Daily Reading for January 23 • Phillips Brooks, Bishop of Massachusetts, 1893
Here lies the sublime and beautiful variety of human life. It is as beings come to their reality that they assert their individuality. . . . The intense variety of Light! The awful monotony of Darkness! Men are various; Christians ought to be various a thousand-fold. Strive for your best, that there you may find your most distinctive life. We cannot dream of what interest the world will have when every being in its human multitude shall shine with his own light and color, and be the child of God which it is possible for him to be,—which he has ever been in the true home-land of his Father’s thought. . . .
The hope of the world is in the ever richer naturalness of the highest life. “The earth shall be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.” Your hope and mine is the same. The day of our salvation has not come till every voice brings us one message; till Christ, the Light of the world, everywhere reveals to us the divine secret of our life; till everything without joins with the consciousness all alive within, and “the Spirit Itself beareth witness with our spirits that we are the children of God.”
From “The Light of the World” by Phillips Brooks, quoted in A Year With American Saints by G. Scott Cady and Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org