Another element in life, which of course is first in importance, is
_God_.
The Angelus is perhaps the most religious picture painted this
century. You cannot look at it and see that young man standing in the
field with his hat off, and the girl opposite him with her hands
clasped and her head bowed on her breast, without feeling a sense of
God.
Do we carry about with us the thought of God wherever we go? If not,
we have missed the greatest part of life. Do we have a conviction of
God's abiding presence wherever we are? There is nothing more needed
in this generation than a larger and more Scriptural idea of God. A
great American writer has told us that when he was a boy the
conception of God which he got from books and sermons was that of a
wise and very strict lawyer. I remember well the awful conception of
God which I had when a boy. I was given an illustrated edition of
Watts' hymns, in which God was represented as a great piercing eye in
the midst of a great black thunder cloud. The idea which that picture
gave to my young imagination was that of God as a great detective,
playing the spy upon my actions, as the hymn says:
"Writing now the story of what little children do."
That was a very mistaken and harmful idea which it has taken me years
to obliterate. We think of God as "up there," or as one who made the
world six thousand years ago and then retired. We must learn that He
is not confined either to time or space. God is not to be thought of
as merely back there in time, or up there in space. If not, where is
He? "The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth." The Kingdom of God is
within you, and God Himself is among men. When are we to exchange the
terrible, far-away, absentee God of our childhood for the everywhere
present God of the Bible? Too many of the old Christian writers seem
to have conceived of God as not much more than the greatest man--a
kind of divine emperor. He is infinitely more; He is a spirit, as
Jesus said to the woman at the well, and in Him we live and move and
have our being. Let us think of God as Immanuel--God with us--an
ever-present, omnipresent, eternal One. Long, long ago, God made
matter, then He made the flowers and trees and animals, then He made
man. Did He stop? Is God dead? If He lives and acts what is He doing?
He is