Bible Commentaries

THE SYMBOL AND THE REALITY

‘The sun shall be no more thy light by day; neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee: but the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory.’

Isaiah 60:19

I. There is no better test of men’s progress than the advancing power to do without the things which used to be essential to their lives.—The lives of men who have been always growing are strewed along their whole course with things they have learned to do without.

II. You may ask (1), How can I tell the symbol from the reality, and so know what things it is good to hold less and less, what things it is good to hold more and more indispensable?—The answer, no doubt, lies in a certain feeling of spirituality and infiniteness and eternity, which belongs to those things which it is good for a man not to be able to do without. (2) When I know what things I must not allow to become indispensable to me, what shall I do then? Shall I throw all those things away? No; certainly not. Not to give up the symbol, but to hold it as a symbol, with that looser grasp which lets its inner reality escape into us, and at the same time makes us always ready to let it go when the reality shall have wholly opened from it, that is the true duty of the Christian as concerns the innocent things of the world. (3) How shall I come to count nothing indispensable but what I really ought to, what I really cannot do without? The answer to that question is in Christ, Who holds the answers of all our questions for us.

—Bishop Phillips Brooks.