3. When we speak of' God we speak of Him as a personal Being, a free and conscious Will. If God be impersonal, He can have no heart tender with love, no will moved by swift- footed mercy, regulated by the large righteousness that loves order and deals with the individual through his relations to the whole, no gracious ends for the universe, or energies active in it that may cheer the despondent and help him in his sad struggle with ill.
IF I have only that which the poor have equally with the rich ; which the lonely have equally with the man of many friends. To me this whole strange world is homely, because in the heart of it there is a home ; to me this cruel world is kindly, because higher than the heavens there is something more human than humanity. If a man must not fight for this, may he fight for anything ? I would fight for my friend, but if I lost my friend I should still be there. I would fight for my country, but if I lost my country I should still exist. But if what that devil dreams were true, I
62 GOD WHO IS OUR HOME
should not be — I should burst like a bubble and be gone ; I could not live in that imbecile universe. Shall I not fight for my own existence ? ^
^ What are the elements essential to a person ? They are two — consciousness and will; or the knowledge by a being that he is, that he knows, that he acts and has reasons for his action ; and the power of free or spontaneous, or, simply, rational choice. Where these are, there is a person ; where they are not, there is only a thing. Personality is simply the power of ordered and reasonable conduct, whether it be in ruling a world or in regulat- ing a life.2
^ Personality expresses itself, not by eternal processes, but by individual words and deeds. If there be personality in God at all, it means that He who is behind me, and beneath me, and above me, who besets me everywhere, who is in all nature — the source of forces, the measure of law, the orderer of events — can also, can, as Person with person, stand face to face with me on the platform of His own world to speak and to be answered. But can He do it worthily ? Can He do it so as to complete, without fatally per- plexing, the manifestation of Himself? I point for answer to Jesus Christ.^
4. Let it be noted that the text expresses no transcendental ior speculative doctrine of Moses, but simply a fact of his experience. The eternal God had been his refuge. He had known better than most men the extremes of wealth and poverty, power and weakness, fulness and want. He had known solitude amid the gaieties and glories of the then most splendid court on earth. He had enjoyed Divine society on the sultry and solitary slopes of Horeb. He knew the best that Pharaoh could do for him, the worst that he could do against him, and had found both to be infinitely little. He had known, in all its anxious and bitter phases, what it was to be the loved and hated, trusted and suspected, praised and blamed, leader of a mutinous and murmur- ing and unstable people. The realities and semblances, the dreams and the disappointments, the actualities and the illusions of life he had alike experienced ; and the grand truth which had amid all given stability, strength, and comfort was, " The eternal God my refuge, and underneath the everlasting arms."
^ G. K. Chesterton, The Ball and the Crost. « A. M. Fairbairn.
' Life of Principal Rainy, ii. 134.
DEUTERONOMY xxxiii. 27 63
5. A great poet, whose words are equally dear to men of letters and to men of science, tells us " the eternal womanliness draws us ever on " ; that is, the love, the beauty, the sweet and potent gentleness personified in ideal woman is a ceaseless inspiration to man, wakes him to admiration, wins him to love. But there is one term that embraces everlasting womanliness and infinitely more, the term Eternal Father, or in its simple and beautiful paraphrase, " God is love." When we think of the eternal God, then we think of the living Source of good, active at all moments in all lives. He is righteousness, but also love ; He is truth, but grace as well. His character determines His ends, His ends justify His ways. His acts become Him, are not accommodated to our deserts, but to His own character and designs. He does not deal with us after our sins, but according to His mercies and in harmony with His own ends. No man is to God an isolated individual, but a unit within a mighty whole, loved as a person, but handled as one whose being was deemed necessary to complete the universe, and judged through the ends of Him who means the universe to be complete. And the man who believes in God, believes in One who loved him from eternity, whose love called him into being, designed and prepared a place for him in the system His wisdom ordained and His will maintains. He knows that, amid all the shadows and sorrows and shame of life, underneath him and around are the everlasting arms.