ST. PAUL, one of the subtlest masters of philosophy, fearlessly challenges the thinkers of all times in his declaration, "The world by wisdom knew not God;" and the condition of mind necessary on the part of the man who would find God inheres in his further statement:"He that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him."
By any and all means, all fashions and processes, men have ever been seeking God. Much of the effort, praiseworthy in its intent, has been and is crude and ineffectual. By blood and sacrifice, through toil and weariness, at cost and pain, the human race, oppressed with the conviction of something terribly wrong, and impelled by the pressure of tremendous need, has been urging this all-important quest. It has been burdened with a sense of inability to remedy its own evil case, to counteract the crushing consciousness of manifest alienation from God, burdened with the uncertainty of knowing where God might be found and how to approach Him; burdened with the seeming impossibility of knowing whether the prayer were heard if offered, and if heard whether it would be answered. So far as concerns humanity in its entirety, defeat and failure in this search would seem to be more conspicuous than success.
But all this while the great God has Himself been seeking the seekers; has indeed been more in earnest in making Himself known to them than they have ever been to find Him; always proportioning and adapting the measure and fulness of His revelation to the capacities and necessities of those to whom the revelation is addressed. The first volume of the revelation of God was unquestionably the book of creation, the creation which was not carnal nor material, but spiritual. It was intended to be legible and comprehensible and accessible. The power and majesty and strength and glory of God were written in the effulgence of the heavens, in the stateliness of the hills, in the mighty mobility of the sea, in all the varying beauty of the earth. The man of God's creating could but have been all-glorious without and within, he must have possessed the reverent spirit of the poet and the seer, combined with the ingenuousness and teachability of the child. Walking with God day by day, the love and care and mercy and grace and goodness and oversight and direction of the divine governor were to him clear as the azure of the noonday firmament.
