The Source of Fire

I. The Source of the Understanding

The last night of Babylon begins as a feast. A thousand of the mighty at the wine, and at the king's command the vessels are carried in that his father plundered from the house of God in Jerusalem; they drink from them, and they praise the gods of gold and silver, of bronze, iron, wood and stone. At that very moment, opposite the lampstand, the fingers of a human hand come forth, and they write on the plaster of the palace wall. The king sees the back of the hand that writes. His radiance fades, his thoughts terrify him, the joints of his hips give way and his knees knock together. All the wise of Babylon are summoned in — and no one can read the writing, no one make known the interpretation. Then, drawn by the uproar, the queen enters the banquet hall, and she speaks the sentence for whose sake this chapter began:

"There is a man in your kingdom in whom is a spirit of holy gods; and in the days of your father, enlightenment and insight and wisdom like the wisdom of the gods were found in him."1

The empire, after half a century of watching, has for Daniel only one explanation — and it is no compliment to his brains. It does not say: he is the cleverest of your wise men. It says: something dwells in that man. "A spirit of holy gods is in him" — it is the fixed formula of the court, spoken four times in the book, by two kings and a queen, each time the understanding of this one exile must be accounted for.2 And when the queen lists his gifts — the interpreting of dreams, the explaining of riddles, the loosing of knots — there stands in that Aramaic inventory one word the reader recognizes as an old acquaintance in foreign dress: śoḵletānû, insight — the maskil-root, in Aramaic.3 Even the enemy, when he must name the secret of the wise one, does not point to the man. He points to what dwells in the man.

With that the question of this chapter is put. The previous chapter laid the field bare: six companies under one clock, six ways in which God carries people through the night of the beast — witnessing, kept, snatched away, persecuted, sealed, tabernacling. But one thing the field has not yet named, and without that one thing the whole map remains a map of marble statues: the power. With what breath do the witnesses prophesy? Out of what source does the vanguard make the many understand, while the courtroom already stands ready? What holds a person upright through the twelve hundred and sixty days — not as teeth-gritting willpower, but as life? The answer of Scripture is neither a technique nor a trait of character. It is a Person, touched until now only along the edge — the good Spirit who teaches, the Spirit of God in Joseph, the spirit of life that raises the witnesses. This chapter is for Him. For the chief driving force of the Maskilim is not a property of the Maskilim. It is the Holy Spirit.

Begin where Part II ended. The function of the wise one was a single breath: to understand and to make understand, to receive and to pass on — and the stream does not begin with human beings. Chapter 3 set the very first "make understand" of the canon with God himself: "Your good Spirit you gave to instruct them." The bearer of the maskil-verb there is no teacher and no angel and not even a scroll; it is the good Spirit.4 The verb after which this whole book is named hangs, at its oldest occurrence, on the Spirit of God. The function has had an engine from the very first, and the text has never concealed it: where teaching comes from above, the Spirit is the teacher.

The New Testament says it no differently; it says it deeper. "The Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God" — ἐρευνᾷ, a tracker's word: in the depths of God the Spirit is no visitor but a dweller, and there is no room he does not enter.5 And then the astounding application, one verse on: "now we have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we might know what has been given us by God." Knowing, in that sense, is no longer an achievement; it is a gift with a courier. What no eye has seen and no ear heard and what has come up in no human heart — "to us God has revealed it through the Spirit." That is why John can write to ordinary believers — no scholars, no seers: "you have an anointing from the Holy One, and you know all things"; "the anointing you received from him abides in you [...] his anointing teaches you about all things."6 Anointing — χρῖσμα, down to its root the Christ-word: the Anointed one distributes his anointing; whoever belongs to him carries something of the oil of his Name. And Jesus himself, in the night before his death, gave the teacher his name and his curriculum in a single sentence: "the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name — he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you."7 To teach and to bring to remembrance: new teaching and old teaching recalled at the hour it is needed — that is no oracle-machine, that is a pedagogue. The personal Guide of everyone who must understand in the night.

