Darkness has its treasures as well as the light. "Truly the light is sweet, and it is a pleasant thing for the eye to behold the sun"; but when darkness overspreads the earth after the setting of the sun, the stars appear to cheer the traveler on his lonely way. The light reveals much but conceals much also. It takes the darkness to bring out the stars.
There are treasures of darkness in earth and sea as well as in the sky. There is bottled up sunlight in dark coal-mines, hidden away for countless ages, waiting for the pick and shovel of the miner to bring it forth for our use. There are silver veins and gold dust and precious gems buried in the darkness mixed with dross and clay.
And what is true of the material world is true of the moral and the spiritual; there are rich treasures of darkness there also.
There is, for instance, the darkness of moral failure. Simon Peter had to enter it, and there discovered the treasure of the dependableness of the heart of Christ, when he had learned by brier defeat to distrust his own heart, with its treacherous quicksands of high emotion so soon followed by the inevitable reaction of a fall.
There is also the darkness of adversity and but few have escaped it. There may be the loss of property, the fruit of a lifetime's toil destroyed in a day. This present calamitous war has brought this darkness into the lives of hundreds of thousands in the war zone. But how often has the darkness of adversity yielded the treasures of spiritual wealth! The darkness of sorrow may be the very shadow of the Almighty. How many have obtained clearer vision therein, finding more help and comfort in communion with God and making a new discovery of their before neglected Bible.
Sooner or later all must enter the mysterious darkness of death. It seems all loss and calamity to the natural mind. But to the Christian, the man who can say: "For me to live is Christ," death wears a different face. He can add: "And to die is gain." The darkness of death contains the treasures of release from the limitations and bondage of perishing clay, to know the blessed expandings of a regenerated spirit in its own holy and happy fatherland.
The Cross of our blessed Saviour is the Key to the problem of darkness as to every other in the moral and spiritual realm; for that Cross was deepest gloom and shame, loneliness and pain, nakedness and thirst, wormwood and gall, to the Lord of Life and Glory. But what treasures have come out and are still coming out of that darkness! To those who believe is granted an unveiling of the Cross, even as with the two on the way to Emmaus, when the Risen Lord opened the ancient Scripture and showed them that what they had called defeat was really victory, that the darkness of Calvary was full of glory.
It is possible to pass through the darkness and feel the darkness only. The wise man is he who is careful to remember that there is the treasure in every dark experience of life. That the darkness and the light are both alike to God, that "He dwelleth in the thick darkness," as Solomon confessed, as much as covering Himself with light as with a garment, as David sung: "That the night has its teachings as well as the day;" and that "Ye are not come unto darkness" as God's last word, but that as it was in the beginning so now, "and it was evening,'' deepening into midnight, "and it was morning," brightening into perfect day.
And when at last that morning, of which every morning of our lives is a type, a prophecy and a pledge, that "morning without clouds" dawns upon our wondering eyes, it will be all the brighter for the treasures we found in the darkness that sometimes fell upon our pilgrim path.