A Day at a Time

“is the part of Nature in which God has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more from the sole and evident purpose of touching him, than in any other of His works.” It looks like the truth. For there is no scene of earth so fair or majestic that man cannot spoil it. Where the “cataract exults among the hills, and wears its crown of rainbows all alone,” he will build him a powerhouse to supply current to some distant town. But he cannot touch the heavens. In the heart of some fairy glen he will placard the virtues of somebody’s pills, and plaster the gateposts in a sweet country lane with the specious claims of some quack doctor, but above it all, it is God, and God alone, who spreadeth out the heavens like a curtain and in them has set a tabernacle for the sun. Even in places where the face of earth wears no suggestion of natural beauty the face of the sky redeems it from evil. For, above the squalor of the city’s meanest slum, burn the great fires of the setting sun, and overhead the fleecy white clouds sail silently all night long.

But, of it all, the glory of the sunset is chief. The dawn has its cold splendours too, but not many of us are there to see it when it is at its best. It is at eventide, when the work of the day is done, and the spell of its restfulness lays the senses open, it is then chiefly that God unfolds these splendid harmonies of colour in the western heavens. And, by consent, on this Ayrshire coast, on which I look out as I write, these glories can be seen to great advantage. It is into no flat expanse of water that the dying sun sinks here. The peaks and crags of Arran invest its passage with an indescribable pomp and majesty, standing out against it like the massive pillars of some giant gateway of the West. It is never twice the same. Sometimes lurid and blazing, with masses of thundercloud piled high, all their outer edges rimmed with fire; and, next night, peaceful and level, a study in straight lines, as if the great Artist, with even brush, had washed the sky with bands of grey and blue and gold. Each evening God has His own picture for us, His own handiwork, unspoiled by man. How many of us ever pause to recognise its beauty? What does it mean that such a prodigality of harmonious colours should be the most ordinary feature of our evening hour? Is it that God Himself takes delight in the beauty of it all, for its own sake, rejoicing, like all good workmen, in the work of His hands? Or has He some purpose with regard to His children of mankind? Is it, as Ruskin says, for the sake of pleasing man? How unthankful and unmindful we are, if that be so!

The sunset teaches us to put together these two ideas⁠—beauty, beyond the wit of man to portray, and God. There is plenty of ugliness and sin in the world, and the life of men. Man himself recognises how much of the beauty that might have been has been marred and disfigured by him. Yet in his heart he worships it, and feels after it afar off. And in the evening sky it is written that Beauty belongeth supremely unto God.

Whatever that far-off divine event be, to which the whole creation moves, one of its features shall be, must be, a beauty which shall fully satisfy. For beauty and God cannot be divorced. And when, of an evening, God for His own good pleasure, working with those material elements which have no power to disobey His behests, unfolds His will in such dazzling visions of splendour, is He not declaring that the end and goal of life itself, when His purpose therewith is completed, and Man, too, has fallen into harmony with His will, shall be fair, and satisfying, and beautiful?

Let us not be afraid to say and believe that God speaks to us in the sunset. If I pick up the receiver of a telephone and hear my friend announce some good news that fills my heart with gladness, it does not disturb me to remember that the wire itself has no power to speak. For I feel that somewhere at the end of the wire is a mind and a heart like my own who is using the dead, soulless wire as a medium of speech with me. When the glories of the sun’s setting fall upon your heart like a benediction, stirring you to devout and grateful thought, breathing peace upon you, cleansing your desires of all that is mean and sordid, do not be afraid to believe that, behind and beyond all that is material and visible, there is the Mind and Heart in whose image yours was made, whose gift peace is, whose whisper, though it come along dead ether-waves to reach you, is His whisper nevertheless.

It is perhaps natural that the prevailing quality of the thoughts that arise within us when we watch the setting sun should be pensive, tender, and, not seldom, a little sad. For it speaks of the end of the day and the coming night. Its charm and spell are like that of autumn, the remembrance of what has gone, the tender grace of a day that is dead. For all the beauty and wonder of this world, there is a tear at the heart of things. Beneath all our laughter and happiness there lies that deeper note. The night cometh. There is an end to it all⁠—friendship, love, happiness, work, life itself.

“For be the long day never so long,
At last it ringeth to evensong.”

And yet, and yet, my brothers, the end is beautiful, more beautiful even than the beginning. God has made the day’s death to be exceeding fair. The sun