“More and more stars! And ever as I gaze
Brighter and brighter seen!
Whence come they, Father? Trace me out their ways
Far in the deep serene.”
Keble.
There is a great deal of beauty in the world which lies too deep for our eyes. There are millions of stars in depths of the heavens which no telescope reveals. Night unveils to us splendors which lie hidden in day’s glare.
One may write with invisible ink, and the words fade out after the pen, leaving no trace. Yet they remain in the paper, hidden there, unseen and unsuspected by any eye that scans it. But if one day the paper be exposed to heat, the hidden words come out in all clearness, every line appearing in distinctness.
There is a sense in which the revealings of God in the Bible are hidden. They are not hidden because God seeks to keep them from us, but because we must be brought into a certain condition before we can receive them. One said the other day, “Why did I never see the rich meaning of that psalm before?” We had been going over one of the psalms together, as I sat at my friend’s bedside, and we had seen many sweet things in some of the verses. My friend almost chided herself with dullness of vision, or with carelessness in reading, in not having seen the precious meanings before. “I have read that psalm hundreds of times,” she said. “These sweet thoughts were lying in the verses all the while, but I never saw them until now. Why was it? Did God mean to hide them from me?”
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