Article March 4, 1905 Issue

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with contributions from Lyman Abbott

Am I to think that there was a personal God six thousand years ago, or sixty thousand years ago, or six hundred thousand years ago, and that to—day, when I can go out and see him painting the leaves, and starting this fall the beginnings for next year's spring—see the love and life of the ever—present God at work before my eyes, can I think that His personality is gone? No; a thousand times nearer, a thousand times closer. We are in the presence of the great Divine personality. What we mean by personality is this: The Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed, is an energy that thinks, that feels, that purposes and does; and is thinking and feeling and purposing and doing as a conscious life, of which ours is but a poor and broken reflection.

The image which in my childhood I formed of God, as a great king sitting upon a great white throne, was really an idol, though it was not formed of stone nor painted upon a canvas. It is not to such an imagination we are to go for a realization of the personality of God. God has personified Himself in human history. He has entered into one human life, and filled that life so full of Himself that in Jesus Christ we see the image of the Invisible God. Christianity is not an episode. The life of Christ is not a historical event completed in three short years. Jesus Christ is the revelation of an Eternal Fact, and the Eternal Fact is the Ever—Present God.

Lyman Abbott. The Outlook.

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