| The Ministry of Comfort |
Chapter 1 |
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A literary friend tells of an experience with an oculist. Her eyes were troubling her, and she asked him if she did not need a pair of new glassed. He replied, after making an examination, that it was rest her eyes needed, not different lenses. She assured him that this was an impossible prescription, telling him a little of what she must do day by day. After a moment’s thought, he asked her if she had not some wide views from her windows. She replied enthusiastically that she had – that from her front porch she could see the noble peaks of the Blue Ridge and from her back window the glories of the Alleghany foothills. “That is just what you want,” said the oculist. “When your eyes get tired with your reading or writing, go and stand at your back window or your front porch, and look steadily at your mountains for five minutes – ten will be better. This far look will rest your eye.”
The friend finds in her oculist’s direction a parable for her own daily life. “Soul of mine,” she says to herself, “are you tired of the little treadmill round of care and worry, of the conflicts with evil, of the struggles after holiness, of the harrowing grief of this world – tired of today’s dreary commonplaces? Then rest your spiritual eyes by getting a far vision. Look up to the beauty of God’s holiness. Look in upon the throngs of the redeemed, waiting inside the gates. Look out upon the wider life that stretches away illimitably.”
It is such an outlook that the thought of immortality gives to us. We live in our narrow sphere in this world, treading round and round in the same little circle. Life’s toils and tasks so fill our hands, that we scarcely have time for a thought of anything else. Its secularities and its struggles for bread keep us ever bent down to the earth. The tears of sorrow dim our vision of God and of heaven. The dust and smoke of earth’s battles hide the blue of heaven. We need continually to get far looks to rest us, and to keep us in mind of the great world that stretches away beyond our close horizons. The glimpses of eternity which flash upon us as we read our Bible or look into Christ’s face, tell us anew that we so easily forget, that we are immortal, that our life really has no horizon.
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