found in all existence; and that we should content ourselves, and others about us content themselves, with the pantheism of the past; which, finding God everywhere, as a matter of fact found him nowhere, or, at least, not much of him anywhere? Shall we return to the faith of the deists, who believed indeed that God created the world, but then left it, as a machinist makes an elaborate piece of mechanism, and passes on to something else? Or shall we hold that the universe is so complete, and so governed by law, that there is no need of God in it at all; that its very completeness has expelled God? Shall we agree with those scientific men who, Ruskin says, "do not believe there is a God, because they have not found. him anywhere in a bottle"?

From all this we come back to the Apostles' Creed. The Church still says, as from the first, "I believe in God." And it is asked again, as it has been asked from the beginning, to give evidence of the ground of its belief to define to the world what it means by this affirmation of its faith.

Now the religion of Jesus Christ has always been and always will be a practical thing-little concerned with speculation, but always concerned with life. Therefore, whether we are dealing with the Ten Commandments or with the Apostles' Creed, we are brought back to the same point of view, the bearing

of our faith upon our life. Christianity enforces a definite moral code.1 It molds men to a certain definite method of life, and in connection with that definite life, it aims to create and maintain certain definite feelings. There must be not only a steady pulsation of the life that is to be lifted and regulated, i.c., an obedient life, there must be the outgoing of the heart in abiding affection for that life. And the affection is as essential as the life. Therefore there must always be also the ideal of the Christian life, which shall give character to the service, and lead to the perception of the supreme Source from which that ideal rises. That Source is God.

It would be easy to show that this process is analogous to the requirements and processes of our daily life. An architect, for example, is a man whose business is to produce in material form, as houses and stores, the creations of his mind. His profession is practical. But he is not in the best sense an architect unless there is awakened in his heart an affection for his work. And not only that, in order that he may work successfully he must have ideals which are cogent because they spring from the laws of beauty and of use. He must know what the possibilities and limits of his profession are, as determined for him by conditions fixed in the nature of things; so that his

1 See Note 3.

ideals, his affection and his practical work always go together.

After the same fashion the Christian life is bound up with the Christian's conception of God. We are compelled to go back to the source of both life and feeling, the character of God, who not only has given us, in his word, ideals of life for us to realize, but has realized them himself. We can worship only a God who is himself, in his supremest glory, that which he has set before us as the ideal for the fulfilment and adorning and blessing of our own personal life.1

Philoso

So we come to the questions: Who is God? What is he? How do we know that he exists? phy has dealt with these questions from the beginning. It has argued along many different lines, and the work of one generation of thinkers has been often set aside by that of the generation that followed. But is it true that the conception of God is uncertain because arguments change? Because these advance and widen, is the foundation less established? Men are still arguing, for example, over the meaning of the statue of the Venus de Milo. The statue is unchanged. Through all the changes of argument some things remain fixed. The conception of man as a thinking being subjecting all things to the test of whether they be true or false, that does not alter.

1 See Note 4.

When, seeking to live right lives, conscious of the desire of our hearts for right affections and for realizing the presence of God who made us, and made us for himself, we ask what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong, we are prepared to receive the answer that inevitably comes: "There can be no thought without a thinker:" Descartes' "Cogito, ergo sum." And the very conception of reality is simply a conception of existence as submitted to the test of a supreme judgment. The judgment of man may be mistaken; he may take the false for the true; but we are conscious in all our thinking that the thinking, as well as the facts themselves, are submitted at last to the arbitrament of the eternal Truth.

“Dark, dark, yes, irrecoverably dark

Is the soul's eye; yet how it strives and battles
Through the impenetrable gloom to fix

That master light, the secret truth of things
Which is the body of the Infinite God.”1

That idea of the absolute Truth, to whom all existence, the thinker himself and all his thoughts, are submitted, is the one enduring conception. It is the thought of the absolute God. Because there is thought, there is a Thinker. Because there is existence, there is a test of reality. And that test of reality

is the test of the infinite Mind, who is over all and in

all, and to whom at last all is to be brought.

1 Arthur Hallam.

Arriving at this, our hearts answer to the thought. We find comfort in believing that, however we may misjudge in life, however we may mistake false for true, all is subjected at last to the absolute Truth, to the pure and enduring Thought, which will set things. right. The heart responds to the conception that the real involves blessing, that the true involves the final dissipation of the untrue, that the weariness and disappointment of life involve the eventual setting of all aright in the pure light of God himself.' So we come to a definite conception of God. Because he has taught us that our life must have in it a purpose, that it must be controlled by love, that it must arrive at a conception of justice and of right; because he has given us the sense of personality in ourselves, so that we think and feel and will; he has precluded our conception of a God who is not himself a person, who is not loving and just, who is not himself present in all the world that he has made. Because the highest life known to us is the progressive realization of the eternal life by an infinite Spirit, we come to believe that all beauty and all knowledge and all usefulness are in God, the infinite Being who has made us in his own image, has breathed into us his own spirit, and will bring us at last to render an account to himself of what he has given us.