JOY IN GOD

O thou who art the Father of us all, how often hast thou made me know the joy of happy intercourse with thee, when joining in the united worship of thy people; and oftener still, when I have sought, and not in vain, the hallowed delight of solitary communion. I thank thee for all the joys thou hast given me in the course of my days; especially for the interchange of elevating thought, for communion with many of the noblest of thy children, either by personal intercourse, or through their recorded sayings and doings. Therefore, how much more, how infinitely more, do I thank thee for the revelation of thyself, and that I am enabled to raise my thought to thee, in the blest experience that thy Spirit imparts to me a holy and sanctifying influence. In thought and faith and holy aspiration, I gaze on so much of thy spiritual beauty and loveliness as my finite vision can descry; and ever more of them I see, for here fresh light and supernal power descend upon me. I taste the felicity of the higher and holier realm, and partially antedate its coming blessedness and glory. As we see the farthest and widest when we look straight upward, so rise our souls the highest, and our vision takes in the broadest and grandest sweep, when we make thee the object of earnest and devout contemplation. This is the mightiest leverage for our spiritual elevation. By this we rise above, all the forms of error and sin, which thence fall away from us, and we become manifest with thine own holy life and beauty. Up here, on this holy mountain of thought and prayer, our faces shine in thy light, and we become transfigured. Our vision is prophetic, and the prospect is equally bright and boundless, for we see thee, the excellent glory. We have become divinely ennobled, and existence is a rapture. We feel that even all the lower and contrasted experiences, affairs and events of our earthly life have lost their littleness and evil. They shine resplendent in the holy and luminous manifestations of thy presence. We now see them as vitally related to our knowledge and experience of infinite good, and they therefore share all its honors. When we thus see light in thy light, the lowliest life and the humblest forms of being, are shorn of their intrinsic insignificance, and even pains, privation and defeat are turned into pleasure and victory. As we have sometimes gazed upon the black sky until we have seen the dense clouds divide, separate and disappear, giving us far off the clear shining of the starry heavens, so have we looked upward in faith and prayer, through various clouds of deep adversity, till we have seen right into the bright world of which God and the Lamb are the light,—more serene by far than all starry beauty and more animating and effulgent than the solar radiance. It is good to be here. But when the special glory is withdrawn, and we descend and reenter the common world, O Lord, let not only the memory, but some tokens of thy love and presence, go with us.                     G.