True, the natural human heart cannot bear this thought of the direct acting throughout nature of the infinite Creator. It brings us too close beneath His gaze in our sinful shortcoming and nakedness. [Footnote 55: A recent clever writer likens some of these metaphysical speculations to the act of a baby sucking at a nursing bottle. So long as there is any milk in the bottle, the baby sucks with pleasure and profit. Unfortunately the little fellow does not always stop sucking when the supply of milk gives out, but still keeps on sucking empty air, with resulting discomfort and colic. We all need to recognize the limits of the intellectual milk supply, and not keep on trying to solve problems that are in their very nature beyond the limits of the human mind.] And so men draw the veil of their pantheistic or monistic philosophy over their hearts, to hide them from His all-searching gaze. In ancient times they seem to have done the same, as the monuments of Egypt and Babylonia declare; and the intimate knowledge of Nature and its Creator which they had in the morning of our world, degenerated into the nature worship and polytheism which we find so nearly universal at the first dawn of secular history. It is only the child of God, the redeemed man, who can view without flinching the sublime fact of a direct Creation, or face the other great fact that what we call second causes are not the real causes of natural action, that the ordinary phenomena of light, heat, gravity, vital action, etc., do not occur because certain "properties" have been once imparted to matter and it then left to act of itself, any more than the child of God is left to struggle along with the supply of divine grace which was imparted to him at his conversion. The Christian feels his constant dependence upon his Creator for overcoming power day by day, and he sees the whole universe just as momently dependent upon the tireless watchcare of the great Sustainer of all. The Christian alone delights to look upon the ceaseless service of his Father's love, perpetually ministering to the needs and even to the whims of His creatures. But if this tireless ministry reminds man of his own spiritual nakedness and insular selfishness, it serves also to remind him that it is only the free gift of a righteousness not his own that can clothe the ashamed soul cowering beneath the eye of infinite Purity and unselfish Love.