And if the suggestion were made seriously there might be talk of putting the suggestor in a certain sort of institution for the safety of the community.  Yet this is the way we go at the other darkness, the worse moral darkness.

God’s way is quite different; indeed just the exact reverse let the light shine. The darkness can’t stand the light.  If the hall were quite dark, and I scratched only a parlour-match, instantly as the little flame broke out of the end of the stick some of the darkness would go.  It’s surprising how much would go, and how quickly.  The darkness can’t stand the light.  It flees like a hunted hare before a pack of hounds.

There may be times when action must betaken by a community against certain forms of evil, so damnable, and so strongly entrenched, and so threatening to the purity of home and young and of all.  But note keenly that this is incidental.  It is immensely important at times, but it is distinctly secondary. The great simple plan of God is this:  let the light shine.  The darkness flees like a whipped cur, tail tightly curled down and in, before the real thing of light.

Let me ask you a question.  Come up a bit closer and listen quietly, for this is tremendously serious.  And it’s the quietest spoken word that reaches the inner cockles of the heart.  Listen:  is it a bit dark down where you live?  Morally dark?  Spiritually?  How about that? in commercial circles and social and fraternal, in church and home and city and neighbourhood.  Is it a bit dark?  Or, have I found the Garden of Eden at last before the serpent entered?

Because if it be a bit dark, softly, please, let me say it very quietly, for it may sound critical, and I would not have that for anything.  We are talking only to help.  Though sometimes the truth itself does have a merciless edge.  If it be a bit dark does it not suggest that the light has not been shining as it was meant to?  For where the light shines the darkness goes.

For, you see, this is still God’s plan for treating darkness.  It is meant to be true to-day of each of us,—­“the light shineth in the darkness.”  Of course, we are not the light.  He is the Light.  But we are the light-holders.  I carry the Light of the world around inside of me.  And so do you, if you do.  It is not because of the “me,” of course, but because of the great patience and faithfulness of Him who is the Light.  A very rickety cheap lantern may carry a clear light, and the man in the ditch find good footing in the road again.

You and I are meant to be the human lanterns carrying the Light, and letting it shine clearly fully out.  And you know when some one else is providing the light the chief thing about the lantern is that the glass of the lantern be kept dean and clear so the light within can get freely out.  The great thing is that we shall live clean transparent lives so the Light within may shine clearly out.  We may live unselfish clean Christly lives, by His great grace.  And through that kind of lives, the Light itself shines out, and shines out most, and most clearly.