It does not cover, nor is presented by the prophet as covering, all the
facts of experience. Every man has his share of sunshine, but still it
is true of all who are not living in dependence on and communion with
God, that they are but travellers in the dark.
Scripture uses the image of darkness as symbolic of three sad facts of
our experience: ignorance, sin, sorrow. Are not all these the
characteristics of godless lives?
As for ignorance--a godless man has no key to the awful problems that
front him. He knows not God, who is to him a dread, a name, a mystery.
He knows not himself, the depths of his nature, its possibilities for
good or evil, whence it cometh nor whither it goeth. He has no solution
for the riddle of the universe. It is to him a chaos, and darkness is
upon the face of the deep.
As to sin, the darkness of ignorance is largely due to the darkness of
sin. In every heart comes sometimes the consciousness that it is thus
darkened by sin. The sense of sin is with all men more or less--much
perverted, often wrong in its judgments, feeble, easily silenced, but
for all that it is there--and it is great part of the cold obstruction
that shuts out the light. Sin weaves the pall that shrouds the world.
As for darkness of sorrow--we must beware that we do not exaggerate.
God makes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and there is
gladness in every life, much that arises from fulfilled desires, from
accomplished purposes, from gratified affections. But when all this has
been freely admitted, still sadness crouches somewhere in all hearts,
and over every life the storm sometimes stoops.
We need nothing beyond our own experience and the slightest knowledge
of other hearts to know how shallow and one-sided a view of life that
is which sees only the joy and forgets the sorrow, which ignores the
night and thinks only of the day; which, looking out on nature, is
blind to the pain and agony, the horror and the death, which are as
real parts of it as brightness and beauty, love and life. Every little
valley that lies in lovely loneliness has its scenes of desolation, and
tempest has broken over the fairest scenes. Every river has drowned its
man. Over every inch of blue sky the thunder cloud has rolled. Every
summer has its winter, every day its night, every life its death. All
stars set, all moons wane. 'Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet
birds sang' come after every leafy June.
Sorrow is as deeply embedded in the necessity and constitution of
things as joy. 'God hath set one over against another, and hath made
all things double.'