2 Corinthians 4:18 While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal… If you were to track the first steps in the growth of a flower just emerging from the seed, you would discover, upon the cracking open of the seed, that one minute vegetable fibre commences presently to be pressed thence away up through the overlying soil into the air and the light, and another vegetable thread begins, at the same time, to wind itself away down through the underlying soil into the ground beneath. If, now, you will sink a single delicate thought into the botanical fact just stated, you will see, I am sure, that that very process of groping up into the air of one part of its nature, and at the same time groping down into the deep places of the earth with the other part of its nature, is a statement in miniature, and a quiet prophecy of the double affinity with which the plant is endowed, and the twin congeniality with which it has been by God made instinct. I have made use of this illustration only that it may serve us as a picture to study our thoughts by as we grow them. Man also buds in two directions; he too is underlaid with a twin tendency. He is Divinely endowed with one impulse that tends to push him out into the world, and into the association of things that lie easily in sight, and he is endowed, also, with a companion impulse that inclines to conduct him into the fellowship of things upon which the sun does not shine. But each, like the soil under the plant, offers to become to him the means of his life and the material for his fixity, his power, and his hope. One object we have had in guiding our thought here by the simile of the plant has been that we may guard ourselves against the easy and all too common danger of cutting off one of two impulses that assert themselves in us for the sake of avoiding the painful conflict that we are liable to be involved in when both of these impulses work in us at She same time, If the plant were intelligent or conscious, we can imagine how easy and natural it would be for it to lop off its plumules (the portion by which it rises into the air) that it might throw all its vigour into the radicle, or to lop off its radicle in order to throw all its vigour into the plumules. It is noticeable that in the realms of matter and of persons both tendencies and forces are harnessed up in pairs. God always drives in pairs. The earth, in its daily progress, is maintained by the power of a centripetal as well as a centrifugal force. Truths, like the early apostles, always go two and two. There is not one truth, whether in science or in theology, that we can quite make an all-over commitment of ourselves to. We resemble the plant, then, in being endowed with two impulses, both of them God-given, but to neither of which we can allow absolute monopoly. One of them is the impulse to let ourselves out into the contact of things that are in easy view, to things that can be seen and heard and handled; the other — an impulse equally Divine — to draw into intercourse with the realm of invisible realities — the soil in which are intertwined the roots of our life, the hidden ground in which are laid our life's deep foundations. We have dwelt at some length upon this feature of the matter for the reason that we do not like to leave the impression, or even to start the suspicion, that intercourse with things that are seen or contact with things that can be handled is any less proper or any less Divinely intended than fellowship with the invisible realities with which the seen ones are underlaid. It is as proper to eat as it is to pray. We must scrupulously dissociate from that word "eternal" all such idea as that its reference is distinctively future. It is as true of us as of the flower we have just mentioned, that we are living in two worlds at one and the same time. Unconsciously, perhaps, to ourselves, this realm of the eternal is continually giving a colour to our thoughts and putting its blessed application upon our experiences. There is not a day we live but what, with greater or less distinctness, there looms up before our minds, like mountains impalpably establishing themselves in the darkness, the dim outlines of realities that words cannot teach, but only hint at, that no more pertain to the region of days and things, and that are dimly felt by us as no more subject to the laws of change and decay than truth and justice and love and righteousness are conceived by us as coming in with the dawn and then going out with the evening twilight. Indeed, it is just that sort of realities precisely — truth, justice, love, and righteousness — which go to compose the realm of the eternal. You can call the right an abstraction, but it grows logically concrete so fast as your thought begins to twine itself about it and your heart to pulse its gentle wave into it. This sense of the Eternal spelt with a large "E" — then, is the key to the religious position, to the Christian position. To quicken that sense, to develop it, to intensify it, is bound to be the master-purpose of all religious training. It is with this end in view that we meet one another here in the sanctuary. (C. H. Parkhurst, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal. |
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