Over at the mouth of the Hudson, where I call it home, there are some strange things seen.  Sometimes the glass of this human lantern gets smoky, badly smoked.  And sometimes it even gets cobwebby, rather thickly covered up.  And even this has been known to happen up there,—­it’ll seem very strange to you people doubtless—­this; they write finely phrased essays on the delicate shading of grey in the smoke on the glass of the human lantern.

They meet together and listen to essays, in rarely polished English, on the exquisite lace-like tracery of the cobwebs on the glass of the human lantern.  But look!  Hold your heart still and look!  There’s the crowd in the road in the dark, struggling, jostling, stumbling, and falling into the ditch at the side of the road, ditched and badly mired, because the light hasn’t gotten to them.  The Light’s there.  It’s burning itself out in passionate eagerness to help.  But the human lanterns are in bad shape.

“Rhetoric!” do you say?  I wish it were.  I wish with my heart it were.  Look at the crowds for yourself.  There they go down the street, pell-mell, bewildered, blinded, some of them by will-o’-the-wisp lights, ditched and mired many of them.  The thing is only too terribly true.

Our Lord’s great plan, bearing the stamp of its divinity in its sheer human simplicity, is this:  we who know Jesus are to live Him.  We’re to let the whole of a Jesus, crucified, risen, living, shine out of the whole of our lives.

Is it a bit dark down where you are? Let the Light shine.  Let the clear sweet steady Jesus-light shine out through your true clean quiet Jesus-swayed and Jesus-controlled life.  Then the darkness must go.  It can’t stand the Light.  It can’t withstand the purity and insistence of its clear steady shining.  And the darkness will go:  slowly, reluctantly, angrily, doggedly, making hideous growling noises sometimes, raising the dust sometimes, but it will go.  It must go before the Light.  The Light’s resistless.  This is our Lord’s wondrous plan through His own, and His irresistible plan for the crowd, and His plan against the prince of darkness.

The Heart-road to the Head.

Then John goes on to say, “the darkness apprehended it not.”  The old common version says “comprehended”; the revisions, both English and American, say “apprehended.”  Both are rather large words, larger in English than John would use.  John loved to use simple talk.  Yet there’s help even in these English words.  Comprehend is a mental word.  It means to take hold of with your mind; to understand.  Apprehend is a physical word.  It means to take hold of with your hand.

You can’t comprehend Jesus.  That is just the simple plain fact.  You may have a fine mind.  It may be well schooled and trained.  You may have dug into all the books on the subject, English and German and the few French.  You may have spent a lifetime at it.  But at the end there is immensely more of Jesus that you don’t understand than the part that you do understand.  You’ve touched the smaller part only, just the edges.  You cannot take Jesus in with your mind simply.  The one is too big and the other too limited for that particular process.