aking Voice is a
fact. How men have reacted to it is for any observer to note.

When God spoke out of heaven to our Lord, self-centered men who heard it
explained it by natural causes: they said, "It thundered." This habit
of explaining the Voice by appeals to natural law is at the very root of
modern science. In the living breathing cosmos there is a mysterious
Something, too wonderful, too awful for any mind to understand. The
believing man does not claim to understand. He falls to his knees and
whispers, "God." The man of earth kneels also, but not to worship. He
kneels to examine, to search, to find the cause and the how of things.
Just now we happen to be living in a secular age. Our thought habits are
those of the scientist, not those of the worshipper. We are more likely
to explain than to adore. "It thundered," we exclaim, and go our earthly
way. But still the Voice sounds and searches. The order and life of the
world depend upon that Voice, but men are mostly too busy or too
stubborn to give attention.

Everyone of us has had experiences which we have not been able to
explain: a sudden sense of loneliness, or a feeling of wonder or awe in
the face of the universal vastness. Or we have had a fleeting visitation
of light like an illumination from some other sun, giving us in a quick
flash an assurance that we are from another world, that our origins are
divine. What we saw there, or felt, or heard, may have been contrary to
all that we had been taught in the schools and at wide variance with all
our former beliefs and opinions. We were forced to suspend our acquired
doubts while, for a moment, the clouds were rolled back and we saw and
heard for ourselves. Explain such things as we will, I think we have not
been fair to the facts until we allow at least the possibility that such
experiences may arise from the Presence of God in the world and His
persistent effort to communicate with mankind. Let us not dismiss such
an hypothesis too flippantly.

It is my own belief (and here I shall not feel bad if no one follows me)
that every good and beautiful thing which man has produced in the world
has been the result of his faulty and sin-blocked response to the
creative Voice sounding over the earth. The moral philosophers who
dreamed their high dreams of virtue, the religious thinkers who
speculated about God and immortality, the poets and artists who created
out of common stuff pure and lasting beauty: how can we expl