revelation of Himself,
seems to be even vaster and more intense than the Divine energy of
creation displayed in the revelation of nature. Every new revelation
of God's power and wisdom which science unfolds serves only to restore
a balance in our mind between God's power and God's love. The more
astronomical the heavens become, the closer they bring God to us.

Another conception of God to be kept in mind, if we are to grasp the
meaning of the "Hound of Heaven," is the omniscient character, the
infinite perfection, of God's knowledge. God sees each of us as fully
and completely as if there were no one else and nothing else to see
except us. Practically speaking, God gives each one of us His
undivided attention. And through this spacious channel of His Divine
and exclusive attention pour the ocean-tides of His love. The weak
soul is afraid of the terrible excess of Divine Love. It tries to
elude it; but Love meets it at every cross-road and by-path, down which
it would run and hide itself, and gently turns it back.

Francis Thompson, in an interpretation of "A Narrow Vessel," has left
us in prose a description of human weakness and wilfulness reluctant of
its true bliss. The following passage is an excellent commentary on
the "Hound of Heaven." "Though God," he says, "asks of the soul but to
love Him what it may, and is ready to give an increased love for a poor
little, the soul feels that this infinite love demands naturally its
whole self, that if it begin to love God it may not stop short of all
it has to yield. It is troubled, even if it did go a brief way, on the
upward path; it fears and recoils from the whole great surrender, the
constant effort beyond itself which is sensibly laid on it. It falls
back with relieved contentment on some human love, a love on its own
plane, where somewhat short of total surrender may go to requital,
where no upward effort is needful. And it ends by giving for the
meanest, the most unsufficing and half-hearted return, that utter
self-surrender and self-effacement which it denied to God. Even (how
rarely) if the return be such as mortal may render, how empty and
unsatiated it leaves the soul. One always is less generous to love
than the other."

God walks morning, noon and eve in the garden of the soul, calling it
to a happiness which affrights it. And the timid and self-seeking soul
strives to hide itself under the stars, under the clouds of heaven,
under human love,