And whoever wants to know what that looks like — Spirit and understanding in a single figure — must look to the stump of Jesse. On the Branch, says Isaiah, the Spirit of YHWH shall rest: "the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of YHWH."8 Beside that list stands the Babylonian vacancy-text of Daniel 1 — "skilled in all wisdom, knowing knowledge and understanding science" — and they are the same words. Wisdom, understanding, knowledge: the profile of the maskilim is, word for word, the portrait of the Spirit upon the Messiah. That is no accident of the dictionary; that is the blueprint. The understanding the wise one distributes was never his own: it is Spirit-stuff, the same material that rests in fullness on the Servant and in parts on those who follow him. And the canon has laid this pattern out from its first pages. The very first human of whom Scripture says that God "filled him with the Spirit of God" is no prophet and no king but a craftsman: Bezalel, filled "with wisdom, with insight and with knowledge" to build a sanctuary. Joshua is "full of the spirit of wisdom." Of Joseph Pharaoh asks: "could we find anyone like this — a man in whom the Spirit of God is?"9 Always the same: wherever in Scripture there surfaces understanding, skill, insight that serves some purpose, a Spirit-formula stands beside it. The canon knows no self-made understanding that does God's work.

So the function of Part II receives here its power-source, and the definition grows sterner and more comforting at once. Sterner: whoever passes on what was not received from the Spirit stands outside the chain — that was the serpent in the garden, the smooth teacher, the insight with deceit in its hand. More comforting: if the understanding is a gift, then it does not hang on giftedness — and then neither can it be taken away by circumstances that wreck only giftedness. When, soon, in the night, a person "understands" and "makes understand," that is no talent that miraculously held out. It is a source that did not stop giving.

II. Fire in the Night

There is one prophet who saw this source open — wide open, over all flesh — and who wrote down alongside it when. His book begins in a land eaten bare: four kinds of locust one after another, the vine ruined, the fig tree snapped, the grain offering halted because there is nothing left to offer. In the middle of that book everything turns — "rend your heart and not your garments" — and on the far side of that turn stands the promise the Old Testament never surpasses:

"And afterward it shall come to pass: I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy; your old ones shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions. And also on the male servants and on the maidservants in those days I will pour out my Spirit."10

Pour out — no trickling, no measuring: the verb of a bucket tipped over, of water and of blood and of a heart that is poured out. And "on all flesh": the promise breaks every sluice the Spirit had known until then. No longer one Bezalel, one Daniel, one prophet a century — sons and daughters, old and young, and then the line that must have sounded like a scandal in the ancient world: also the slaves, also the slave-women; and for them the "I will pour out" is repeated separately, as though God knew it would otherwise be reasoned away. It is the answer to the oldest wish of the prophetic order. When the Spirit fell on the seventy elders and two men went on prophesying in the camp, Joshua wanted to forbid it — and Moses answered with a sigh that waited thirteen centuries for its fulfillment: "oh, that all the people of YHWH were prophets, that YHWH would put his Spirit on them!"11 Joel is the granting of that wish, with interest. And that is, at its deepest, how the weak servant is raised up: "I will pour my Spirit on your seed" (Isaiah 44:3). The weary one does not get his wings like eagles out of himself — the raised-up servant Jacob of chapter 3 rises by this outpoured Spirit.

But the passage is not finished — and here is the shock this chapter must not smooth over. Without a blank line, without a new heading, in the same breath the oracle goes on:

"And I will give wonders in the heavens and on the earth: blood and fire and columns of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood, before the coming of the day of YHWH, the great and dreadful. And it shall come to pass: everyone who calls on the name of YHWH shall escape; for on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be escape, as YHWH has said, and among the survivors whom YHWH calls."12

One passage, three steps, no seam between them: the outpouring — the signs — the escape. We are fond of sawing that stairway in two. The first step we give to Pentecost and to the light: the Spirit, the prophesying sons and daughters, the young church in the sun. The second and third we push off toward the end and toward the dark: the blood-moon, the columns of smoke, the escape at the last moment. But Joel did not write two oracles. In him the outpouring and the darkness fall in the same days — "in those days," he says himself; the Spirit goes over all flesh while in the heavens the sun is turned to darkness. The greatest promise of the Spirit the Old Testament knows is not planted in a golden age. It is planted in the night.

