anding'; it is our
prerogative to be led by His eye speaking to the heart, not by His
bridle appealing to the sense; to do Him loyal service, to understand
His purposes, to sympathise with them, and sympathising to execute. This
our prayer gives us the clear distinction, then, between mere blind
obedience and the true goal of man. The kingdom is other and better than
the creature-wide dominion.

And then, this prayer reposes on the confession that that higher, better
form of obedience is not yet attained. In a word, it can only be prayed
aright by a man who feels that the world has gone away from God and His
commandments. We separate ourselves by it from all who think that this
present state is the natural condition of men, the order into which they
were born, the kind of world which God intended; and we assert, in sight
of all the evils and sore sorrows that fill the world, that this is not
God's intention. People tell us that the doctrine of a fall, an earth
which has departed from God, a race which has rebelled, is a gloomy and
dark one, covering the face of life with sackcloth. But it seems to me
that instead of being so, it is the only conviction that can make a man
bear to see the world as it is. Brethren, which of these two is the
gloomy--the creed that says, Look at all these men dying--in dumb
ignorance, living in brutal sin; look at blood, rapine, lies,
battlefields, broken hearts, hopes that never set to fruit but died in
the bud, the stream of sad groans, and sadder curses, and wild mirth,
saddest of all. Look at it all, coming to pass on this fair earth amid
the pomp of sunsets and the calm beauty of autumn, and beneath the cold
stars, in a world where the noblest creature is the saddest, and accept
for explanation that it is the necessary road for the perfecting of the
creature; that it is all for the best, that it is exactly what God meant
the world to be;--or the creed which sees the same things and says:
'This is not what God intended: an enemy hath done this'? Sin hath
entered into the world, and death by sin.

The Christian doctrine does not make the facts, but only the Christian
doctrine can explain them. It seems to me that if I believed that life
as I see it in the world, and as I feel it in myself, is life as God
meant it to be, I should either go mad or be a wise man, not a fool, if
I were to look up at the unpitying stars that could sing for joy over
such a creation, and say, _There is no God_.