Article November 12, 1910 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from C. L. Goodell

[Outlook.]

Perhaps the most vital struggle of humanity is to keep God alive in its thought. The fathomless source of life, He has been and is fast bound in formulas which have as little relation to His tidal energy and vitality as the little stream which is conduited from the great cataract to do the work of a factory. The Master of life, whose universe moves through an endless series of changes. He is locked in catechisms and books of theology as if He were the creature of systems and could be compassed by them, instead of being the very Soul and source of abounding freedom. The great Lawmaker. He has been brought to judgment into statute-books and made the slave of human interpretations of His will. Men have been told again and again that He cannot justify the sinner, that He must receive the exact equivalent in blood of every ounce of transgression, that He cannot violate His own laws of matter—as if we knew finally what His laws are! There must be statements of faith, but they have no authority when they substitute a philosophy of which we are ignorant for an experience which we know; there must be churches, and there always have been churches in which the thought of God was an inspiration and the sense of His presence a great and sustaining comfort; but God is not shut up in churches, and any attempt to imprison Him within four walls is a terrible disaster to humanity. Many a boy has looked out of the church window on a summer morning and wished he were with the birds in the freedom of the radiant day, and believed himself a sinner for the longing; and has not known that the God of his fathers was calling him from the open fields rather than from the pulpit before which his fathers had sat. There is one God, and He is unchanging, but our thoughts of Him must widen as He more and more rises above the horizon of knowledge and experience. Each age must know Him for itself; each age must speak to Him in its own tongue; in every age the thought of His love and power must be renewed. The ancient revelation stands secure; but there must always be a new revelation in the experience of each succeeding generation.

[Christian World.]

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