While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal. 2 Cor. 4: 18. X LONG SIGHT Clearly in the apostle's judgment, one of the great uses of Christian truth is to give a man long sight. This noble man had had all the benefits his age could give him in the way of mental training; but that mental training had not elongated his power of vision sufficiently to keep him from being a most diabolical persecutor of his fellow men. He was not for that time a bad man, but a blind man. Anyway, he was a man who could only see a very little way ahead. The experiences he passed through afterwards elongated his vision. He saw farther. He carried an invisible telescope through which he took in worlds which had made no impression on him aforetime. From which we may make certain very useful inferences, such as these — that seeing-power is various: that it needs cultivation: that the experiences of life, especially those that probe us to the quick, are necessary to that longsightedness of which the apostle gives us an illustration in his own person: and, lastly, that only the man who has spiritual discernment has anything approaching to fulness of vision. How various seeing-power is we all know. Our ordinary bodily eyesight is far from uniform. At different periods of life we have different seeingpowers. The oculist discovers that eyes vary almost as much as faces. In the same person the two eyes may not be twins. One may be long-sighted and the other short-sighted. In the days behind us, "glasses," as the word was, invariably meant "age stealing on." In our day we meet with mere babies spectacled as if they had been born fifty years old. It is only within a very brief period of time that people have known how defective we are in that kind of vision we call physical. Mentally it is the same. Really all vision is mental, even that we call physical. For we never see a thing until we mentally recognize that we see it. The differences in mental vision are so various that it would almost seem as if there were minds of different kinds, as there are herbs of various kinds and fishes of various kinds and birds of various kinds and animals of various kinds. Take the one illustration of the inability of men to see alike on any subject you may introduce. One man sees it from one angle of vision, another from another. There may be a certain measure of agreement, some common ground on which men may stand, but the outlook from that ground will be different for any two men. Allow me to give an illustration of the difference out of my own experience showing that elevation had everything to do with outlook. Looking upon the river Rhine from Bingen, on its bank, level with the water, it was disappointing. Opposite Bingen, on the other side of the river, is a national monument. Why it should be put on that particular spot did not appear. But we must see the monument and examine it. On reaching it, we soon discovered how its elevation and distance had diminished it. But that was not all. We discovered why that spot was chosen for a national monument. The Rhine itself was revealed to us in all the sweep of its beauty. Miles and miles of it stretched away from our feet, the most lovable and living thing in that landscape. Then we felt the throb of energy in the lines on the monument : "Dear Fatherland, no fears be thine, The difference in elevation had brought the difference in revelation. Since then I have been accustomed to ask myself the question when considering a subject: Are you looking at it from the low levels of Bingen or from the heights of the Niederwald? And when I hear men talking on the subjects which divide us, I ask myself: Where is this man standing? On the low level so that he cannot see far, or on the heights from which he gets largeness and comprehensiveness of view? Mental seeing-power is even more varied than physical seeing-power. One step further — this seeing-power needs cultivation. Always we must bear in mind that God never gives us finished-up faculty, that everything is a seed to be sown, a germ to be fructified, cared for, and developed. A man with no seeing-power beyond that of the average man you meet on the street stands before some work of art like Raphael's |