But now, I take this vision in a meaning which the prophet had no intention to put on it.  I do not often do that with my texts, and when I do I like to confess frankly that I am doing it.  So I take the words now as a kind of symbol which may help to put into a picturesque and more striking form some very familiar and homely truths.  Look at that dark-painted chamber that we have all of us got in our hearts; at the idolatries that go on there, and at the flashing of the sudden light of God who marks, into the midst of the idolatry, ’Hast thou seen what the ancients of the children of Israel do in the dark, each man in the chambers of his imagery?’

I. Think of the dark and painted chamber which we all of us carry in our hearts.

Every man is a mystery to himself as to his fellows.  With reverence, we may say of each other as we say of God—­’Clouds and darkness are round about Him.’  After all the manifestations of a life, we remain enigmas to one another and mysteries to ourselves.  For every man is no fixed somewhat, but a growing personality, with dormant possibilities of good and evil lying in him, which up to the very last moment of his life may flame up into altogether unexpected and astonishing developments.  Therefore we have all to feel that after all self-examination there lie awful depths within us which we have not fathomed; and after all our knowledge of one another we yet do see but the surface, and each soul dwells alone.

There is in every heart a dark chamber.  Oh, brethren! there are very, very few of us that dare tell all our thoughts and show our inmost selves to our dearest ones.  The most silvery lake that lies sleeping amidst beauty, itself the very fairest spot of all, when drained off shows ugly ooze and filthy mud, and all manner of creeping abominations in the slime.  I wonder what we should see if our hearts were, so to speak, drained off, and the very bottom layer of every thing brought into the light.  Do you think you could stand it?  Well, then, go to God and ask Him to keep you from unconscious sins.  Go to Him and ask Him to root out of you the mischiefs that you do not know are there, and live humbly and self-distrustfuliy, and feel that your only strength is:  ‘Hold Thou me up, and I shall be saved.’  ’Hast thou seen what they do in the dark?’

Still further, we may take another part of this description with possibly permissible violence as a symbol of another characteristic of our inward nature.  The walls of that chamber were all painted with animal forms, to which these men were bowing down.  By our memory, and by that marvellous faculty that people call the imagination, and by our desires, we are for ever painting the walls of the inmost chambers of our hearts with such pictures.  That is an awful power which we possess, and, alas! too often use for foul idolatries.