'Walk whilst ye have the light, lest the darkness come upon you.' That
is the summing up of the whole history of that stiff-necked and
marvellous people. For what has all the history of Israel been since
that day but groping in the wilderness without any pillar of fire? But
there is more than that in it. Christ gives us this one solemn warning
of what falls on us if we turn away from Him. Rejected light is the
parent of the densest darkness, and the man who, having the light, does
not trust it, piles around himself thick clouds of obscurity and gloom,
far more doleful and impenetrable than the twilight that glimmers round
the men who have never known the daylight of revelation. The history of
un-Christian and anti-Christian Christendom is a terrible commentary
upon these words of the Master, and the cries that we hear all round us
to-day from men who will not follow the light of Christ, and moan or
boast that they dwell in agnostic darkness, tell us that, of all the
eclipses that can fall upon heart and mind, there is none so dismal or
thunderously dark as that of the men who, having seen the light of
Christ in the sky, have turned from it and said, 'It is no light, it is
only a mock sun.' Brethren, tempt not that fate.
And if Christian men and women do not advance in their knowledge and
their conformity, like clouds of darkness will fall upon them. None is
so hopeless as the unprogressive Christian, none so far away as those
who have been brought nigh and have never come any nigher. If you
believe the light, see that you growingly trust and walk in it, else
darkness will come upon you, and you will not know whither you go.