Enlargement of heart is the true description of that higher progress to which it is ever the aim of God to lead us; the text pictures the progress, and unfolds to us both the pain and the joy. The language of the prophet is intended to present to our mind's eye that nameless dread, that inward shrinking and shuddering, with which the forecast shadows of great crises affect us as we approach them, and through which lies our passage to a larger freedom, a larger power and a larger joy.
I. It is very wonderful how all the great things which have largely influenced the world have grown from small, narrow, hard, but intensely vital beginnings, and have grown by enlargement of heart. Look, from this point of view, at the greatest of all institutions the Church. There is a clear orderly progress in the development of a Divine idea and in the effect of a Divine influence on man from the day when Abraham "crossed the river" until now. The Church is the depositary of this sacred counsel, this redeeming purpose, which underlies all man's history; and again and again the heart of the Church has been enlarged in seasons of sore strain and dread to take in those wider views of its vocation, its mission from God, and for God, for which, in the order of Providence, "the fulness of time" was come.
II. A kindred, or rather a parallel, course of enlargement has gone on in similar society. While God has been enlarging His Church, to comprehend better the meaning and the scope of His Gospel on the one hand, He has been enlarging, on the other, man's heart to receive and to rejoice in it. And, looking at it only from the secular side, it is most notable that the periods of man's greatest enlargement, when intellect and spirit have broken out of the old bounds and have occupied a new world, have been ages of convulsion and revolution, of ceaseless conflict and awful dread. The vision of a fairer order has never been wanting to mankind; when the path has been darkest, this vision has always been brightest; it is in the seasons of strain and dread that the fairest pictures of this higher order of things have been portrayed. There is travail everywhere through all the spheres of creation; and man's life, standing as it does on the summit level of mere creature development, travails in birth with a kingdom of heaven, a kingdom with a new commandment: Love one another.
J. Baldwin Brown, The Higher Life,p. 92.
References: Isaiah 60:5. E. Hale, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxix., p. 58. Isaiah 60:6. Preacher's Lantern,vol. i., p. 427. Isaiah 60:7. G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons,p. 409. Isaiah 60:8. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. ii., No. 63; Ibid., My Sermon Notes: Ecclesiastes to Malachi,p. 262; G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons,p. 276; J. R. Macduff Communion Memories,p. 62.