goes forth at last into genuine spiritual life? Of what avail the possession of a soul unless that soul is made alive in the light of God? It is something to be born; but it is something more to be born again. It is something to have this body live, but it is infinitely more to have the soul alive. Life is God; and God is life. That life may be filtered through all the lower strata of thought and purpose, so that it partake of all the filthiness which inheres in stagnant things ”

“ Thus also here, in the words of the Creation-parable, by the creation of the beasts of the earth is symbolized the bringing forth the most exalted spiritual affections of the mind.
But the culmination of all this is in the creation of man. To this end, from the beginning, every thing has pointed. For this purpose every thing else has been made. As this is true of the progress of earth, so it is true of the advance of the human mind. Every preparatory stage of regeneration has been for the sake of the one beyond. Each and all have been for the sake of the final outcome. ”

“ The fourth is to acquire that faith in the Lord, and that love for Him which is necessary to a truly spiritual walk with God. The fifth is to lead a true and noble life under a strong rational consciousness—an inward absolute intellectual conviction, of the glory and beauty of this higher faith and love.
These steps are each, in their turn, pronounced by the Lord to be good. And they are. But what is good in its degree is not always the perfection of its kind. A seed hid away in the damp, dark earth is good. The first shoot it sends upward into the realm of light is good. ”

“ Regeneration is the process through which we pass, the work of shunning evils as sins against God which we perform, the radical change of will and thought, of heart and mind, which is made within us, as we gradually emerge from the low plane of merely natural and sensuous existence to the highest levels of life, which is summed up in a state of love to the Lord and the neighbor.
The history of the creation is not natural science but spiritual parable. It is not a revelation of the process of the world's formation ”

“ As earth or land signifies the mind, the dry land is the mind without spiritual life. When, therefore, in this parable of the creation, that is, of man's regeneration, the Lord exclaims, "Let the dry land appear," it is as though He had said, "Let now the regenerating man see how dry—how spiritually dead and lifeless is the land of his mind. Let its dryness appear to him."
There is no dryer task in life than that of pouring the waters of mere knowledge, of mere memorized facts, into the sandy plains of the memory. Every schoolboy knows that. ”