You know, brethren, it is the details in which lies the beauty. If I trust Jesus as my Savior I shall be saved, but the enjoyment of faith comes from knowing him in his person, in his offices, in his work, in his present, and past, and future. We perceive his true beauty, by studying him, and observing him carefully, and with holy watchfulness. So it is with the doctrines; the mere whole of the doctrine... is blessed, but it is when we come to take the doctrine to pieces that we gain the purest enjoyment.
“Yes,” says the clown, as he looks at a fine painting, such, for instance, as Paul Potter’s famous Bull at the Hague, “it’s a rare picture certainly,” and then he goes away. But the artist sits down and studies its details. There is to him a beauty in every touch and shade, which he understands and appreciates. Many believers have light enough to know the faith in its bare outline, but they have not observed the filling up, and the minutiae wherein the sweetest comfort will always be found by the spiritually educated child of God. They can see, but they “see men as trees, walking.”
From a sermon entitled "Seeing And Not Seeing, Or Men As Trees Walking" delivered July 22, 1866. Image by Martin Gommel under Creative Commons License.
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