II.
Eternal Life as Knowledge of God in Christ.
1. It is knowledge. — Knowledge is a word of more than one meaning, and that knowledge of God which is eternal life has very 1 A. Scmplo, Scotch Sermons (1880), 333.
ST. JOHN XVII. 3 265
little in common with that knowledge of Him which is called theology. For there is a difference, and that a fundamental difference, between knowing a thing and knowing ahout it ; there is a difference, and that a fundamental difference, between the knowledge which we gain from books and that which comes through feeling.
^ Those who "know God" most worthily are not the in- tellectually powerful, but the spiritually sensitive, and very often such are found among the " poor of this world." To them is given the higher vision. The husband knows his wife, not by keen intellectual estimates of her character, but by the insight of a close and intimate fellowship. In this way the mother knows her child, and adjusts all her relations by the knowledge. The friend could not tell us why he loves his friend, or recount those elements of character which he admires. Heart knows heart, and love knits bonds. And the innermost secret is that we must feel God, and by the feeling gain our knowledge of Him.^
^ The mere knowing of the understanding is never life, but only the instrument or tool of life. That which my understanding, my logical faculty, knows is, so far, outside of me. I may build my life on it. But of it I cannot build my life. I know that twelve times twelve are a hundred and forty-four, that London lies nearly two hundred miles from Liverpool, and that June is likely to bring warm days and December cold. And on each of those bits of knowledge I build up now and again fragments of my life. They are useful to me in my planning and contriving ; but they are not life. But I know the remorse that is the fruit of sin, the pleading of the Holy Spirit in my conscience, the look of love in my friend's eyes, the bliss of the summer sunshine, the chill pain of a great bereavement ; and that knowing is itself of the very texture of my life. If you could take this strange abstract thing, my life, and divide it up into its several elements, you would find it all made up of knowings such as these. They are of its essence. For these knowings in me are not information given me by others, not inferences reached by syllogism, not even convictions grasped by closest reasoning, but immediate realiza- tions, instant experiences. And so these are not the furniture of life, but life itself. And if the eternal life consists in knowing certain objects, then the knowing must be of this immediate kind, facts of the soul, realizations woven into the very structure of the self.2
^ R. T., Light for Lifes Even-tide, 79.
* R. C. Armstrong, Memoir and Sermons, 253.
266 LIFE IN THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD
Comrades, I said, who to the West
Have through a thousand dangers pressed,
Let not the little space
Eemaining to our race Kun out before our senses find Experience of the world behind
The courses of the Sun,
Where people there are none. Consider what hath been your lot: Not for brute life were ye begot:
But that ye might pursue
Virtue and knowledge too.^
2. It is knowledge of God. — The one thing needful for men, the great cry of our nature, in which all other crjies are swallowed up, is for knowledge — the knowledge of God. To know the true God has been the deep desire of living souls through all time. Wearied by the changes of a fleeting world, finding no repose in the best that the finite can give, men of earnest minds long to know the Eternal that they may rest in Him. An old mystic has said : " God is an unutterable sigh of the human soul." With greater truth we may reverse the saying, and affirm that the human soul is a never-ending sigh after God. In its deepest recesses there lives or slumbers inextinguishable longing after Him, and the more we consider the nature of that longing, the more we discover that what it aims at is not a mere intellectual apprehen- sion of God, but a personal relationship to Him. It is essenti- ally of a practical nature. It is an impulse to draw nigh to God, to place ourselves in personal fellowship with Him from the conviction that He hath made these hearts of ours for Himself, and they are altogether restless till they find their rest in Him. And thus the cry of the earnest has always been that of the disciple : " Shew us the Father and it sufficeth us." The dream that has haunted the earnest of the world has ever been this — to live the blessed life man must know the true God, and Christ proclaims that dream to be a fact.
■[j What does knowing God mean ? It does not mean knowing Him by name, knowing about Him, knowing Him as a stranger and foreigner, whose speech and ways we have not been accus- tomed to ; it means knowing Him in the sense in which we know