"Then sawest thou that this fair Universe, were it in the meanest
province thereof, is in very deed the star-domed City of God; that
through every star, through every grass-blade, and most through every
Living Soul, the glory of a present God still beams. But Nature, which
is the Time-vesture of God, and reveals Him to the wise, hides Him from
the foolish."
Moreover, this idea of God as the Creative Power conceived in spiritual
terms need not lose any of the intimate meanings which have inhered in
more personal thoughts of him and which are expressed in the Bible's
names for him: Father, Mother, Bridegroom, Husband, Friend. There is
indeed this danger in the approach which we have been describing, that
we may conceive God as so dispersed everywhere that we cannot find him
anywhere and that at last, so diffused, he will lose the practical
value on account of which we want him. For we do desire a God who is
like ourselves--enough like ourselves so that he can understand us and
care for us and enter into our human problems. We do want a human side
to God. A man who had seen in Henry Drummond the most beautiful
exhibition of God's Spirit that he had ever experienced said that after
Henry Drummond died he always prayed up to God by way of Drummond. We
make our most vital approaches to God in that way and we always have,
from the time we prayed to God through our fathers and mothers until
now, when we find God in Christ. We want in God a personality that can
answer ours, and we can have it without belittling in the least his
greatness.
I know a man who says that one of the turning points of his spiritual
experience came on a day when for the first time it dawned on him that
he never had seen his mother. Now, his mother was the major molding
influence in his life. He could have said about her what Longfellow
said in a letter to his mother, written when he was twenty-one. "For
me," wrote Longfellow, "a line from my mother is more efficacious than
all the homilies preached in Lent; and I find more incitement to virtue
in merely looking at your handwriting than in a whole volume of ethics
and moral discourses." So this man would have felt about the pervasive
influence of his mother. Then it dawned on him one day that he never
had seen her. To be sure, he had seen the bodily instrument by which
she had been able somehow to express herself through look and word and
gesture, but his mother herself, her thoughts, her consciousness, her
love, her spirit, he never had seen and he never would see. She was
the realest force in his life, but she was invisible. When they talked
together they signalled to each other out of the unseen where they
dwelt. They both were as invisible as God. Moreover, while his mother
was only a human, personal spirit, there was a kind of omnipresence in
her so far as he was concerned, and he loved her and she loved him
everywhere, though he never had seen her and never could. If spiritual
life even in its human form can take on such meanings, we need not
think of God as an expanded individual in order to love him, be loved
by him, and company with him as an unseen friend. Let a man once begin
with God as the universal spiritual Presence and then go on to see the
divine quality of that Presence revealed in Christ, and there is no
limit to the deepening and heightening of his estimation of God's
character, except the limits of his own moral imagination.