Peter knew this. On the day of Pentecost, when the crowd mocks that the disciples are full of sweet wine, he opens Joel: "this is that which was spoken through the prophet Joel" — and he does two things. The first: he dates it. Where the old Greek translation of Joel reads "afterward," Peter says: "in the last days it shall come to pass, says God, that I will pour out from my Spirit on all flesh."13 The outpouring is for him no incident but the opening shot of the last epoch. And the second: he reads on. He does not stop at the prophesying sons and daughters; he reads the whole stairway aloud — the blood and the fire and the smoke-vapor, the sun to darkness and the moon to blood, all the way to "everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved" — while over Jerusalem that morning no sun was darkened and no column of smoke stood.14 Peter reads out more than happens that day, and he knows it. Pentecost is the first step, not the stairway. And the law itself had already given that day its name, centuries before: the Feast of Weeks is called in the Torah "the day of the firstfruits"15 — and chapter 7 has taught what a firstfruit is: never the whole harvest; the sheaf that goes ahead while the fields still stand full. The outpouring of Pentecost is the firstfruit-sheaf of Joel. The full harvest-outpouring — the step with the signs alongside it, with the blood-moon and the columns of smoke — waits on the completion of the time Joel saw.

And with that something stands on the map that runs clean against nearly every image of "the great revival" that lives among us. Whoever speaks today of revival usually draws it as a triumph in the light: full halls, a church that counts again, a tide that turns before the dark comes — the awakening as a postponement of the night. Joel draws it otherwise, and Joel is the text. The greatest outpouring Scripture promises falls neither before the darkness nor after it; it falls within it — among the columns of smoke, under an extinguished sun, in the days when the beast gets his forty-two months. That is no contradiction; that is the law of nature of fire. Fire is never so visible as in the dark. A flame at midday is almost nothing; the same flame at midnight is a beacon for miles. God does not withdraw his fire when the sun goes out — he pours it out precisely then, and precisely then it will shine fiercer and more visible than in all the centuries of daylight before. The great revival is no alternative to the great tribulation. It is God's answer within it: prophesying sons and daughters in the hour of the columns of smoke; the completion of Joel, with fire.

And the stairway comes out on a mountain. "On Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be escape [...] among the survivors whom YHWH calls." Chapter 7 has already seen those words lying under Revelation 14:1: the one time Revelation says "Zion," the Lamb stands there with a numbered, escaped company — and Joel's mountain of escape is the Old Testament freight of that scene. That the survivors of Joel 2:32 and the hundred and forty-four thousand of the mountain meet each other there — the same mountain-word, the same remnant-field, the same order from night to escape — is a strong and coherent reading, and this book reads it so; it must be said that it is a reading: Joel names no number and Revelation does not cite him here word for word.16 But the composition carries it: the passage that begins with the poured-out Spirit ends with the survivors on Zion. The outpouring and the sealing belong together like the breath and the body. And the first step of the stairway — "your sons and your daughters shall prophesy" — that step comes down, in the field of the previous chapter, on the loud side, and the fourth movement of this chapter is about that.

III. "I will not leave you orphans"

Now the night before the cross, the upper room. The disciples have just heard that he is going away and that they cannot now follow him; the ground slides out from under them. And in that room, against that fear, Jesus makes the promise on which this whole chapter hangs:

"And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you forever: the Spirit of truth [...] you know him, for he abides with you and shall be in you. I will not leave you orphans; I come to you."17

Another Comforter — so there was already one: himself; there comes one of the same kind, no lesser replacement but a second of the same house. That he may abide with you forever — εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα: the first Comforter was with them three years; the other gets no expiry date. And then the three prepositions, in one breath: he is with you, he abides beside you, he shall be in you — next to you as a companion, beside you as a housemate, in you as breath.18 Language cannot come closer. And the close is the tenderest word of the whole farewell discourse: "I will not leave you orphans" — ὀρφανούς, orphans, children whose father has fallen away.19 That is exactly what the disciples fear becoming that night, and it is exactly what Jesus rules out — not for a while, but "forever."

And now the question that may not be dodged, because the model itself raises it. This book reads the keeping in such a way that the Bride is taken away before the abomination — the tabernacling company was already dwelling above in the field of the previous chapter. Whoever reads so hears sooner or later the consequence-question: if the Church is gone from the earth — is then the Spirit gone too? There is a reading that says so, and it appeals to the "restrainer" of 2 Thessalonians 2: something — or someone — still holds back the man of lawlessness, "until he is out of the way"; whoever reads the Spirit into that restrainer (or the Spirit-in-the-Church) lets the Spirit depart along with the taking-away, and the year-week becomes a Spirit-less vacuum. Honesty is honesty: who or what the restrainer is, is one of the oldest open questions of interpretation — the text itself names no name, and that model-question is not decided here.20 But what this book does decide, and with the texts on the table: whatever the restrainer is, the Spirit is not taken away from the believers in the tribulation. The texts themselves are five, and they all point the same way.

