, where He is not. Ten million
intelligences standing at as many points in space and separated by
incomprehensible distances can each one say with equal truth, God is
here. No point is nearer to God than any other point. It is exactly as
near to God from any place as it is from any other place. No one is in
mere distance any further from or any nearer to God than any other
person is.

These are truths believed by every instructed Christian. It remains for
us to think on them and pray over them until they begin to glow within
us.

"In the beginning God." Not _matter_, for matter is not self-causing. It
requires an antecedent cause, and God is that Cause. Not _law_, for law
is but a name for the course which all creation follows. That course had
to be planned, and the Planner is God. Not _mind_, for mind also is a
created thing and must have a Creator back of it. In the beginning God,
the uncaused Cause of matter, mind and law. There we must begin.

Adam sinned and, in his panic, frantically tried to do the impossible:
he tried to hide from the Presence of God. David also must have had wild
thoughts of trying to escape from the Presence, for he wrote, "Whither
shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?"
Then he proceeded through one of his most beautiful psalms to celebrate
the glory of the divine immanence. "If I ascend up into heaven, thou art
there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the
wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even
there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me." And he
knew that God's _being_ and God's _seeing_ are the same, that the seeing
Presence had been with him even before he was born, watching the mystery
of unfolding life. Solomon exclaimed, "But will God indeed dwell on the
earth? behold the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee:
how much less this house which I have builded." Paul assured the
Athenians that "God is not far from any one of us: for in him we live,
and move, and have our being."

If God is present at every point in space, if we cannot go where He is
not, cannot even conceive of a place where He is not, why then has not
that Presence become the one universally celebrated fact of the world?
The patriarch Jacob, "in the waste howling wilderness," gave the answer
to that question. He saw a vision of God and cried out in wonder,
"Surely the Lord is in this place; and I