It is a primary truth of Christianity that God reaches man directly. No person is insulated. As ocean floods the inlets, as sunlight environs the plant, so God enfolds and enwreathes the finite spirit. There is this difference, however, inlet and plant are penetrated whether they will or not. Sea and sunshine crowd themselves in _a tergo_. Not so with God. He can be received only through appreciation and conscious appropriation. He comes only through doors that are _purposely_ opened for Him. A man may live as near God as the bubble is to the ocean and yet not find Him. He may be “closer than breathing, nearer than hands or feet,” and still be missed. Historical Christianity is dry and formal when it lacks the immediate and inward response to our Great Companion; but our spirits are trained to know Him, to appreciate Him, by the mediation of historical revelation. A person’s spiritual life is always dwarfed when cut apart from history. Mysticism is empty unless it is enriched by outward and historical revelation. The supreme education of the soul comes through an intimate acquaintance with Jesus Christ of history. One who wished to feel the power of beauty would go to some supreme master of color and form who could exhibit them on canvas and not merely lecture about them. One who desired to feel the power of harmony would go, not to the boy with his harmonica, but to the Beethovens or Mozarts of the race who have revealed what an instrument and a human hand can do. So he who wishes to realize and practice the presence of God must inform himself at the source and fount, must come face to face with Him who was the highest human revelation of God. No one of us can interpret his own longings or purposes until he reads them off in the light of some loftier type of personality. That person understands himself best who grows intimate in fellowship with some noble character. And any man who wishes to discover the meaning of the inward voice and to interpret the divine breathings which come to human souls needs to be informed and illuminated by the supreme revelation of the ages. With perfect fitness, then, we speak of the inward Presence as the spiritual Christ. It is the continuation of the same revelation which was made under the “Syrian blue.” The procession of the Holy Ghost is a continuous revelation and exhibition of Christ within men. Whether we use the expression Holy Spirit or Christ within or spiritual Christ, we mean God _operating upon human spirits and consciously witnessed and appreciated in them_. “The Lord is the Spirit,” cries Paul when, with unveiled face, he discovers that he is being transformed into His image from glory to glory. “Joined to the Lord in one Spirit,” is another testimony of the same sort.