Joel sets the prophesying amid the columns of smoke — the outpouring falls "in those days," the days of the darkened sun; a Spirit-less end-time cannot be written with Joel. Mark 13:11 stands within the end-time discourse itself: the promise that the Holy Spirit will take over the speaking is given for the hour before governors and kings, for the hour of the handing-over — it presupposes the tribulation as its backdrop. Revelation 11:11: on the darkest day of the darkest week, when the corpses of the two witnesses have been on view for three and a half days, "a spirit of life from God" comes into them — Spirit-work, dated at the end of the year-week. Revelation 14:13: in the midst of the mark-section of the book, directly after "here is the endurance of the saints," a voice sounds — "blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on. Yes, says the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors" — the Spirit speaks there himself, audibly, of the dead of precisely those days; the book lets him have the word at exactly that spot. And the Lamb himself bears seven eyes, "the seven Spirits of God, sent out over all the earth": in the book of the tribulation the Spirit is not evacuated — he is sent out, over the whole earth.21 Five texts, one direction. And above them stands, like a beam over all five, the word of the upper room: "that he may abide with you forever." In εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα there is no gap of seven years. Whatever shifts in the taking-away as to public, restraining work — the indwelling is nowhere revoked, the comfort nowhere withdrawn, the guidance nowhere ended. Whoever believes in those days is indwelt by the same Spirit as the disciples in the upper room. That reading lies closer to the texts than its opposite.

It is, moreover, no new way of doing for God; it is his oldest. When Israel went through its first wilderness, the Spirit was not the absent one but the present one: "where is he who put his holy Spirit in their midst?" Isaiah asks of the exodus — in their midst, forty years of wilderness long; "the Spirit of YHWH gave them rest." And to the handful of returnees who stood despairing among the rubble of the temple, Haggai said in God's name the shortest comfort of the Old Testament: "my Spirit stands in your midst; do not fear."22 A small, threatened, surrounded remnant — and the Spirit stands right in the middle of it, like a man who has kept his feet. God has never yet left a tribulated generation without his Spirit. He is not about to begin with the generation that gets it hardest of all.

And precisely for them — for whoever comes to faith after the Church is taken away; who wakes in a world from which something seems irrevocably gone — the word of the upper room is written as though it waited for them. If there will ever be people who can feel themselves orphans, it is they: left behind, too late by their own reckoning, children of a house that has been removed. Against exactly that feeling the promise stands with its own words: no orphans. The Comforter did not move away along with those taken; he is the Spirit who "abides with you and shall be in you" — in you too, in you above all. The great comfort of this chapter is no abstraction: there comes no hour in history, not even the blackest, in which a believer on this earth is uninhabited.

IV. It Is Not You Who Speak

There is a scene that Jesus himself foretold for those days — it stands in all three synoptic gospels, and in Mark it stands in the middle of the end-time discourse, so the setting is not arbitrary. You are handed over. Councils, synagogues, governors and kings; family members among the accusers. You stand in the place where in that empire no one stands willingly: at the front, alone, with the power facing you and your life at stake. And for exactly that hour Jesus gives his people one instruction — and it is, astoundingly, a prohibition:

"When they hand you over, do not be anxious how or what you shall speak; for it will be given you in that hour what you shall speak. For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father, who speaks in you."23

No rhetoric-training, no rehearsed defense, not even an exhortation to be brave. One prohibition — do not be anxious, do not think it out beforehand — and one promise: it will be given you, in that hour. Given — the favorite word of this whole book: as the seal was given and the wings were given, so also the word is given, exactly on time and not a day earlier. Mark says who the giver is: "it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit." And Luke adds the third, and whoever has read this far hears in his words an old signal: "settle it then in your hearts, not to prepare beforehand how you will defend yourselves; for I will give you a mouth and wisdom, which all your adversaries will not be able to contradict or withstand."24 Mouth and wisdom — the maskil-word, handed out in the courtroom. The Son gives, the Spirit speaks: it is no contradiction between the evangelists but the chain itself, from above downward, as it has been followed from the Tigris — and the incontestability of that speaking (Luke's promise) the church has seen on its own body: "they were not able to withstand the wisdom and the Spirit by which he spoke," it says of the first martyr.25

