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ARISE! SHINE!

The "light" of which Isaiah spoke, the " which he foretold as rising upon Zion, was Christ glory" himself. Simeon, appropriating to Him, by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, these very figures of prophecy, calls the infant Jesus, not only God's salvation--"Mine eyes have seen thy salvation". but yet more expressly, "A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel." And yet Zion herself, to whom this promise is given, failed, when He came, to arise and shine! So easy is it for man's carelessness and man's unbelief to spoil and vitiate, for him, God's best and brightest gifts!

Again, although man is false, yet God abideth faithful: He cannot deny Himself. He kept his promise to Israel: the light did shine, the glory did rise upon her: Gentiles did come to her light, and kings to the brightness of her rising: nay, she herself, the nation of Israel, is still, as St. Paul writes, "beloved for the fathers' sakes," and has a glorious future yet in store when her "heart shall have turned to the Lord," and "the vail" which now rests upon it is (in consequence) "taken away."

The words of the text, spoken (in form) to a person, were addressed (in sense) to an aggregate of persons; and that aggregate of persons was the church and city and nation of Israel, which God had taken for Himself out of all the nations, to be the repository of his revelations, and the very nucleus of life to the world.

But were the words done with, when "Israel after the flesh" had once heard, and once refused them?

St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Ephesians, uses these very words as applicable to Christian congregations, and to individual Christian men. For there can be little question that it is to this 1st verse of the 60th chapter of the Prophet Isaiah, that he makes his reference, when, after speaking of the effect of light in reproving and transforming darkness, he adds, in the way of enforcement, the words which next follow, "Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light." It is his paraphrase of the verse now before us, "Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee."

Therefore we have the sure warrant of Inspiration for taking home to ourselves the animating exhortation, even as the Church herself, in her choice of lessons for her sacred seasons, has made this her Epiphany subject.

The text has but two words: but a whole volume of doctrine lies in each.

I. "Arise."

We may see three charges in this one.

1. "Arise" is a call to action. The Old Testament Scriptures are full of it in this use. "Arise, walk through the land." "Arise, go up to Bethel." "Arise, therefore, and be doing, and the Lord be with thee." "Therefore we his servants will arise and build." "Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered." 'Arise ye, and depart: for this is not your rest." To "arise" is the opposite of sitting still.

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[Good Words, Feb. 1, 1867.

this sense, “Arise?"
And has God any reason to call to us, and say, in

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for Egypt to bring against Israel, when the fault was
'Ye are idle, ye are idle," was a cruel accusation
in the oppressor, not in the oppressed. But is it a
cruel or a false charge if God brings it against us?

which would not be true against others. Faults and
Many things might be true against some of us,
sins differ both in nature and complexion, and he
who offends in one point, offends not (it may be) in
another.
spiritual idleness is, more or less, the fault of all.
But this we can say confidently, that
Arise," as a call of action, suits us all: all alike,
reproof.
as a summons; all alike, if not all equally, as a

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taking pains with his soul? Where is he who gives Where is he amongst us, Christian friends, who is any time to it? whose thoughts run upon this, as a point of real and chief concern, "What must I do to be saved?" "Lord, what wouldst Thou have me to dɔ?" how can I make a little progress in the life of God? how can I get on, how can I make way, how can I press towards the mark, how can I make questions do not occupy us. sure of the prize which hangs thereon? These of walking, instead of journeying, instead of running We sit still, instead the race that is set before us. where we were yesterday, just where we were on the We are to-day just first day of last year, as to the chief question of all is an oscillation: to and fro the pendulum swings, -the question of grace and salvation. At best it within fixed limits, at a certain rate, till the chain the struggle, not the warfare nor the battle-the is run out and the pendulum-not the race, not pendulum is the fit type and emblem of the life of most of us-for the life of most of us is oscillation, not progress, not advance.

this opening year, to take one step really onwards? Shall it be always thus? Shall we not try, in Is there nothing, in which we may not definitely hear the charge to arise? no bad habit to be finally trodden under foot, no neglected duty to be at last be not, in our case, as it is year after year in the faced in God's name, and done? God grant that it of a life, and then the spiritual galvanism of a case of countless thousands, the spiritual oscillation death-bed!

he says,

makes it so, in the passage already quoted, when
2. "Arise" is a call to wakefulness. St. Paul
"Awake thou that sleepest, and arise.”
And so what was before a call to action, the re-
proof of a spiritual indolence, becomes now a call to
waking, the reproof of a spiritual unconsciousness.
is because we are unconscious, that we are inactive.
And the latter state accounts for the former.
If we were wide-awake in soul, we should also be
hard at work in life.

