e, in
its depth and fulness, unknowable and inexhaustible, may yet be really
and truly known. You do not need a thunderstorm to experience the
electric shock; a battery that you can carry in your pocket will do that
for you. You do not need to have traversed all the length and breadth
and depth and height of some newly-discovered country to be sure of its
existence, and to have a real, though it may be a vague, conception of
the magnitude of its shores. And so, really, though boundedly, we have
the knowledge of God, and can rely upon it as valid, though partial; and
similarly, by experience we have such a certified acquaintance with Him
and His power as needs no enlargement to be trusted, and to become the
source of blessings untold. We may see but a strip of the sky through
the narrow chinks of our prison windows, and many a grating may further
intercept the view, and much dust that might be cleared away may dim the
glass but yet it _is_ the sky that we see, and we can think of the great
horizon circling round and round, and of the infinite depths above
there, which neither eye nor thought can travel unwearied. Though all
that we see be but an inch in breadth and a foot or two in height, yet
we do see. We know the unknowable power that passeth knowledge.

And let me remind you of how large importance this knowledge of and
constant reference to the measureless power manifested in Christ is for
us. I believe there can be no vigorous, happy Christian life without it.
It is our only refuge from pessimism and despair for the world. The old
psalm said, 'Thou hast crowned Him with glory and honour, and hast given
Him dominion over the works of Thy hands,' and hundreds of years
afterwards the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews commented on it
thus, 'We see not yet all things put under Him.' Was the old vision a
dream, was it never intended to be fulfilled? Apparently so, if we take
the history of the past into account, and the centuries that have passed
since have done nothing to make it more probable, apart from Jesus
Christ, that man will rise to the height which the Psalmist dreamed of.
When we look at the exploded Utopias that fill the past; when we think
of the strange and apparently fatal necessity by which evil is developed
from every stage of what men call progress, and how improvement is
perverted, almost as soon as effected, into another fortress of weakness
and misery; when we look on the world as it is to-day, I k