JOB XI. 7 23
We long for Canaan when we stand in Canaan. We cry for love when we have learned love. We pray for purity when we have tasted purity. We feel our distance from God when God is at the door.^
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The Deeps of God.
Literally the verse reads: Canst thou find the deeps of (or, that which has to be searched out in) God ; canst thou reach to the perfection (the outmost, the ground of the nature) of the Almighty ? The word is the same as that translated in xxxviii. 16 " recesses " of the sea.
'^ 1. God is not to he fully comprehended in His Being. — Our knowledge of God, in this life, must be a constant " moving forward in the twilight " ; fragmentary, and perhaps unequal ; but by His grace increasing, as we "follow on to know"; starting from a venture, demanding an effort ; and to the end of this life a knowledge only in part. But after this life, if we have endured and persevered unto the end, there will be a change. "Then shall I know even as also I have been known." When the things which keep us back have loosed their hold on us ; when sin and indolence and doubt are done with ; when all the anxieties that we have allowed to fret us and divide our hearts here are put away for ever ; when, through whatsoever discipline, in this world or beyond it, God has wrought His perfect work in us; then will the broken and faltering effort pass into an unhindered energy, and we shall know Him even as also we are known. Even as from the first He has known us ; as, when He made us His, when He called us to Himself, when He gave us our work to do. He knew us ; as now, in all the discipline of life, in all His dealings with us, His gaze penetrates at once the inmost depths of our being; so shall we be ever moving forward, with intensity then undivided and unwearied, in the realization of His infinite truth and goodness.
Some measui'e of the knowledge of God is within the reach of all who really desire it and will really strive for it. Through ^ 6. Matheson, Times of Retirement, 235.
24 THE DEEPS OF GOD
many ways He is waiting to reveal Himself more clearly to every one of us — through conscience, through nature, through the Bible, through the lives of the poor and of. those who suffer patiently, through all moral beauty, and above all in the life and teaching of our Lord. Through all these ways, it may be, hints and glances of His glory have already come to us ; through all these ways we may know in part, and follow on to know continually more. But, undoubtedly, there is need of venture — the venture of faith, to commit ourselves to Him ; to trust the light we see, even though we see it faintly and unsteadily. Knowledge will never grow in that cold and sceptical mind which Dr. Newman has described so well; the mind "which has no desire to approach its God, but sits at home waiting for the fearful clearness of His visible coming, whom it might seek and find in due measure amid the twilight of the present world."
^ How my mind and will, which are not God, can yet cognize and leap to meet Him, how I ever came to be so separate from Him, and how God Himself came to be at all, are problems that for the theist can remain unsolved and insoluble for ever. It is sufficient for him to know that he himself simply is, and needs God; and that behind this universe God simply is and will be for ever, and will in some way hear his call. In the practical assurance of these empirical facts, without " Erkentnisstheorie " or philosophical ontology, without metaphysics of emanation or creation to justify or make them more intelligible, in the blessed- ness of their mere acknowledgment as given, lie all the peace and power he craves. The floodgates of the religious life are opened, and the full currents can pour through.
It is this empirical and practical side of the theistic position, its theoretic chastity and modesty, that I wish to accentuate. The highest flights of theistic mysticism, far from pretending to penetrate the secrets of the me and the thou in worship, and to transcend the dualism by an act of intelligence, simply turn their backs on such attempts. The problem for them has simply vanished — vanished from the sight of an attitude which refuses to notice such f atile theoretic difficulties. Get but that " peace of God which passeth understanding," and the questions of the under- standing will cease from puzzling and pedantic scruples be at rest.^
^ It is neither what we seem to understand about God that feeds our love, nor the fact that He is infinitely beyond our
1 W. James, The Will to Believe, 135.
JOB XI. 7 25
understanding, but the fact that we can ever progress in know- ledge and love, and always with a sense of an infinite " beyond." It is at the margin where the conquering light meets the receding darkness that love finds its inspirations. If we are forced to conceive Him human-wise, we know that the conception is but an idol or picture ; that if He is all that, He is also infinitely more. To the savage He is but the biggest and strongest of men ; to the rationalist He is but the most intelligent and moral ; to faith He is the hidden Infinite, of which these are but the finite symbols.^