What then is spiritual unconsciousness?

It

sleep, the brain is not always torpid: bodily sleep It is not the absence of all impressions. In bodily has its dreams: events of the past day, or of days long past, exercise an influence still; and often the

impression is not only strangely vivid, but (which is a different thing) wonderfully life-like persons appear in their exact character, know just the secrets which they ought to know, and say to us just the words which they ought to say: probability is there, plausibility is there, verisimilitude is there-only reality, only fact, only truth itself, is wanting. And because truth is wanting, therefore we call sleep unconsciousness. There is impression, but there is not consciousness, because consciousness has place only in the case of true impressions. Knowledge is the belief of things true, and consciousness is the impression upon the mind of something real.

Now therefore we see, by example, what spiritual unconsciousness is. It is not the absence of impressions: it is not a condition in which that which is impressed upon the mind is violently improbable, contradicts all reason, and violates all the unities: but it is a condition in which reality is wanting; in which the things impressed upon the mind are not the very things actually existent and really

true.

To take just one instance. There is this common characteristic in the cases now before us-those of persons spiritually asleep that they put time and the world in the place of eternity and of God. They are, as St. Paul says, "conformed to this world." They wear the fashion, as it were, of persons who belong to this present state of being, and not to the eternal unchangeable state of being which lies above and beyond it. They act, speak, and think, as if this world were permanent, and they in it. Is that a libel upon worldly persons? Is that a charge which, in itself, they would even think affronting? Might they not even be supposed to say in answer, that they are bound to do so: that they could not be the active, nor the successful, no, nor the useful men they are, if they were perpetually reminding themselves that the things which are seen are temporal. Now therefore we say of this unconsciousness, as of the other, bodily sleep, that the impression upon the mind is not a violently improbable one: it is only the impression that that which has been is, and that that which is shall be: it is only the feeling, not avowed but still cherished, that there is a reality, and that there is an importance-in one word, that there is a permanence-in the life of this world, which the Word of God says that there is only in the life of eternity and of God. The unconsciousness consists, like the other, not in the absence, and not in the faintness, of impressions, but only in their unreality and in their untruthfulAnd in this matter the unreality and the untruthfulness of the ideas can be learnt only from the Word of God.

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love: that which God commands, do. Correct your impressions of things false and true, and live henceforth that kind of life in which shadows are no longer substances, nor the false real, nor the fleeting permanent.

3. Add yet, with St. Paul, one third thing. "Awake," he says, "thou that sleepest "-of this we have spoken-" and arise from the dead." To arise is, in its strongest and highest sense, to arise from the dead. "Arise" is a call to resurrection.

St. Paul speaks, in the same Epistle, of persons "dead in trespasses and sins," to whom God has given life by his Holy Spirit. "And you hath He quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sin."

Death is an aggravated form of sleep. It differs from it in two chief respects. In both sleep and death, there is inactivity: but in death there is also (1) incapacity for activity-the dead man cannot, at will, arouse himself to action: and in death there is also (2) a permanence of inactivity: to-morrow shall be as this day that sleep has no natural waking: nothing but miracle, nothing but the interposition of God Himself, can restore to that substance either sensation or action.

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So therefore, when a man is described as spiritually dead, it is a stronger thing than to describe him as spiritually sleeping. It expresses (1) impassivity as well as inactivity-the present absence of impression as well as of motion: and it expresses (2) the impotence of this condition; the loss of powers, as well as their suspension.

And can this figure, as well as the other, be applied to any Christian? The wise virgins "slumbered," as well as the foolish: the Christian may be inactive, may even be asleep, as to his soul's life: but the wise virgins had only, when aroused, to "trim their lamps": the oil was there: it was the foolish only who had a name to live and were dead. Can a Christian be told to arise out of death?

It is true, these are all figures, all metaphors: let us be careful not to stereotype them into dogmas. But let us look at the facts. Is there nothing like death now, even in Christian Churches? Is there no such thing as death after Baptism, yea, amidst Communion? Is not the present condition as hopeless, in many cases, without God, without the miracle of his grace, as ever it was in heathen man or publican of old? Wherever sin is, there is death: total death, if the sin reigns; partial death, if the sin even lives. If there be one amongst us, who struggles not against his lusts, there is a dead soul even now: if there be one amongst us, who struggles indeed a little, but most often struggles unsuccessfully, against his besetting sin, there is even now a soul but half alive; a soul in which the great issue of all is still ambiguous.-Shall he die in his iniquity, or shall he at last, through abounding, sovereigu grace, save his soul alive?

