e, recognized or unrecognized,
he is burning up as best he can.

This principle of God's unrecognized presence applies to a special
group of people that has been growing rapidly in the last few years:
the men and women who give themselves with high spirit to human service
in science or philanthropy but who never think of attributing their
service or love of truth to religious motives. To this group belong
many of our scientists. They give themselves no rest, seeking for
truth which will help human need. In obscure and forgotten
laboratories to-day they search for remedies for ancient, lamentable
ills. They make it a point of professional honour not to take profit
for themselves when they have succeeded, but to give freely to the
world the knowledge they have achieved. The pulpit has often quarreled
with the scientists. Let the pulpit honour them for their amazing
outpouring of service to the world. To this group also belong many of
our philanthropists, to whom sacrifice for the common weal has become
the moral equivalent of war. Yet often these men and women, useful
public servants of the generation as they are, do not know God. They
are great spirits. Let us not pretend that they are not. They are
making a deep and beneficent impress upon their own times, and our sons
and our sons' sons will rise up to call them blessed; yet they do not
know God. What are we to say of such men and women? You know what
some people do say about them. They use them as arguments against
religion. They say, See these fine men living without God. That is an
utter fallacy. They are not living without God. They only think they
are. They are the supreme examples of the work of the unrecognized
God. One wishes that those men and women would recognize God. God can
do much more through responsive than through unresponsive lives. But
we may not say that they are living without God. There, in the center
of their life, in the ideals they work for, in the service they render,
in the love they lavish, in the mission that has mastered them, there
_is_ God.

Some time ago I wandered down Broadway, in the small hours of the
morning, with one of the prominent citizens of the community. At the
heart of his life is the passion to be of use. Because his character
is stalwart and his ability great, the scope of his service is far
wider than the capacity of most of us. Amid the hurrying crowds and
the flashing lights of Broadway we t