fortune, our intention is fact. If a man does his best to swim to the wrecked vessel with a life-line, and is thrown insensible upon the shore, who will have the heart to judge him because he has failed? Your cheap moralist talks of facts, and no doubt this is a fact that he is lying there like a helpless and useless seaweed. There are other facts which are worth mentioning; as, for instance, that he made a brave attempt, and that he only failed because the surf was too strong. We are apt to ignore such facts in our moral judgments, but they are not forgotten when God is judge. With God the effort is counted as the act, for in the spiritual world it is only a question of time, when the struggler will succeed. What one desires to be he shall be before set of sun, and the soldier who has fought bravely to the end in spite of his reverses shall be glorified. Our failures may one day count higher than our successes, and our gracious thoughts which were choked in utterance be of higher value than our finished words, when God sits on the judgment seat and weighs in His infallible scales, not only the patent facts of life which men have praised, but the spiritual imaginations of the heart which we never realized.

I.F.

12

. . . All the world's coarse thumb

And finger failed to plumb,

So passed in making up the man's account;

All instincts immature,

All purposes unsure,

That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's

amount.

Thoughts hardly to be packed,

Into a narrow act,

Fancies that broke through languages and escaped; All I could never be,

All men ignored in me,

This I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.

XV

THE IMMANENCE OF GOD

If a man love Me he will keep My word, and My Father will love him, and We will come unto him and make Our abode with him."-St. John xiv. 23.

HE question of Judas, not Iscariot, and the

THE

answer of Jesus reminds us that there are two ideas of the relation of God to His creatures, and therefore two ideas of His manifestation. According to one, which was the message of John Baptist and of the prophets before Jesus, which is a perfectly true message, and requires always to be preached, God is to be imagined outside and above this world. He is our creator, by whose will we have been brought into being, our governor by whose righteousness we are tried, and our preserver by whose mercy we are kept. He is almighty and awful, inaccessible and unknown-a distant God,

Far withdrawn upon the hills of space.

This is the transcendence of God and the idea

reached its climax when Deism reduced God to the chief mechanic who has made the universe like a watch and sees it go, and when Art represented the Almighty as an old and majestic person holding the globe in his hand. According to Jesus and those who have entered most perfectly into His mind, God lives inside this state of things and is revealed within the soul of man. We have not to go to the heights to find Him nor descend into depths; we have not to turn to the right hand nor to the left. Behold, He is a presence throughout nature and His dwellingplace is the obedient soul. Within He speaks to us and we can speak to Him. In a human sanctuary we can meet with Him and He with

us:

Speak to Him thou, for He hears, and spirit

With spirit can meet;

Closer is He than breathing, and nearer

Than hands and feet.

This is the immanence of God, and this truth since the days of Jesus has never been more perfectly grasped than by the mystics before the Reformation, and our own Society of Friends. Nor has it ever been more beautifully and convincingly expressed than in the pages of Tauler's

Theologia Germanica to which Luther owed so much in his day, and our best Broad Churchmen like Kingsley and Maurice in our own day.

While God within was the religion of our Master and He taught that it would be fulfilled to His disciples by the coming of the Comforter no one will seriously contend that it has been the conscious and working faith of the Church. For one Christian who believes in God within, there are ninety-nine who believe in God without. And why? For two reasons, and the first is historical. The Church has not passed beyond the transcendence to the immanence of God because her thoughts have up to this time been largely formed by a powerful theologian who lived in the fourth century, and whose hand is still upon her mind. When one mentions the name of St. Augustine people listen with respect because they understand that he was the chief of the Christian fathers, and with indifference because they know nothing about him except that he had a saintly mother, and was converted through Monica's prayers. They do not realize that this African theologian has had more to do with the ordinary Christian's con