are made. I
like, I cannot help liking, intensely some of them; and from them I am
led on to Him who made them and who therefore must--if I only knew
Him--be more attractive even than they are. I believe that we are
intended to rise from them to Him who made them, that if we stop short
with the creature, we lower ourselves--we become idolaters. We worship
beauty or intellect or goodness as though they belonged to the
creature; we thereby lower ourselves and the persons whom we worship.
If, on the contrary, we rise from them to the Personal Being, we see
more in them than we ever saw before, and we get nearer to them than we
ever got before. For life is a circle whose centre is God. Each of us
is unconnected with his neighbour, but connected with the centre from
whom he comes. The nearer the centre, the nearer we get to each other.
When we get to the centre, we really become united with each other. To
die is to get a step nearer the centre. The closer we are connected
with the centre, the nearer we are to those whom we call dead. Our
communion with them is spiritual, because 'God is spirit' and they are
in Him. But the {71} spiritual is not the unsubstantial, the nebulous,
the gaseous; it is the personal--to my mind the awful--reality. The
more truly we understand persons, the more we shall find they are
spirits.

I tell you what has been the greatest possible strength to me of late.
God is not merely a Person, He is Three Persons in One. I am always
trying to get closer to those whom I love best, to know them more, to
serve them better. Yet something is ever keeping us apart. I said
'something,' I mean 'some one,' for only a person can keep a person
from another--only a malicious, a devilish person--yet I feel that some
day I shall be able to love, and know them better. Then I look out on
life and I see how again and again death, and some one worse than
death, is separating us, misinterpreting motives, keeping men apart;
men are struggling to be one, and cannot be; on earth persons long to
be one, persons who love feel they ought to be, they must be one. In
heaven Three Persons are really, perfectly, quite One. What we are
trying to do has been done there. Men try to be one. God is One. And
the comfort comes in when one knows that 'in the image of God made He
man.' Our life is a copy; God's life is the original. Because God is
One, we, whose life is a picture of His, shall some day be one, as He
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