But the question of questions remains--What is the relation of the Person Whom I call God to my own personal being, to my spirit? And, in answering this question, popular theology makes a grave and disastrous mistake. It regards that Person as being isolated from all other persons, in the same way as each of us is isolated from all other persons. God, that is, is viewed as but One Person among many. Now, without inquiring as to the truth of this conception of personality, as being essentially an exclusive thing, we may at least say this, following the teaching of our best modern thinkers, as they have followed that of St. John and the Greek Fathers, that God is as truly conceived of as being within us, as external to us. His Throne is in the heart of man, as truly as it is at the centre of the universe. No view of God is tenable at the present day which regards Him as outside His own creation. His Personality is not exclusive, but inclusive of all things and all persons, while yet it transcends them. And as He includes us within Himself, as in God "we live and move and have our being," so also He interpenetrates us with His indwelling Presence as the life of our life. To this point we shall presently return, for it is the keynote of all modern advance in theological knowledge, so far as that is not concerned with questions of literature, history, archaeology, and textual criticism. But we are concerned to notice now, that this recovered truth of the immanence of God in our humanity, affords the full and sufficient explanation of that dark shadow which lies athwart all human lives. That shadow has loomed large in the minds of poets, thinkers, and theologians. The latter know it by the name of sin. But what is sin save the conscious alienation and estrangement of man from the Divine Life which is in him? And if this be true, we can now see clearly why sin, moral transgression, always makes itself felt as a disintegrating force both without and within the individual life. Without, it is for ever separating nation from nation, class from class, man from man. Within, it produces discord and confusion in our nature. And both results follow, because sin is the alienation from the Divine Life, which is both the common element in human nature which binds man to man by the tie of spiritual kinship; and also the central point of the individual life, the hidden and sacred source and fountain of our being, which unites all the faculties and powers of our manhood in one harmonious whole.