And then there is something that goes deeper than comfort; it is the grammar of the whole Kingdom. "It is not you who speak" — the witness does not speak from himself. But that is no demotion, for higher up the chain it is no different: the Spirit too does not speak from himself — "when he has come, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you in all the truth; for he will not speak from himself, but what he hears he will speak." And the Son did not speak from himself: "I have not spoken from myself, but the Father who sent me, he has given me a commandment what I should say and what I should speak."26 Three links, and none of them speaks from itself: not the Son, not the Spirit, not the witness. What goes into the courtroom through the mouth of an interrogated maskil comes out of the depths of God, along the Son, through the Spirit — a waterfall with three steps, and the lowest step is a human mouth. That is the definitive version of what chapter 3 called the stream. And it is at once the boundary this chapter must guard against all vaporousness: the Spirit does not make oracle-people who get interesting notions of their own. "He shall glorify me," says Jesus, "for he shall take of what is mine and declare it to you."27 The Spirit never sets himself in the light and never his bearers; he is the lamp aimed at Christ. That is why Revelation gives, from the mouth of an angel who refuses worship, the touchstone that governs all prophecy of those days: "the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy."28 All true prophecy — the sons and the daughters of Joel included — has one subject, and it is never the prophet.

That light now falls over the loud side of the field. The two witnesses: their whole chain is Spirit-marked, link for link. They prophesy — Joel's verb — twelve hundred and sixty days; fire goes out of their mouth, and ever since Jeremiah it is settled what that fire is: words, made fire in the mouth; and when they are killed, it is "a spirit of life from God" that sets them on their feet.29 From their first word to their resurrection there is nothing in them that comes from themselves — and precisely for that reason nothing in them could be overcome, not even their death. And the wise who "make the many understand" under sword and flame: that is no lecture-hall scene but exactly the situation of Matthew 10 — teaching with the courtroom alongside, exposition given by people who may be arrested tomorrow. For them Joel 2:28 is no lovely vista but their job description: the poured-out Spirit makes of the vanguard what it is — prophesying, understanding-giving mouths in the night, sons and daughters who speak while the columns of smoke stand. The maskil of those days need not be eloquent, nor learned, nor old and nor young; he needs one thing: to be inhabited. The rest is given, in that hour.

V. The Cloud and the Scales

This book has from its third chapter followed four strings — suffering, endurance, testimony, glory — and said that whoever strikes one hears the other three sing along. Once more along all four — this time not the strings, but the hand that draws them taut. It is four times the same.

The testimony — that has been the fourth movement of this chapter: it is not you who speak. The string sounds, but the breath is the Spirit's.

The suffering — here stands the sentence that is perhaps the loveliest of the whole first letter of Peter: "if you are reviled in the name of Christ: blessed are you, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you."30 Rests on you — it is, in the Greek of the old translation, word for word the verb of Isaiah 11:2: the Spirit that would rest on the Branch from Jesse, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding. What rested on the Messiah comes to rest on the reviled. Peter says with that something the tribulation-believer must know by heart: the reviling is not the proof that the Spirit has left you — the reviling is the place where he alights. Where the suffering for the Name begins, the dove is not startled off; there it lands.

The endurance — and here the tenderest word written about the Spirit: "likewise the Spirit also comes to the aid of our weakness; for what we should pray as we ought, we do not know, but the Spirit himself pleads for us with unutterable groanings."31 "To come to the aid" is in the Greek one long, beautiful compound verb: to take hold together, on the other side — the word for someone who steps up to a burden that is too heavy for you, grips the other end and lifts along. It stands in the whole New Testament but one other time, and there Martha asks whether her sister will come help her in the kitchen: it is household language, not temple language — that close is this help. And when even the praying gives out — for that is what Paul supposes here: that there exists a weakness in which you no longer even know what you should pray — then the prayer does not stop. Then the indwelling Prayer takes over, with groanings for which no words exist. There is in the tribulation a prayer that goes on where your words stop. Even the silence of the exhausted is inhabited.

