is a weight--laid upon a man whose muscles are not strong enough to
sustain it. It crushes rather than gladdens. So because they had not
strength enough to carry, had not capacity to receive, our Lord was
lovingly reticent.

There is a great principle involved in this saying--that revelation
is measured by the moral and spiritual capacities of the men who
receive it. The light is graduated for the diseased eye. A wise
oculist does not flood that eye with full sunshine, but he puts on
veils and bandages, and closes the shutters, and lets a stray beam,
ever growing as the curve is perfected, fall upon it. So from the
beginning until the end of the process of revelation there was a
correspondence between men's capacity to receive the light and the
light that was granted; and the faithful use of the less made them
capable of receiving the greater, and as soon as they were capable of
receiving it, it came. 'To him that hath shall be given.' In His
love, then, Christ did not load these men with principles that they
could not carry, nor feed them with 'strong meat' instead of 'milk,'
until they were able to bear it. Revelation is progressive, and
Christ is reticent, from regard to the feebleness of His listeners.

Now that same principle is true in a modified form about us. How many
things there are which we sometimes feel we should like to know, that
God has not told us, because we have not yet grown up to the point at
which we could apprehend them! Compassed with these veils of flesh
and weakness, groping amidst the shadows of time, bewildered by the
cross-lights that fall upon us from so many surrounding objects, we
have not yet eyes able to behold the ineffable glory. He has many
things to say to us about that blessed future, and that strange and
awful life into which we are to step when we leave this poor world,