Among the many colonial buildings in the City of Mexico is the City Hall, where weekly meetings of the municipal council were held continuously for three hundred and eighty years, until 1903. This building was erected eighty years before the government palace at Santa Fe, New Mexico, the oldest building in the United States, is older by nearly ten years than Jamestown, and twenty-two years the senior of Plymouth.
In the flowery patio of one of these old buildings, where "the morning falls asleep" on dusty lintels and mullioned windows, there is an old-fashioned sun-dial, which taught me many lessons. As I watched the gnomon, or style, casting its shadow on the graduated arc or plate, I was set thinking. The shadow from that pin of course marked the hour—that was its task; but the sun sent no shadow, for the shadow was cast by the pin itself upon the plate. Just as the human hand held in the air between one's self and the sun will cast a shadow on one's face, that pin created a well-defined shadow. Had the sun fallen full upon the plate, such would not have been the case. When we allow God to shine full upon us, there is no shadow; there can be none, unless we allow the human senses to interpose themselves against the sunburst of light and harmony. When we walk with God, with our faces toward Him, our shadows of self—our sins, sicknesses, and errors—fall behind us and are lost, for we face the light. When we turn our backs upon God, error commences to project itself upon our pathway and force itself into our future. We then walk in the shadow, the depressing, self-created shadow of our limitations and errors. Then "error rehearses error," and we stumble on in the darkness we create, or rather allow error to create for us. With our faces to the light we cannot stumble, but with perfect fearlessness we may face the untried future.
No one need fear the past, for it is gone. Nor need one fear the present, for God is with him. The only excuse mortal mind can have for fear is for the future. To the child of God the present moment is one of contact with infinite good. The good does not have to be created expressly for us. any more than the sunshine or the air for our human needs. Good already exists for us, more unlimited, even infinitely more so, in its origin and its bestowals than the sunlight smiling upon us or the air we breathe. Surely, then, we have but to avail ourselves of that infinite good, with which as God's children we are necessarily in eternal contact. Furthermore, the future is in the hands of a living, loving Father, and He is all good and always good; therefore we have nothing to fear from the future. How can we possibly fear what God has prepared for us? As soon can a child fear the thoughtful provision made for its daily needs by its earthly father. Earthly parents may make mistakes; they may even be cruel to their children, and neglect them, but God never neglects His children, His eternal ideas. As the concept of Father is impossible without the correlative concept of child, man exists because his Father-Mother God exists; he is harmonious and happy because God is. This concept of being is borne out by the correlative reading from the third chapter of I John, which we hear at all our Sunday services.
