tinomies of the
spirit, has arisen man's belief in a Saviour-God. Sublime and awful
are the sanctions upon which it rests. Out of the extremity and
definiteness of our need we know that He must be and we know what He
must be like. He is the One to whom all hearts are open, all desires
known, from whom no secrets are hid. Who could state the mingling of
desire and dread with which men strive after, and hide from, such
a God? We want Him, yet until we have Him how we fear Him. For that
inclusive knowledge of us which is God, if only we can bear to come to
it, endows us with freedom. For then all the barriers are down, there
is nothing to conceal, nothing to explain, nothing to hold back. Then
reality and appearance coincide, character and condition correspond.
I am what I am before Him. Supreme reality from without answers and
completes my own, and makes me real, and my reality makes me free.

But if He thus knows me, and through that knowledge every inner
inhibition melts in His presence and every damning secret's out, and
all my life is spread like an open palm before His gaze, and I am come
at last, through many weary roads, unto my very self, why then I can
let go, I can relinquish myself. The dreadful tension's gone and in
utter surrender the soul is poured out, until, spent and expressed,
rest and peace flood back into the satisfied life. So the life is
free; so the life is bound. So a man stands upon his feet; so he
clings to the Rock that is higher than he. So the life is cleansed in
burning light; so the soul is hid in the secret of God's presence. So
men come to themselves; so men lose themselves in the Eternal. There
is perfect freedom at last because we have attained to complete
captivity. There is power accompanied by peace. That is the gift which
the vision of a God, morally separate from, morally other than we,
brings to the inward strife, the spiritual agony of the world. This
is the need which that faith satisfies. It is, I suppose, in this
exulting experience of moral freedom and spiritual peace which comes
to those men who make the experiment of faith that they, for the most
part, find their sufficient proof of the divine reality. Who ever
doubted His existence who could cry with all that innumerable company
of many kindreds and peoples and tongues:

"He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay;
And he set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.
And he hath put a n