How is the presence of God to be realized in the Christian life?
1. Think, first of all, what the presence of God is in the
individual Christian's life. How infinitely more it means to us than it could have meant to Moses. To him it meant a signal honour for his people, a separation from all nations by the fact that God was with them, that they were the Lord's host and God their Captain, their earthly leader only His vicegerent. In the fact of the Incarnation we bow before a greater mystery, we receive a higher gift, than patriarch or prophet or Old Testament saint could dream of. In the finished work of God the Son, human life has been transformed. In baptism we are separated, far more than ever Israel was — separated not as a nation over- shadowed by God's presence, but as those who by the grace of union have been united with God. No outward visible sign of cloud or tire, but the inward reality of a new life is ours. God
• P. Carnegie Simpson, The Life of Principal Rainy, ii. 97.
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and man are no longer separated as they were before Christ came. They are one in Him " in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead," while yet He has taken our nature upon Him. And that Presence of God is ever renewed to us in the sacrament of love. When we dwell with Christ and Christ with us, we are one with Christ ; while if so be that deadly sin has separated us from that supernatural Presence, Christ has Himself ordained and blessed the ministry of reconciliation whereby the penitent is restored to grace. The whole meaning and purpose of Christianity is to assure to man the Presence of God, removing that separating barrier which sin has raised, destroying sin for us by the Atonement, killing down sin in us by the power of Divine grace. Pardon and life are the two needs of man's spiritual nature, the two gifts of God in Christ, whereby the Presence of God is secured to us.
2. But there is a danger in our day that this great gift of God should be lost to us almost without our knowing it. We have made a break with the past which synchronizes in the case of most of us with the first dawn of intellectual activity ; we are learning to think for ourselves, and at the moment when we want the calmest judgment and the coolest head we feel for the first time, in their full strength, the special temptations of early manhood ; we are surrounded by a life which ministers to self- indulgence, and is hostile to stern moral discipline. We have learnt perhaps the A B C of philosophy, and already feel our- selves competent to make for ourselves our religious creed. But religion is not made — ^it grows or dies. A made religion does not live. It is true, no doubt, that something of reconstruction must take place in the case of every one who thinks. The faith which we were taught as children, and unhesitatingly received, must become ours in a different sense if it is to go with us through life. It has to be brought into relation with the new truths of science, of philosophy, of criticism, which are flowing in upon us. We cannot keep it as the only part of our intellectual heritage which must not be examined, hidden away in some sacred place. But it is one thing to try to see the old truths in the light of the new knowledge ; it is another, as it were, to sweep away the old and begin afresh. And this is what men so often do. And
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before long they discover that the Presence of God, which was with them in the old life, is not with them now. They thought they might drop the practice of religion till they had made a place for it in their new theory of life ; and resume it when the reconstruction was complete. And they find they cannot ; though there is still the longing for Him who made us for Himself, in whom alone our hearts can rest. It is in vain then that they attempt to fill the void with that God to whom the speculative reason, in abstraction from conscience, leads us. No one wants or cares for an abstract first cause. What the soul needs is a Living God, an invisible personality behind the veil of things we see, who can be to us both a Brother in sympathy and a sincere object of worship. "The only God," it has been said, "whom Western Europeans, with a Christian ancestry of a thousand years behind them, can worship, is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob ; or rather of St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Bernard, and of the innumerable blessed saints, canonized or not, who peopled the ages of faith." And religion stands or falls with the belief in a personal God, and the possibility of communion with Him.
0 thou that after toil and storm
Mayst seem to have reach'd a purer air, Whose faith has centre everywhere,
Nor cares to fix itself to form.
Leave thou thy sister when she prays, Her early Heaven, her happy views; Nor thou with shadow'd hint confuse