These made the cold blue blush
with warm color. The sapphire was backed with sardonyx, and the bluish
white of the chalcedony was half pellucid to the gold chrysolite behind
it. God was laying the foundation of his perfect city there, and the
light of it seemed fit for the redeemed to walk in, and to have been
made by the luminousness of Him who is light.
One great purpose of this world is its use as significant symbol and
hint of the world to come. The communication of ideas and feelings
there is not by slow, clumsy speech, often misunderstood, originally
made to express low physical wants, but it is by charade, panorama,
parable, and music rolling like the voice of many waters in a storm.
The greatest things and relations of earth are as hintful of greater
things as a bit of float ore in the plains is suggestive of boundless
mines in the upper hills. So the joy of finding one lost lamb in the
wilderness tells of the joy of finding and saving a human soul. One
should never go to any of God's great wonders to see sights, but to
live life; to read in them the figures, symbols, and types of the more
wonderful things in the new heavens and the new earth.
The old Hebrew prophets and poets saw God everywhere in nature. The
floods clap their hands and the hills are joyful together before the
Lord. Miss Proctor, in the Yosemite, caught the same lofty spirit, and
sang:
"Perpetual masses here intone,
Uncounted censers swing,
A psalm on every breeze is blown;
The echoing peaks from throne to throne
Greet the indwelling King;
The Lord, the Lord is everywhere,
And seraph-tongued are earth and air.
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