.
A man and woman hiding. Skulking behind trees. Trees served a new purpose
that evening, not a good purpose. They never were meant to hide behind.
Sin perverts the use of all things.

All these weary years God has been standing wherever men are: standing,
waiting, calling man back to his tryst. Among the trees, in the crowded
city of man's making, He is ever calling, and eagerly, wondrously, helping
every one who answers. He is so near that a reaching hand always touches
Him. The voice of the heart never misses His ear. But His love and grief
shine out most on that bit of a hill, outside a city wall, on the east
coast of the middle-of-the-earth sea. That is earth's tallest hill. It can
be seen farthest away of any. Jesus up on that hill is God calling man
back to his broken tryst.

<u>God's Wooing.</u>

God seems to have fairly outdone Himself to get man to turn toward the old
trysting place. For when a man will turn around enough to get even a
glimpse of that God-Face, and a whisper of that God-Voice, he can
withstand no longer.

God has taxed all the ingenuity of His love to let man know about Himself.
He revealed Himself directly to the whole race at the start. He has in
every generation, and in every clime, on every hilltop and valley, in
every village and crowded city, been revealing Himself to the heart of
every man. There cannot be found one anywhere who has not heard the quiet
inner voice drawing up, and away from wrong.

In this world of wondrous beauty God is speaking. The glory-telling
heavens, the winsome coloring of trees and all growing things, the soft
round hills, the sublime mountains, the sea with its ever-changing mood
but never-changing beneficence upon the life of the whole earth, the great
blue and gray above, the soothing green below, the brighter colors in
their artistic proportion, the wondrous blendings--surely every bush and
other green thing, every bright twinkler in the blue, everything is aflame
with the presence that burns but in great love consumes not. His eyes are
indeed badly bothered that cannot see; his ears in queer fix that do not
hear. Yet sometimes the empty shoes seem few enough. But they are ever
increasing, and will yet more and more, by retail method, with wholesale
result.

But God comes closer yet in His wooing. The web of life's daily run, with
its strange mixing and blending, shadings and tints, is of His weaving.
He sits at life's loom ever watching and wea