Knocking, knocking! What, still knocking!

He still there?

What's the hour? The night is waning,

In my heart a drear complaining,

And a chilly, sad unrest.

Ah! His knocking! It disturbs me,

Scares my sleep with dreams unblest!
Give me rest,

Rest, ah rest!

Rest, dear soul, He longs to give thee;
Thou hast only dreamed of pleasure,
Dreamed of gifts and golden treasure
Dreamed of jewels in thy keeping,
Waked to weariness and weeping.
Open to thy soul's one Lover,
And thy night of dreams is over;
The true gifts He brings have seeming
More than all thy faded dreaming!

Did she open? Doth she? Will she?

So, as wondering we behold,

Grows the picture to a sign,

Prest upon your soul and mine;
For in every heart that liveth
Is that strange mysterious door;
Tho forsaken and betangled,
Ivy-gnarled and weed be-tangled,
Dusty, rusty, and forgotten,

There the piercéd hand still knocketh,
And with ever-patient watching,
With the sad eyes true and tender,
With the glory-crowned hair,
Still a God is waiting there.

THE CREATION OF LIGHT

"And the Lord said, let there be light; and there was light."-Genesis 1:3.

M

ILTON, in his immortal poem, "Paradise Lost," represents Adam as asking Raphael to relate to him why and how the world was created. And Raphael goes on to tell him, in the poem, how God, after the expulsion of Satan and his angels from heaven, because of their pride and rebellion, declared his purpose to create another world, peopled with other creatures, and sent His Son with a great retinue of angels to perform the work of creation. When they visited the world of chaos the divine voice exclaimed:

"Silence, ye troubled waves! and thou deep, peace!
Your discord end!''
Nor stayed; but on the wings of cherubim
Uplifted, in paternal glory rode

Far into Chaos, and the world unborn;

For Chaos heard his voice: him all his train
Followed in bright procession, to behold

Creation, and the wonders of his might.

They stayed the fervid wheels, and in his hand

He took the golden compasses, prepared
In God's eternal store, to circumscribe
This universe, and all created things;
One foot he centered and the other turn'd
Round through the vast profundity obscure,
And said, "Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds,
This be thy just circumference, O world!"'
Thus God the heaven created, thus the earth.

"Let there be light," said God, and forthwith light
Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure,
Sprung from the deep; and from her native east
To journey through the airy gloom began,
Sphered in a radiant cloud, for yet the sun
Was not.

I

Scientific research in our own day is bringing science into far greater harmony with the Bible account of creation than was true in earlier times. It used to be asked in all seriousness by science, "How could light exist before the sun?" All such perplexity has disappeared. Modern science has discovered that light is not conditioned by perfected luminous bodies, but that light bodies are conditions of a preceding luminous element;

that is, that light could exist before the sun was created.

A century ago materialism was both fashionable and scientific. Men were boasting, "Give me the least bit of bioplasm and I will construct a universe. Everything is spontaneously generated from some other thing. Mind and matter come from the same primordial cell." In those days men were making tremendous attempts to get something out of nothing. Science was trying to get effects without causes. No reputable scientist talks that way to-day. Prof. John Fiske, one of the greatest of the modern scientists, tells us that "The impetus of modern scientific thought tends with overwhelming force toward the conception of a single First Cause, or Prime Mover, perpetually manifested from moment to moment in the changes that make up the universe." God is no longer thought of as far off, but immanent, revealing Himself in all the phenomena of the universe which He has created. The presence of God encompasses us about and illuminates all our existence. So it is true that David, writing his Psalm on the skin of some wild animal, perhaps,