knew it not." Jacob had never
been for one small division of a moment outside the circle of that
all-pervading Presence. But he knew it not. That was his trouble, and it
is ours. Men do not know that God is here. What a difference it would
make if they knew.

The Presence and the manifestation of the Presence are not the same.
There can be the one without the other. God is here when we are wholly
unaware of it. He is _manifest_ only when and as we are aware of His
Presence. On our part there must be surrender to the Spirit of God, for
His work it is to show us the Father and the Son. If we co-operate with
Him in loving obedience God will manifest Himself to us, and that
manifestation will be the difference between a nominal Christian life
and a life radiant with the light of His face.

Always, everywhere God is present, and always He seeks to discover
Himself. To each one he would reveal not only that He is, but _what_ He
is as well. He did not have to be persuaded to discover Himself to
Moses. "And the Lord descended in the cloud, and stood with him there,
and proclaimed the name of the Lord." He not only made a verbal
proclamation of His nature but He revealed His very Self to Moses so
that the skin of Moses' face shone with the supernatural light. It will
be a great moment for some of us when we begin to believe that God's
promise of self-revelation is literally true: that He promised much, but
promised no more than He intends to fulfill.

Our pursuit of God is successful just because He is forever seeking to
manifest Himself to us. The revelation of God to any man is not God
coming from a distance upon a time to pay a brief and momentous visit to
the man's soul. Thus to think of it is to misunderstand it all. The
approach of God to the soul or of the soul to God is not to be thought
of in spatial terms at all. There is no idea of physical distance
involved in the concept. It is not a matter of miles but of experience.

To speak of being near to or far from God is to use language in a sense
always understood when applied to our ordinary human relationships. A
man may say, "I feel that my son is coming nearer to me as he gets
older," and yet that son has lived by his father's side since he was
born and has never been away from home more than a day or so in his
entire life. What then can the father mean? Obviously he is speaking of
_experience_. He means that the boy is coming to know him more
intimately and with d