So then the text-the first half, the first word of it has a voice for each one of us.

To all it says, Arise from sitting.
To many it says, Arise from sleep.

To some it says, Arise from death.

And may God guide his Word infallibly to the mark, and make it suitable, impressive, persuasive, powerful, to each soul which He has caused to listen !

II. Pass to the other charge. "Arise-shine."

I believe that the word, and certainly the context, expresses not the origination but the reception of light: not, Give light; but, Receive light: not, Illuminate, but, Be illuminated, for thy light is come. Zion is charged to drink in the glory with which God has visited her. The Sun of righteousness has risen upon her let her bathe herself in his beams, and then she too, by reflection, shall brightly shine. "In thy light shall we" first "see," and then transmit "light."

It is a true and touching parable.

"Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify," not you, but "your Father which is in heaven." The light is all His; and the recognition of it, in eternal praise, shall be His also!

To "shine" is to transmit light.

was glorious, to the perfection of its irradiationto the absolute self-forgetfulness (so to speak) of its receptivity.

These are so many common examples of the thing denoted by the charge to "shine." Receive God's light.

I hope we are not losing the truth in figure. Take then one verse, the last of the 3rd chapter of the 2nd Epistle to the Corinthians, that we may bring together, under the guidance of Inspiration itself, the sign and the thing signified.

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"But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image, from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord." The Christian, charged to shine," can do so only as did the Lawgiver of Israel-for his history furnishes the illustrationwhen by long converse with God "the skin of his face shone;' so bright was the glory of the heavenly vision, so near the access given him to the Divine presence. Even so we, St. Paul says, must strip off every vail which lies by nature between the heart and its God, and allow the full light of God Himself, as He is revealed to us in

So then there must be two things in this charge, Jesus Christ, to stream without let or hindrance when we set ourselves to act upon it.

1. First, receive the light.

You have seen one of the windows of a great church perfectly filled and saturated with sunshine. It might have seemed, to an uninstructed eye, to have the glory in itself. But what really caused the beautiful dazzling brilliance was the combination of two things; the direct incidence of the sun's rays, and the perfect transparency of the window's glass: the window "shone," because the sun was opposite, and because the window was so made as to be receptive of light.

"Shine," as addressed to the Church, means just that. Receive God's light. Drink in at every pore the rays of the Sun of righteousness.

Some of you, in home or foreign travel, may have chanced to reach, just at sunrise, the brow of a hill which looked down upon a sleeping city. The first rays of the sun were just gilding the towers of its great cathedral: and for the moment it looked as though the building itself were on fire-so perfect was the lighting up of pinnacle and buttress, so brilliant the reflection of the glory from its roof of metal.

Or you may have been a spectator of that most unearthly of all sights given to human eyes belowa sunrise over snow mountains; when far above the earth's surface, above long-spread ranges of mountain tops, above even the cloud which rested on the summit of most of them, there appeared just one peak, clad not in golden but in rosy light-and for the moment you took it for a cloud itself; so strangely delicate, so transparently immaterial, was the form before you; so severed from earth, so far uplifted in heaven. But in reality it was nothing more than the pointed horn of a solid mountain : all else it owed, all that was distinctive, all that

upon our souls. It is by communing with God Himself, in deep earnest prayer, in the study of His Holy Word, in the devout and diligent use of every means of grace, that we must become as it were penetrated and imbued with the light which is our life, and so be changed into the same image-into the very likeness of Christ Himself-by the operation and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

To "shine" is to receive God's light; that light which is the revelation of Himself in the person of Jesus Christ.

I hope we ask ourselves seriously, Is Christ manifested to me? Do I know personally what is meant by the words, "In him was life: and the life was the light of men?" Light is cheering; light is guidance; light is comfort, and warmth, and power. Is Christ any of these things to me? I cannot "sbine except by receiving light: I cannot originate light: I cannot emit light: I can only receive, I can only drink in, that heavenly ray which falls upon me out of heaven, from the throne of God and the Lamb.

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Let us think of the Gospel as meant to be our light. Or rather, as meant to bring us into contact with Him who is our light. Let us desire to know it thus, and to know Him thus-and then we shall be able to say, "My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning.'

2. And then, finally, the charge to shine by receiving will pass on into the charge to shine by reflecting.

Be well assured, there is but one way in which the true light is ever communicated below-and that is by reflection; by being transmitted by one who has first received.

In other words, every single endeavour made to

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