And the glory — whoever suffers with is glorified with; and the suffering of the present time, Paul reckons, does not weigh against the glory that shall be revealed to us.32 That reckoning is a bookkeeper's word; Paul has actually worked the scales, with on the one side all that he himself had seen of sword and flame, and the beam swung down toward the side not yet visible. Elsewhere he sets the weighing in four words: light against weight, moment against eternal — the light tribulation of the moment works an eternal weight of glory. On that scale the final part will return at length; here only the reading need be noted: a short time tribulated — the time is counted off to the very day, the field knew that already — and an eternal glory for it. Now it is all or nothing, and whoever knows the scales knows what "all" weighs.

But there is one more thing, and it is the last this chapter has to say; it stands in the letter to the Hebrews, directly after the longest roll of honor of faith-witnesses that Scripture knows: "Therefore then, let us also, now that we have such a cloud of witnesses lying around us, lay aside every weight [...] and with endurance run the race that lies before us, looking to Jesus."33 A cloud of witnesses — νέφος, no little cloud but a cloud-bank, a mass that fills the whole sky; and "around us": the believer's racecourse is no deserted athletics track in the early morning, it is a full stadium. And who sit on those rows? The eleventh chapter has just enumerated them — and among them stands one line the reader of this book recognizes as a familiar figure: "others were stretched on the rack, and would not accept release, that they might obtain a better resurrection." The rack — the tympanon: the instrument on which, in the book of the Maccabees, old Eleazar gave his life.34 The old man of chapter 1, the mother with her seven sons, the refined wise of all the ages — they are not gone. They sit on the rows. The tribulation-believer who thinks he is the first and the only one is in reality running the last leg of a relay centuries old, through a stadium full of forerunners — and "witnesses" they are called not because they are spectators, but because they have made declarations: about the faithfulness of God in the fire, and about how it ends. Whoever in those days looks up looks into no empty heaven.

So the last hand is laid on the field. Six companies, six modes, one clock — and now the power too is named: one Spirit, poured out, indwelling, speaking, lifting-along, resting on whoever is reviled; the fire under all six the ways, and most fiercely visible where the night is deepest. The darkness of those days will be complete — the thirteenth chapter of Revelation has concealed no part of it. But it will not manage one thing, the only thing it needed: it will not get the fire put out, for the fire burns not on the earth but in the people, and the Source of it is inexhaustible and dwells there itself. And each of the six ways through that night comes out somewhere; at the end of each way lies, by the law of the Kingdom, a crown. About that crown — what it is, who wears it, and what a crowned one does with it — is the part that now follows.

For whoever reads this in those days.

Perhaps the stillest and most poisonous thing the night says to you is not that God does not exist, but that he has left. That the Spirit was something for a warmer century than yours; that the Church has been taken away and heaven with her; that you are too late, left behind in an emptied house. Then hear what was said in the upper room — it is addressed to you: I will not leave you orphans. Under that sentence stands no expiry date; it says "forever," and your days fall within it. You are no orphan. The house is not empty: the fire is with you. You will have nights in which you think that you must keep it burning, with your small hands around a flickering flame. It is the other way around. You do not hold the fire; the fire holds you. The Spirit is no store that you manage but a Source that carries you, and a source does not run dry in the night. And for the hour you dread most — the interrogation, the question straight to your face — you have one task, and it is a prohibition: do not think it out beforehand. What you must say will be given you in that hour, and no hour earlier; that close does the Giver walk beside you. The Son did not speak from himself, the Spirit does not speak from himself, and neither need you — that is no poverty, that is the nobility of this chain. And when even the praying is spent, there prays Someone on in you, with groanings that need no language; your silence too is inhabited. Then look up once more. You do not run alone and not as the first: around you, row above row, sits the cloud of witnesses — the old man of the rack, the mother with her seven sons, the refined of all the ages — no spectators, but witnesses: their declaration is already made — that God is faithful in the fire, and that the fire does not have the last word. A short time tribulated; an eternal glory for it — the scale has been weighed by people who were allowed to know. It is the darkest night of history, and you carry through it a fire that is not yours — and precisely for that reason cannot go out. Speak, when the hour comes. One speaks along with you.