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The sun is the fountain of light to this lower world. Day by day it rises on us with its gladdening beams, and with the return of light is connected the sense of reviving power in ourselves; invigorated health and cheerfulness; renewed and willing application to appointed duties. God Himself has made it the ruler over the day. All nature seems to own its influence. The flowers that drooped, or closed their leaves during the night, expand themselves again when the sun arises. The gorgeous colours with which the clouds that were lately dark are now illuminated, bespeak the return of the absent king; and the clouds themselves are scattered at his approach. The loathsome or savage creatures that love darkness now "get them away together, and lay down in their dens. Man goeth forth to his work and to his labour until the evening." Christ is to the moral world what the sun is to the natural world; the source of life, and health, and motion. He is the "Sun of Righteousness," because the robe of righteousness in which His people "shine" is the light from Him which they reflect; and on this account His Church is said to be "clothed with the sun." And the inward righteousness also, in which they are created anew after the image of God, is derived from His illuminating presence in their hearts. And He rises on us "with healing in His wings," because He brings with Him, day by day, spiritual health to those who are diseased in soul, comfort to those who mourn, rest to the weary and heavy-laden. The world had long lain in darkness and the shadow of death, waiting with earnest expectation for the first tokens of the "dayspring from on high," even as travellers in a starless night, or as they that watch in loneliness and weariness, wait with eager longing for the burst of morning. At length the Sun of Righteousness arose, when He who was with the Father from all eternity was born at Bethlehem, and took our nature upon Him. And as the light from the morning sun travels with inconceivable speed to the remotest corners of the earth, and penetrates into the darkest recesses, so did the light from the Sun of Righteousness penetrate the dark places of the earth. It scattered the mists of ignorance and sin, and called forth from the garden of God's Church those fruits and flowers which it could never otherwise have borne. Nor is His power to heal and comfort diminished by the lapse of years. As the sun in the heavens has the same quickening and cheering power over the material world, as in the day when God first formed it and set it in the heavens; so have the beams of the Sun of Righteousness the same efficacy to heal the wounded conscience, and to comfort the afflicted soul, as when they first shone upon His humble followers.

(Bishop Trower.)

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KJV: Through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us,

WEB: because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the dawn from on high will visit us,