So we might speak to one who incredulously looks upon our faith, but
for one who whole-heartedly approaches God as Christianity suggests,
no negative and cautionary word is adequate. The Christian method of
conceiving God brings the most exhilarating thought of him that man
has ever had. It says in brief: Take your _best_ and think of God as
most truly symbolized in that. As to what our best is, not even the
agnostics doubt. The physical universe belittles us on one side only;
it makes a pigmy of the body. In our spirits we still tower above the
physical; we are greater than the world we know. Our supreme good, the
divinest reality with which we deal, is personality. Then lift that
up, says Christianity; it is your best, and you dare not think of God
in terms of less; you have Christ's example in arguing from the human
best to the divine: "If ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts
unto your children, _how much more_ ... your Father." (Matt. 7:11.)
The Christian faith asserts that when a man thus thinks of God in
terms of the best he knows he is on the road toward truth. How many
billion spiritual miles he may have to travel to the end, no man can
tell. Only he will never need to stop, retrace his steps, and start
upon a lower path than personality, a road that lies beneath
righteousness and love. The road leads on and up beyond our
imagination, but it is the same road and not another. _God is
personality plus, or else he alone is completely personal and we are
but in embryo._
If God so is personal, then all the deep meanings of religious life
and faith that the saints, our spiritual sires, have known are open to
us modern men and women. Forms of thought indeed have changed, but if
God is thus our Father and our Friend, the essentials of Christian
experience are waiting for us all. Life then is not purposeless; all
creation is bound into spiritual unity by personal Will; and in
sacrificial labor we are serving one who is able to guard that which
we "have committed unto him against that day" (II Tim. 1:12). Old
hymns of confidence in time of trial, we too can sing:
"Still will we trust, though earth seem dark and dreary,
And the heart faint beneath His chastening rod;
Though steep and hard our pathway, worn and weary,
Still will we trust in God."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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