Yet through all this wild riot the spirit thrust its way, like a tender blade through the grass and stony soil. Up it came. It showed itself a new and strange force amid the mob of tyrannous impulses that tugged and strained to beat it down. Still it persevered ; still it insisted ; still it drew itself upward, beyond all that clung and encumbered, seeking still the intangible, the unseen. It threw all competing experiences aside, it pressed on towards a secret goal of its own ; it strove, it wrestled, it sought in all strange places, and on lonely mountain-peaks, and in hidden silences. It sought something that haunted and fled, and escaped and returned; and was very near, yet very far; something that for ever evoked and yet for ever evaded. It sought it through blundering incantations and bloody rites, and down by foul ways and by weird devices. It sought and failed, and cried aloud in its failure and cut its flesh with knives ; it tore itself, it foamed, it went mad. It lost itself in obscure magic. Yet still it sought that which its heart desired.
At last out of a wilderness of effort, strewn with the wreckage of a thousand false hopes, it arrived ; it found ; it felt ; it touched ; it knew. Lo ! this, this is God. This is what explains all. This is it. This is the experience that it craved ; this is the consummation ; this is religion. " 0 taste and see " (so man cried) " how gracious the Lord is ! " Spirit and spirit meet. Soul and God are one. How deep the peace ! How keen the joy ! lilessed ! blessed is the man that putteth his trust in Him.i
^ In the Divinity Hall at Aberdeen John Duncan was impressed with Dr. Mearns's prayers to the "Great King," and his cogent reasonings convinced him intellectually of the existei ice of the living God. The gain was to him invaluable. " It was Dr. Mearns," he frequently said to me, " who satisfied me of the existence of God " ; and through life he remembered the debt with lively gratitude. But the conviction had been reached by a logical process, without any more direct mental perception ; rather his reason accepting, than his mind seeing it. The next stage of light seems almost to belong to the operation of the Spirit of God, and to involve on his part a special resistance in not following it up to spiritual fruit. It was the breaking in of a light which he looked back upon to the last as an era in his life, 1 H. Scott Holland, VUal Values, 40.
io8 THE GOODNESS OF GOD
and spoke of as a season of indescribable joy. His own words to me were nearly if not exactly these : " I first saw clearly the existence of God in walking along the bridge at Aberdeen; it was a great discovery to me ; I stopped and stood in an ecstasy of joy at seeing tlie existence of God." I think he also added, "I stood and thanked God for His existence." To another friend he said, " When I was convinced that there was a God, I danced on the Brig o' Dee with delight." *
Expecting Him my door was open wide :
Then I looked round
If any lack of service might be found, And saw Him at my side : —
How entered, by what secret stair,
I know not, knowing only He was there.'
^ I shall never forget the hour when I first discovered that God was really good. I had of course always known that the Bible said He was good; but I had thought it only meant He was religiously good; and it had never dawned on ma that it meant He was actually and practically good, with the same kind of goodness as He has commanded us to have. The expression, "the goodness of God," had seemed to me nothing more than a sort of heavenly statement, which I could not be expected to understand. And then one day I came, in my reading of the Bible, across the words, " 0 taste and see that the Lord is good," and suddenly they meant something. " The Lord is good," I repeated to myself. What does it mean to be good ? What but this, the living up to the best and highest that one knows. To be good is exactly tlie opposite of being bad. To be bad is to know the right and not to do it, but to be good is to do the best we know. And I saw that, since God is omniscient, He must know what is the best and highest good of all, and that therefore His goodness must necessarily be beyond question. I can never express what this meant to me. I had such a view of the real actual goodness of God that I saw nothing could possibly go wrong under His care, and it seemed to me that no one could ever be anxious again. And over and over since, when appearances have been against Him, and when I have been tempted to question whether He had not been unkind, or neglectful, or indifferent, I have been brought up short by the words, " The Lord is good " ; and I have seen that it was sim])ly unthinkable that