The Light That Leads to Further Light

Men seem to have an urgent sense of searching for something that they are not now aware of having seen. They are not content with only what their hands can touch, with only what is evident and obvious. And in this searching there sometimes comes a sense of thinking something for the first time – and yet somehow seeming to remember the same thought from far back – from some distant scene,

from somewhere far-forgotten. And sometimes things are heard which we cannot recall having heard before, but which somehow strike a certain inner sense, a deeply satisfying conviction within the soul. Nor does it seem unusual to experience that which seems new and yet somehow seems not new. Such thoughts suggest within each man an immortal, eternal intelligence – and bring to mind these lines from Wordsworth:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;

The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar…

All through the centuries men have searched this inner sense, this light within that leads to further light, the faith within that says there is yet to be found that which is not yet found. And most discoveries that men have made have come because an inner faith moves men on to something unseen – with an inner urging, a kind of wholesome discontent, a restless reaching from something that once was to something that is yet to be. And so man moves, led, if he will, by the light within – the light which shows the petty things for what they are, and gives patience for the unsolved problems and faith and assurance for the future.