of these metaphysical
speculations to the act of a baby sucking at a nursing bottle. So long
as there is any milk in the bottle, the baby sucks with pleasure and
profit. Unfortunately the little fellow does not always stop sucking
when the supply of milk gives out, but still keeps on sucking empty air,
with resulting discomfort and colic. We all need to recognize the limits
of the intellectual milk supply, and not keep on trying to solve
problems that are in their very nature beyond the limits of the human
mind.]

And so men draw the veil of their pantheistic or monistic philosophy
over their hearts, to hide them from His all-searching gaze. In ancient
times they seem to have done the same, as the monuments of Egypt and
Babylonia declare; and the intimate knowledge of Nature and its Creator
which they had in the morning of our world, degenerated into the nature
worship and polytheism which we find so nearly universal at the first
dawn of secular history. It is only the child of God, the redeemed man,
who can view without flinching the sublime fact of a direct Creation, or
face the other great fact that what we call second causes are not the
real causes of natural action, that the ordinary phenomena of light,
heat, gravity, vital action, etc., do not occur because certain
"properties" have been once imparted to matter and it then left to act
of itself, any more than the child of God is left to struggle along with
the supply of divine grace which was imparted to him at his conversion.
The Christian feels his constant dependence upon his Creator for
overcoming power day by day, and he sees the whole universe just as
momently dependent upon the tireless watchcare of the great Sustainer of
all. The Christian alone delights to look upon the ceaseless service of
his Father's love, perpetually ministering to the needs and even to the
whims of His creatures. But if this tireless ministry reminds man of his
own spiritual nakedness and insular selfishness, it serves also to
remind him that it is only the free gift of a righteousness not his own
that can clothe the ashamed soul cowering beneath the eye of infinite
Purity and unselfish Love.

In our natural state we are like the dead, inorganic matter. Only by a
new life that must be imparted to us from above, a real, individual, new
creation, can we become alive spiritually. And then only by constant
dependence for spiritual life and growth upon the word of the One who
first cre