per speculum in aenigmate

John Donne, perhaps most well known for his poetry, was also a brilliant prose writer, and his sermons are among the most profound and literary ever written. The following is an excerpt from a sermon he delivered on Easter Sunday in 1628. I shamelessly stole the title of this blog from this golden sermon:

"God made light first, and three days after that light became a sun, a more glorious light. God gave me the light of nature when I quickened in my mother's womb by receiving a reasonable soul; and God gave me the light of faith when I quickened in my second mother's womb, the church, by receiving my baptism; but in my third day, when my mortality shall put on immortality, he shall give me the light of glory by which I shall see himself. To this light of glory the light of honor is but a glow-worm; and majesty itself but a twilight; the cherubims and seraphims are but candles; and the Gospel itself, which the apostle calls the glorious Gospel, but a star of the least magnitude. And if I cannot tell what to call this light by which I shall see it, what shall I call that which I shall see by it, the essence of God himself! And yet there is something else than this sight of God intended in that which remains; I shall not only see God face to face, but I shall know him - which, as you have seen all the way, is above sight - and know him even also as I am known."