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Page 27
First, that God is their Christlike Father, and that He is love as Jesus
experienced His love and Himself was love.
Second, that God is the Lord of heaven and earth. We do not know whether
He is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent; there is much that leads us
to think that He is limited. He can do no more than Love can do with His
children, and Love has its defeats, and crosses, and tragedies. But
trusting the Christlike Father we more and more discover that He is
sufficiently in control over all things to accomplish through them His
will. He needs us to help Him master nature, and transform it into the
servant of man,--to control disease, to harness electricity, to
understand earthquakes; and He needs us to help Him conquer human nature
and conform it to the likeness of His Son. God's complete lordship waits
until His will is done in earth as it is in heaven; but for the present
we believe that He is wise and strong enough not to let nature or men
defeat His purpose; that He is controlling all things so that they work
together for good unto them that love Him.
And third, that God is the indwelling Spirit. The Christlike Father
Lord, whom we find outside ourselves through the faith and character of
Jesus, becomes as we enter into fellowship with Him, a Force within us.
He is the Conscience of our consciences, the Wellspring of motives and
impulses and sympathies. We repeat, today, in some degree, the
experience of the first disciples at Pentecost; we recognize within
ourselves the inspiring, guiding and energizing Spirit of love.
While we find God primarily through Jesus, He reveals Himself to us in
many other ways: in the Scriptures, where the generations before us have
garnered their experiences of Him; in living epistles in Christian men
and women, and in some who do not call themselves by the Christian name,
but whose lives disclose the Spirit of God who was in Jesus; in
non-Christian faiths, where God has always given some glimpse of Himself
in answer to men's search. Christ is not for us confining but defining;
He gives us in Himself the test to assay the Divine.
Nor do experiences which we label religious exhaust the list of our
contacts with God. Our sense of duty, whether we connect it with God or
not, brings us in touch with Him. Many persons are unconsciously serving
God through their obedience to conscience. It was said of the French
_savant_, Littr�, that he was a saint who did not believe in God. He
made the motto of his life, "To love, to know, to serve"; and no
intelligent follower of Him who said, "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of
My brethren, even these least, ye did it unto Me," will fail to admit
that in such a life there is a genuine, though unrecognized communion
with God. In our own day when conscience is erecting new standards of
responsibility, rendering intolerable many things good people have put
up with, demonstrating the horror and hatefulness of war and forcing us
to probe its causes and motives, discontenting us with our industrial
arrangements, our business practices, our social order, God is giving us
a larger and better Ideal, a fuller vision of Himself. We know what our
Christlike Father is in Jesus; but we shall appreciate and understand
Him infinitely better as He becomes embodied in the principles and
ideals that dominate every home, and trade, and nation.
Again, our perception of beauty affords us a glimpse of God. The Greeks
embodied loveliness in their statues of the Divine, because through the
satisfaction which came to them from such exquisite figures their souls
were soothed and uplifted. They have left on record how the calm and
majestic expression of a face carved by a Phidias quieted, charmed,
strengthened them. Dion Chrysostom says of the figure of the Olympian
Zeus, "Whosoever among mortal men is most utterly toil-worn in spirit,
having drunk the cup of many sorrows and calamities, when he stands
before this image, methinks, must utterly forget all the terrors and
woes of this mortal life." The Greek Christian fathers often tell us
that the same sense of the infinitely Fair, which was roused in them by
such sights, recurred in a higher degree when their thoughts dwelt upon
the life and character of Jesus. Clement of Alexandria says, "He is so
lovely as to be alone loved by us, whose hearts are set on the true
beauty." Our �sthetic and our religious experiences often merge; our
response to beauty, whether in nature, or music, or a painting, becomes
a response to God. Wordsworth says of a lovely landscape that had
stamped its views upon his memory:
Oft in lonely rooms, and mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:--feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.
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