John's Gospel or Epistles,
one violent expression? One sentence of great swelling words? Are
not the words of the Son of Thunder, as I have been telling you,
peculiarly calm, slow, simple, gentle? Can those whose mouths are
full of noisy and violent talk, be true Sons of Thunder, if St. John
was one?
No. And if you will think for yourselves, you will see that there is
a deeper meaning in our Lord's name for St. John than merely that he
was a loud and violent man.
You hear the roar of the thunder, but you know surely that it is not
the thunder itself; that it is only its echo rolling on from cloud to
cloud and hill from hill.
But the thunder itself--if you have ever been close enough to it to
hear it--is very different from that, and far more awful. Still and
silently it broods till its time is come. And then there is one ear-
piercing crack, one blinding flash, and all is over. Nothing so
swift, so instantaneous, as the thunder itself, and yet nothing so
strong.
And such are those sudden flashes of indignation against sin and
falsehood which break out for a moment in St. John's writing,
piercing, like the Word of God himself, the very joints and marrow of
the heart, and showing, in one terrible word, what is the real matter
with the bad man's soul; as the thunderbolt lights up for an instant
the whole heavens far and wide.
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