"One and the same fire": Donne on Candlemas

From a 1626 Candlemas sermon of John Donne, words which find an echo in the practice of the singing or saying of the Nunc Dimittis at Evensong. The salvation which we now see in Word and Sacrament, in "the church, which is the daughter of God, and spouse of Christ" (the words with which Donne opened this sermon"), is "one and the same fire" with the One whom Simeon beheld and with the fulness of the beatific vision:

The Christian philosophy goes farther; it shows us a perfecter blessedness than they [i.e. "the philosophers"] conceived for the next life, and it imparts that blessedness to this life also: the pure in heart are blessed already, not only comparatively, that they are in a better way of blessedness, than others are, but actually in a present possession of it: for this world and the next world, are not to the pure in heart two houses, but two rooms, a gallery to pass through, and a lodging to rest in, in the same house, which are both under one roof, Christ Jesus; the militant and the triumphant, are not two churches, but this the porch, and that the chancel of the same church, which are under one head, Christ Jesus; so the joy, and the sense of salvation, which the pure in heart have here, is not a joy severed from the joy of heaven, but a joy that begins in us here, and continues, and accompanies us thither, and there flows on, and dilates itself to an infinite expansion, (as, if you should touch one corn of powder in a train, and that train should carry fire into a whole city, from the beginning it was one and the same fire) though the fulness of the glory thereof be reserved to that which is expressed in the last branch, They shall see God.

(The painting is Rembrandt's 'Simeon in the Temple', c.1669.)

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