The late Charles Cuthbert Hall said:
I recall the wonder and delight with which I saw the ocean
tide come up the Bay of Fundy and fill the empty river-bed.
Through the hours of the ebb, the Nova Scotian rivers dwindled
and shrank within their banks. Broad and barren reaches of
sand exposed themselves; ships listed heavily on their sides,
deserted by the feeble stream trickling in mid-channel. Then
came the tide up the Bay of Fundy, up from the abundance of
the unfathomable sea. You could hear it coming with a distant
sound of motion and life and unmeasured power. You could see
it coming, with a pure white girdle of foam, that looked in
sunlight like a zone of fire. It entered the river-bed; it
filled the empty channel as one fills a pitcher at the fountain;
it covered the barren sands with motion and sparkling life;
it lifted the heavy ships, gave back to them their rights of
buoyancy, set them free upon the broad water-way of world-wide
opportunity; it changed the very face of the land from sadness
and apathy and dulness to animation and color and glittering
activity. So Christ comes into empty human lives, and fills
them with His fulness, which is the very fulness of God. The
difference between a life without Christ and a life with Christ
is the difference between ebb and flood: the one is growing
emptier, the other is growing fuller.
(1173)