aint who did not believe in God. He
made the motto of his life, "To love, to know, to serve"; and no
intelligent follower of Him who said, "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of
My brethren, even these least, ye did it unto Me," will fail to admit
that in such a life there is a genuine, though unrecognized communion
with God. In our own day when conscience is erecting new standards of
responsibility, rendering intolerable many things good people have put
up with, demonstrating the horror and hatefulness of war and forcing us
to probe its causes and motives, discontenting us with our industrial
arrangements, our business practices, our social order, God is giving us
a larger and better Ideal, a fuller vision of Himself. We know what our
Christlike Father is in Jesus; but we shall appreciate and understand
Him infinitely better as He becomes embodied in the principles and
ideals that dominate every home, and trade, and nation.

Again, our perception of beauty affords us a glimpse of God. The Greeks
embodied loveliness in their statues of the Divine, because through the
satisfaction which came to them from such exquisite figures their souls
were soothed and uplifted. They have left on record how the calm and
majestic expression of a face carved by a Phidias quieted, charmed,
strengthened them. Dion Chrysostom says of the figure of the Olympian
Zeus, "Whosoever among mortal men is most utterly toil-worn in spirit,
having drunk the cup of many sorrows and calamities, when he stands
before this image, methinks, must utterly forget all the terrors and
woes of this mortal life." The Greek Christian fathers often tell us
that the same sense of the infinitely Fair, which was roused in them by
such sights, recurred in a higher degree when their thoughts dwelt upon
the life and character of Jesus. Clement of Alexandria says, "He is so
lovely as to be alone loved by us, whose hearts are set on the true
beauty." Our aesthetic and our religious experiences often merge; our
response to beauty, whether in nature, or music, or a painting, becomes
a response to God. Wordsworth says of a lovely landscape that had
stamped its views upon his memory:

Oft in lonely rooms, and mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:--feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure; such, perha