September 18

☩ send out thy light and thy truth: let them lead me.

PSALM xliii. 3.

This is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. — JOHN iii. 19.

CHRIST, who is at once the Son of God and the Son of man, uttered a truth whose sublimity stands without a parallel, when he said, "I am the light of the world." Light and life, like grace and truth, came by Jesus Christ, the true light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. "All other lights lead but to bewilder and dazzle but to blind." But in his light we see light revealing at once the exceeding sinfulness of sin and the infinite beauty of holiness, the deepening darkness of the path that leads away from God, and the growing brightness of the way that brings us back to our Father's house. The mischief and the misery of unbelief is that in its love of darkness and its hatred of light, in its rejection of Christ and its retention of sin, the soul is led to refuse that which above all else it needs the most, and to cling to that which multiplies its sorrows and hastens its ruin. With a yearning tenderness like unto that with which a grieved yet loving father laments the folly of a wayward child, the dear Lord addresses the sons and daughters of unbelief, whose unwise choice is the fruitage of their evil deeds, and tells them that impenitence writes its own condemnation, invites its own sentence, and aggravates its own eternal doom.

John J. Brown

Lord, I believe; thy power I own,

Thy word I would obey.

I wander comfortless and lone,

When from thy truth I stray.

J. R. WREIFORD.