The profound significance, and the illumination brought to the problem
of living by simply giving one's self entirely, with belief, and love,
and joy, to the will of God, is an experience that transcends human
language. Too often has the acceptance of God's will been held to be a
spirit of the abandonment of despair, or of the mere inertia that ceases
from striving and from aspiration. On the contrary, it is the most
intense form of action. It embodies the loftiest aspiration. It compels
the highest degree of energy. It calls into play every intellectual
faculty; it arouses and inspires. It is the regeneration of the
individual. He does not know what life is; he does not even begin to
live, at all, in any sense worth the name, until he lives and moves and
has his being in the will of God. It is, indeed, as Professor Carl Hilty
has said, a sense of initiative and power. "What is the happy life?"
questions Professor Hilty. "It is a life of conscious harmony with the
Divine order of the world, a sense, that is to say, of God's
companionship.... The better world we enter is, indeed, entered by faith
and not by sight; but this faith grows more confident and more
supporting, until it is like an inward faculty of life itself. To
substitute for this a world of the outward senses is to find no meaning
in life which can convey confidence. Faith in God," continues Professor
Hilty, "is a form of experience, not a form of proof.... Here then, is
the first step toward the discovery of the meaning of life. It is an act
of will, a moral venture, a listening to experience. No man can omit
this initial step, and no man can teach another the lesson which lies in
his own experience. The prophets of the Old Testament found an accurate
expression for this act of will when they described it as a 'turning,'
and they went on to assure their people of the perfect inward peace and
the sense of confidence which followed this act. 'Look unto me and be ye
saved,' says Isaiah; 'Incline your ear and come unto me; hear, and your
soul shall live.' From that time to this, thousands of those who have
thus changed the direction of their wills have entered into the same
sense of peace; while no man who has thus given his will to God has ever
felt himself permanently bewildered or forsaken.
"Here, also, in this free act of the will is attained that sense of
liberty which is described as righteousness. It is a sense of initiative
and power, as though one were not wholly the subject of arbitrary grace,
but had a certain positive companionship with God.... This step once
taken both the world in which one lives and one's own personal life get
a clear and intelligible meaning."
Mrs. Browning has a line in "Aurora Leigh" that runs,--
"And having tried all other ways, to just try God's."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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