was darkness.  God alone is the light, and our light is the shining of his will in our lives.  If our light shine at all, it must be, it can be only in showing the Father; nothing is light that does not bear him witness.  The man that sees the glory of God, would turn sick at the thought of glorifying his own self, whose one only possible glory is to shine with the glory of God.  When a man tries to shine from the self that is not one with God and filled with his light, he is but making ready for his own gathering contempt.  The man who, like his Lord, seeks not his own, but the will of him who sent him, he alone shines.  He who would shine in the praises of men, will, sooner or later, find himself but a Gideon’s-pitcher left broken on the field.

Let us bestir ourselves then to keep this word of the Lord; and to this end inquire how we are to let our light shine.

To the man who does not try to order his thoughts and feelings and judgments after the will of the Father, I have nothing to say; he can have no light to let shine.  For to let our light shine is to see that in every, even the smallest thing, our lives and actions correspond to what we know of God; that, as the true children of our father in heaven, we do everything as he would have us do it.  Need I say that to let our light shine is to be just, honourable, true, courteous, more careful over the claim of our neighbour than our own, as knowing ourselves in danger of overlooking it, and not bound to insist on every claim of our own!  The man who takes no count of what is fair, friendly, pure, unselfish, lovely, gracious,—­where is his claim to call Jesus his master? where his claim to Christianity?  What saves his claim from being merest mockery?

The outshining of any human light must be obedience to truth recognized as such; our first show of light as the Lord’s disciples must be in doing the things he tells us.  Naturally thus we declare him our master, the ruler of our conduct, the enlightener of our souls; and while in the doing of his will a man is learning the loveliness of righteousness, he can hardly fail to let some light shine across the dust of his failures, the exhalations from his faults.  Thus will his disciples shine as lights in the world, holding forth the Word of life.

To shine, we must keep in his light, sunning our souls in it by thinking of what he said and did, and would have us think and do.  So shall we drink the light like some diamonds, keep it, and shine in the dark.  Doing his will, men will see in us that we count the world his, hold that his will and not ours must be done in it.  Our very faces will then shine with the hope of seeing him, and being taken home where he is.  Only let us remember that trying to look what we ought to be, is the beginning of hypocrisy.

If we do indeed expect better things to come, we must let our hope appear.  A Christian who looks gloomy at the mention of death, still more, one who talks of his friends as if he had lost them, turns the bushel of his little-faith over the lamp of the Lord’s light.  Death is but our visible horizon, and our look ought always to be focussed beyond it.  We should never talk as if death were the end of anything.