s seem
to have conceived of God as not much more than the greatest man--a
kind of divine emperor. He is infinitely more; He is a spirit, as
Jesus said to the woman at the well, and in Him we live and move and
have our being. Let us think of God as Immanuel--God with us--an
ever-present, omnipresent, eternal One. Long, long ago, God made
matter, then He made the flowers and trees and animals, then He made
man. Did He stop? Is God dead? If He lives and acts what is He doing?
He is
MAKING MEN BETTER.
He it is that "worketh in you." The buds of our nature are not all out
yet; the sap to make them comes from the God who made us, from the
indwelling Christ. Our bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost, and
we must bear this in mind, because the sense of God is kept up, not by
logic, but by experience.
Until she was seven years of age the life of Helen Keller, the Boston
girl who was deaf and dumb and blind, was an absolute blank; nothing
could go into that mind because the ears and eyes were closed to the
outer world. Then by that great process which has been discovered, by
which the blind see, and the deaf hear, and the mute speak, that
girl's soul became opened, and they began to put in little bits of
knowledge, and bit by bit they began to educate her. They reserved her
religious instruction for Phillips Brooks. After some years, when she
was twelve years old, they took her to him and he began to talk to her
through the young lady who had been the means of opening her senses,
and who could communicate with her by the exceedingly delicate process
of touch. He began to tell her about God and what He had done, and how
He loved men, and what He is to us. The child listened very
intelligently, and finally said:
"Mr. Brooks, I knew all that before, but I didn't know His name."
How often we have felt something within us impelling us to do
something which we would not have conceived of by ourselves, or
enabling us to do something which we could not have done alone. "It is
God which worketh in you." This great simple fact
EXPLAINS MANY OF THE MYSTERIES OF LIFE,
and takes away the fear which we would otherwise have in meeting the
difficulties which lie before us.
Two Americans who were crossing the Atlantic met on Sunday night to
sing hymns in the cabin. As they sang the hymn, "Jesus, Lover of my
Soul," one of the Americans heard an exceedingly rich and beautiful
voice behind him. He looked aro
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