“He loves light and not darkness, therefore shines, therefore reveals.  True, there are infinite gulfs in Him, into which our small vision can not pierce, but they are gulfs of light, and the truths there are invisible only through excess of their own clarity.  There is a darkness that comes of effulgence, and the most veiling of all veils is the light.  That for which the eye exists is light, but through light no human eye can pierce.—­I find myself beyond my depth.  I am ever beyond my depth, afloat in an infinite sea; but the depth of the sea knows me, for the ocean of my being is God.—­What I would say is this, that the light is not blinding because God would hide, but because the truth is too glorious for our vision.  The effulgence of Himself God veiled that He might unveil it—­in his Son.  Inter-universal spaces, aeons, eternities—­what word of vastness you can find or choose—­take unfathomable darkness itself, if you will, to express the infinitude of God, that original splendor existing only to the consciousness of God Himself—­I say He hides it not, but is revealing it ever, forever, at all cost of labor, yea of pain to Himself.  His whole creation is a sacrificing of Himself to the being and well-being of His little ones, that, being wrought out at last into partakers of His divine nature, that nature may be revealed in them to their divinest bliss.  He brings hidden things out of the light of His own being into the light of ours.

“But see how different we are—­until we learn of Him!  See the tendency of man to conceal his treasures, to claim even truth as his own by discovery, to hide it and be proud of it, gloating over that which he thinks he has in himself, instead of groaning after the infinite of God!  We would be forever heaping together possessions, dragging things into the cave of our finitude, our individual self, not perceiving that the things which pass that dreariest of doors, whatever they may have been, are thenceforth but ‘straws, small sticks, and dust of the floor.’  When a man would have a truth in thither as if it were of private interpretation, he drags in only the bag which the truth, remaining outside, has burst and left.

“Nowhere are such children of darkness born as in the caves of hypocrisy; nowhere else can a man revel with such misshapen hybrids of religion and sin.  But, as one day will be found, I believe, a strength of physical light before which even solid gold or blackest marble becomes transparent, so is there a spiritual light before which all veils of falsehood shall shrivel up and perish and cease to hide; so that, in individual character, in the facts of being, in the densest of Pharisaical hypocrisy, there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, nothing hid that shall not be known.