Christian fiction; Neighborhoods -- Scotland -- Fiction
"But to return to the resurrections we see around us in nature. Look at
the death that falls upon the world in winter. And look how it revives
when the sun draws near enough in the spring to wile the life in it
once more out of its grave. See how the pale, meek snowdrops come up
with their bowed heads, as if full of the memory of the fierce winds
they encountered last spring, and yet ready in the strength of their
weakness to encounter them again. Up comes the crocus, bringing its
gold safe from the dark of its colourless grave into the light of its
parent gold. Primroses, and anemones, and blue-bells, and a thousand
other children of the spring, hear the resurrection-trumpet of the wind
from the west and south, obey, and leave their graves behind to breathe
the air of the sweet heavens. Up and up they come till the year is
glorious with the rose and the lily, till the trees are not only
clothed upon with new garments of loveliest green, but the fruit-tree
bringeth forth its fruit, and the little children of men are made glad
with apples, and cherries, and hazel-nuts. The earth laughs out in
green and gold. The sky shares in the grand resurrection. The garments
of its mourning, wherewith it made men sad, its clouds of snow and hail
and stormy vapours, are swept away, have sunk indeed to the earth, and
are now humbly feeding the roots of the flowers whose dead stalks they
beat upon all the winter long. Instead, the sky has put on the garments
of praise. Her blue, coloured after the sapphire-floor on which stands
the throne of him who is the Resurrection and the Life, is dashed and
glorified with the pure white of sailing clouds, and at morning and
evening prayer, puts on colours in which the human heart drowns itself
with delight--green and gold and purple and rose. Even the icebergs
floating about in the lonely summer seas of the north are flashing all
the glories of the rainbow. But, indeed, is not this whole world itself
a monument of the Resurrection? The earth was without form and void.
The wind of God moved on the face of the waters, and up arose this fair
world. Darkness was on the face of the deep: God said, 'Let there be
light,' and there was light.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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