Page:In tenebris lux.djvu/9



'Clouds and darkness are round about Him: righteousness and judgement are the habitation of His seat.'—Ps. xcvii. 2.

So spoke the man of old time, summing up in a sentence the faith of his day.

His thoughts of God were in a paradox: he knew and he did not know. His eye as he looked upward met impenetrable cloud: yet he dared to say, for he felt that he knew, what the cloud concealed. He endured, seeing Him who was invisible.

In so speaking he was simply true. He kept to his facts. He did not let one half of them belie the other. His understanding looked out upon this wonderful world, this immeasurable and unimaginable system of things in which he lived, as we do; upon the lesser world within the world, the life of man, so familiar yet so baffling, so intelligible in the way that right upon the whole brings its own reward, and wrong its own hurt and ruin, and yet so utterly perplexing in its changes and chances of fortune; and he knew that he could not understand what was the heart, the centre, the meaning of all this mystery and of Him who made it. 'Clouds