Article November 27, 1920 Issue

Knowing God

JOHN B. WILLIS

He who accepts the teaching of Scripture that God is the Alpha and Omega of being, the only cause and creator, is prepared to accept the logic and naturalness of the Master's statement that to know God is eternal life. True consciousness can be explained only upon the assumption that God is constantly expressing Himself in and through man, and our awakening to this concept marks the beginning of our escape from the thrall of belief in organic life. This awakening is the dawn of spiritual day, it is the fulfillment in each one of us of that ancient Scripture word, "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light."

In Christ Jesus this white light of revelation broke out in all its effulgence, and yet he taught us of the treasures of truth we were to find not only in him and in the wisdom of the wise, the teaching of the prophets and seers, but in the little as well as the larger events of everyday experience. As he certainly intimated, the sparrow and the wayside flower may make God's nature the better known to us, if we are but childlike and humble enough to be responsive to their speech, and this teaching appears again and again in Mrs. Eddy's writings, as when she declares that "the floral apostles are hieroglyphs of Deity" (Science and Health, p. 240). It is clear that, when rightly understood, all things are to be ours, as Paul declared. They are to yield us an enlarged and enriched sense of the greatness, the goodness, and the active nearness of God.

All this is quite in keeping with the fact that we usually gain the larger through the many lesser things; we reach the absolute through the concrete. As the sun is brought nigh in a thousand dewdrops and all the other sunlit things about us, so the nature of God is disclosed in the unnumbered reflections which, in the present imperfect state of our spiritual perception, may the more appealingly objectify the divine wisdom and beauty and bring us into closer touch with Him. A mother's love, a father's integrity, a friend's unselfishness, the nobility of character and the refinement of thought revealed in the lives of great men and in the pages of great books, especially in the songs of the great poets,—these all may bring us higher, finer concepts of the ideality of Him who has been expressed in some degree in all the good, the beautiful, and the true that is or ever was.

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