Page:The aquarium - an unveiling of the wonders of the deep sea.djvu/165

124 It is a beautiful thought, by whom originated I know not, that all earthly things are types of the heavenlies; the visible, shadows and outlines of the invisible. Specimens of this sort of representation are presented to us with considerable copiousness in the Holy Scripture, where ideas of heavenly and unseen things are reflected, as it were, from the familiar objects around us. And this is the only way in which they could be communicable, without a direct and miraculous change in the constitution of our minds. Perhaps it is not too much to presume that the order and fashion of material things were planned expressly with this end in view; that the characteristics of the lamb were given it to make it fitly shadow forth the spotlessness and unresisting meekness of our great atoning Sacrifice; and the essential qualities of light were prescribed not only (perhaps not principally) to make it a medium of conveying intelligence through our eyes of worldly things, but that it might represent the glory, purity, truth and omniscience of God, "in whom is no darkness at all."

It is true that, as yet, we get but occasional glimpses of these revelations: it is only now and then that a homely object becomes a picture of something higher, a dissolving view, that, while we gaze, changes its lineaments into something of higher beauty and deeper interest, a transparency lighted up in every feature by a glory behind it. "Now we see through a glass, darkly." But hereafter much may be plain and patent, that now we only guess at; and the curtain may be broadly lifted that now hangs thick and