O ye who seek to solve the knot, Ye live in God, yet know Him not; Ye sit upon the river's brink, Yet crave in vain a drop to drink; Ye dwell beside a countless store, Yet perish hungry at the door.
The revelation of God in nature is that of an omnipresent, all- embracing, all-working Power, an Infinite Eeason which is manifested in the unvarying order of the world.
5. How are we to find the true God ?
(1) St. Paul teaches us that in order to find God we must get at the true idea of God. The faculty of religion in the Athenians was keen but uninformed. St. Paul set forth the true object of worship, first, as " Maker of the world," or in their own language " the cosmos," with all the order and beauty, adaptation and design, harmony and conspiring motions and uses of all inanimate existences and living beings in it. And He is not only the Creator, who, having once completed His work, and arranged for its maintenance, has left it to go on by itself, like a man who constructs some curious contrivance to go for an indefinite period, and takes no further care of it. But just as He constructed, so He continues to superintend the evolutions and workings of this acts & ROM. — 11
162 AN UNKNOWN GOD
huge machine of the universe. He presides at the helm of providence. He is "the Lord," the possessor and master of heaven and earth. And being so great, and high, and infinite, of Almighty power, spirituality, and prescience, He necessarily could not dwell in temples made with hands. Neither could He be served or ministered to by men's hands, as though He needed anything, seeing He giveth to all creatures life, and breath, and whatever else may be necessary for their sustenance and con- tinuance. So that the Athenians must henceforth attach to their idea of God the predicates of daily and direct providence, together with a spirituality and omnipotence ever at work, energizing throughout the length and breadth of creation, as well as the predicate of original creative power.
(2) But more than this, man everywhere is by creation the son of God. All nations of men who dwell on the broad earth must acknowledge the one Fatherhood. No one particular people, neither the Greeks, nor their Koman conquerors, neither the Jews, nor any other, could engross to themselves the Divine favour. All were brothers, of whatever race or language, without exception, bearing in their make and constitution the Divine impress, endowed with that faculty of religion, in virtue of which they were all drawn to seek after God, if haply they might feel His presence, and discover His working in the creation around, and in the providence over them, since He was at all times immediately near, present in their hearts in the power of His love and holiness. The great Father of men had been schooling and disciplining His children, through the whole course of history, by the varied dispensations of His providence. He had fixed the bounds and determined the ages and periods of human life, both in single persons and in nations. Jew, and Greek, and heathen alike had been tending and hastening toward the goal of human history, the advent of the Eedeemer, and the promulgation of a wholly spiritual and universal religion, in which the ideas of the one fatherhood, and sonship, and brotherhood of the human family would be finally realized. Knowing, therefore, so much of God, and of our relation and dependence upon Him, for " we are also his offspring," it was not reasonable to think that the spirituality and infinity of the Deity could be worthily represented by figures, or images, or material symbols of any sort, although
ACTS xvii. 22, 23 163
men everywhere have fondly endeavoured to realize His presence under some visible emblem or form.
(3) Further, St. Paul went on to declare that in Jesus Christ God had revealed Himself in His moral character, as the God of Kighteousness. If in the past He had seemed to slumber, He was now awake ; if He had overlooked the ignorance of the past, He would do so no longer ; for He had " appointed a day in which he would judge the world in righteousness by the man whom he had ordained ; whereof he had given assurance to all men in that he had raised him from the dead." Eighteousness was the ruling passion in St. Paul's soul, and as he looked around on that world of many gods and of much wickedness, his spirit was mightily stirred to declare to it a God of Eighteousness who should judge the world righteously.
(4) And this righteous God is both immanent and transcendent. He is immanent. The revelation of the true God in Christ teaches us that man is God's organ, God's son, to learn and to give expres- sion to the will of his Father. The reason why the world is not better than it is, and why individual lives often remain on such a low level, is because men have been looking too exclusively to a God outside themselves, slow to learn where the living God is, or, having learned, reluctant to do His will — perhaps because it called for sacrifice. The power of the revelation of God in Christ is in the fact that Jesus stopped not short of the complete sacrifice of Himself in order to do the Will of God. So entirely was He one with God, so completely was He the Continuator of the Divine working in the world. Moreover, since it was the very life of God that moved in Christ — God as the living God — we see God Himself in Christ accepting and submitting to the actual order of the Universe, and in that Divine silence which makes human life often seem so dark and tragical, enduring the worst that man can do to man, suffering the result in this life of the sin of humanity. In this light we see that the actual order is an absolutely necessary one — necessary for the making of man and for the accomplishment of the Divine purposes concerning him ; therefore, one to be accepted, not only in submission, but in faith and hope.