The pink ribbon of river wound its way between icy banks as it flowed eastward toward the roseate dawn. Starting in a glacial lake a hundred miles back in the mountains, the river would flow more than a thousand miles across the Canadian prairies and through the Precambrian shield until it emptied into Hudson Bay.
Watching its steady, irresistible flow, I thought of the verse that begins the last chapter of the Bible: "And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb." Rev. 22:1.The throne of God," we might say, symbolizes the source of all life, the creative, governing Principle that is divine Life itself. And doesn't the Lamb represent Christ, the divine manifestation of that Life, the pure spiritual idea flowing from Mind, God?
God is Life—infinite, eternal, inexhaustible, omnipotent. Because God is infinite Spirit, as the Bible reveals, this Life must be all-embracing. It cannot be material and mortal, for all that is material and physical is temporal, limited, and destructible. To the material senses life appears to originate in matter, to be expressed through physical bodies, and controlled by organic systems. There would seem to be as many lives as there are individual organisms, each one fallible and finite.
