Ezekiel 8:12 Then said he to me, Son of man, have you seen what the ancients of the house of Israel do in the dark… The simplest form of imagination is dreaming. In dreaming we are dependent on past experience. We cannot dream about men and women and children, about earth and sky, about sea and land; about words and music and laughter, unless we have seen and heard things like them. Dreams are like life, and yet how unlike. All we have ever done and suffered, seen and heard, learned and experienced, may be in our dreams, but all altered into phantasmagoria — combining and dissolving, and succeeding one another with great rapidity. It is very difficult to understand under what impulse or impulses the imagination acts in dreaming. Another form of imagination is day dreaming, or reverie. We say the children see faces in the fire, and young people build castles in the air, but in point of fact these exercises are indulged in by all ages. In our leisure, and especially perhaps in the hours of the nights when we lie awake, forms and scenes flit of their own accord out of the dark background of memory. If you could find out what a man is thinking of when he is lying awake, you would have an invaluable index to his character; and by the same test, find out, if you like, what is your own character. It is common to warn the young against reverie; but it seems to me that this advice can only be given with qualifications. What we really need to be warned of in respect of reverie is the subjects of our daydreams. If our day dreams are concerning foul and forbidden subjects, this habit will waste the mind utterly. These thoughts must be caught at the threshold and kept resolutely out of the mind, or a man will soon become within a leper from head to foot. The office of the imagination is to improve on reality. It creates beside the actual world another world, finer, fairer, and more perfect. You see that in childhood; and I am often astonished in noticing the strength of the imagination in children. Give them two or three bits of wood, roughly carved and rudely painted, a few cuttings of cloth, a few bricks, a little mud or sand, and out of these things they will create a world with kings and queens, the tinker and tailor, soldier and sailor; and these figures will go through all the movements and activities of grown people, as far as these can be observed by the minds of children. And why is it that children, and children of a larger growth, are so fond of stories? It is because in a story the life is grander and fiercer than in actual life. It is an ideal, undimmed and undiminished by the obstacles and qualifications of reality. Now this explains, as you will all see, the delight afforded to us by works of art, which of course are works of imagination. Why does a song or a piece of music delight us? It is because in it there are gathered together sounds sweeter than the ordinary sounds which life gives us to hear; and in a picture there is distilled the beauty of a hundred scenes. And especially this explains the delight we have in imaginative literature. In the real world movement is slow, and the colours are grey, but in this world a year can be compressed into an hour; the colours are bright, the crisis is exciting, the end is satisfying. In the epic, one great movement succeeds another; in the drama, some great principle is fully illustrated; in a novel, love is triumphant and justice is vindicated. But is it good to live in such an unreal world? Well, that depends. No doubt this kind of reading may be carried to excess. If it is made, instead of an occasional treat, the daily bread of the mind, it will undoubtedly debilitate the mind. Fiction may give us altogether false ideas of life, making us suppose that success is to depend not upon effort and endeavour, which must be the only road to success with the majority, but on some lucky fall of fortune, or some effort of genius not accessible to one in a million. Yet imaginative literature has a real service to perform. There is poetry which shows us the mystery the world is full of, and helps us to believe in a secret, deep and interesting, in every heart by which we are approached. Now that is the right kind; that is the healthy kind. The wisdom of life very largely consists in being able to appreciate the romance of ordinary existence, and the poetry of common things. I said a little while ago that the function of the imagination is to improve on reality. Keep a grip of that. The imagination is the torch by which humanity is conducted along the path of progress. Then ordinary life cannot go on for a day without the imagination. When a workman is engaged on some piece of work, has not he in his mind an image of the perfect article, which directs every stroke he gives to the rough material? And although what he makes never comes up entirely, perhaps, to the object of his imagination, the perfection of the image in his imagination determines the perfection of the work of his hand. It was because Columbus had more imagination than the rest of Europe that he believed in a new world to be found on the other side of the globe, and it was for a similar reason that David Livingstone could not settle down among the other missionaries in South Africa, but was haunted by a vision of something beyond the desert, and through his imperative desire to go and see he was made the greatest discoverer of modern times. There are thousands of visions of an improved world that are never anything more than visions, but the world is never improved, even in the smallest particular, without there being first a vision of the improvement in someone's imagination. Youth is full of visions, and thousands of them never come to anything; but woe to that young man who has no visions — no vision of his own future, no vision of the future of the world. Professor Drummond used sometimes to say that in our day young men are saved, not by the conviction of sin, but by the conviction of righteousness. That has an air of paradox, but is a great truth. What he meant was that in our day many a man was saved, not by thinking of the horrible pit into which he was in danger of dropping, but of something above him, which he knows Christ would help him to grasp; although I should be inclined to add that the sense of such an ideal which you cannot reach above you is just the very thing to give you a horror of your actual self, and an intense desire to be delivered from the besetting past. Nowhere does imagination do so much for us as when it gives us a vision of our own possibilities, of what we ought to be, and what we may be by the grace of God; or rather, let me put it in this way, the best the imagination ever can do for a man is when it supplies him with an image of Jesus Christ, so enchanting and attractive that he follows Him by an irresistible impulse, and his whole subsequent life becomes one unceasing prayer and effort to be like Him. (James Stalker, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Then said he unto me, Son of man, hast thou seen what the ancients of the house of Israel do in the dark, every man in the chambers of his imagery? for they say, The LORD seeth us not; the LORD hath forsaken the earth. |
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