blossoms and fruits of the spirit, fills with life its affections and thoughts, and gives strength and growth to its varied faculties. And could we but peer into the domain of the higher spheres of the world beyond, we would see the Lord as the beneficent sun or life-giver of its entire spiritual realms.
But the sun typifies the Lord as love, because it is the sun, in respect to its warmth, which makes the earth so full of life and beauty, as it is the Lord, in respect to his affectionate warmth of love, who renders living, glowing, real, all that fills the world of the mind. Our hearts warm toward what we love; they are cold toward what we love not. Love is the warmth of the spiritual nature. It is the Lord's gift of love which warms us toward Himself, toward religion, toward spiritual study, toward the higher life and work, just as it is the sun's heat which warms, revives and renovates the earth.
This symbol of the sun as representing the Lord, and especially the Lord as our love, is as old as human religion. It was the origin of sun-worship. For as the sun was first used as a symbol only of the Deity, and as such temples were adorned with its semblance and dedicated to its name, through the decadence of religion the symbol became, in human thought, the reality; and the sun, in its origin, the type of God, became to idolatrous nations the great God himself.
