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on; and when I touch the shore, I say, 'Oh, if that current had set the other way I should have been carried out to sea and been lost, but the current, following the law of its being, has washed me to the shore.' I say this, but I don't say, 'Oh tide! I feel grateful to thee, I offer to the divinity within thee thanks because thou hast washed me to the shore instead of drifting me out to sea!' I cannot say so, because, if I had been thrown into the sea half an hour before, no divinity in the tide would have washed me back. I know I should have been drowned. The current never changes its mind. No miracle was wrought to make the tide wash me ashore; it carried me to the shore naturally. Thus, though I feel joy and satisfaction, I don't feel religious gratitude, so long as I only contemplate a stream of tendency.

19. But now, will any conviction about a power which makes for righteousness, create in me the spirit of trust and adoration? My perception of a moral law may be keen enough, my morality may even be touched with enthusiasm, without its being identical with religion, without its lifting me up to God or going at all beyond a man's naturally keen sense of the Tò πρéπov, the Kaλòv Kai ȧyalóν. Well has Dr. Church, the Dean of St. Paul's, observed (p. 12, 'Sermons Preached Before the University'), 'It is not by religion only that tones of goodness are struck from the human soul which charm and subdue us.' When I see a great abuse my sense of morality is touched with emotion, but that is not necessarily a

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religious emotion. I say, 'What an abominable thing it is that this man should be enjoying all the pay, and that that man should be doing all the work. What an abominable thing it is that all these charitable funds should, from year to year, be grossly mismanaged in that way!' My sense of right revolts. My sense of right is kindled into enthusiastic perception that the whole thing is abominably wrong; but I am not aware that there is anything in that which leads me to God. Numbers have felt this, and are daily feeling this, but their feelings have not led them to a God; their musings on the moral law-nay, their practice of the moral law, has not by any means always been connected with God. Neither the tendency' nor the 'moral law' gives what we mean by religion. God is a stream of tendency,' 'God is a moral law,' I have found Him thus far. Is He nothing more to me?

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20. May I not continue one step further my process of thought, and ask, is there nothing more written about God in the outward and visible world, in the recesses of the human heart? All religion leans not upon the vague, it requires a personal, a sympathetic element, and can I not discover a warrant for this sympathetic element in God? If there is a physical law in the world from which I argue that God must have points of contact with matter in his character of A STREAM OF TENDENCY, if there is a moral law pointing to a divine order or arrangement of moral qualities according to A POWER WHICH MAKES FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS, may I not go a

step further and point to the affectional regions of life as indicating an affectional and SYMPATHETIC ELEMENT IN GOD? What do you mean by love: what do you mean by friendship and tenderness and sacrifice? All these things are qualities admirable and divine, which are evolved often in spite of great obstacles in the human heart. But how did they come into the human heart? Where did they come from? If they are the offsprings of convenience, or mere utility, or a desire for pleasure, how is it that they are constantly exercised in opposition to what people are agreed to understand by the words convenience, utility, and pleasure? If they are the survival of the permanent instincts—the higher instincts over the lower-what teaching, what passion has prevailed to enable men as individuals to resist lower forms and choose the higher, to find their pleasure in what is their pain, to find their gain in what is their loss, to find their triumph in their defeat, to find their life in death?

We answer, man has been able to do all this and to feel all this, because there is not only a moral law, but a sympathetic law inscribed in his heart. And from the love that is in him, which enables him to triumph over himself and to live for others and to aspire, he is led to rest in some great central source of love, from whence his own being flows; he is able to say, 'God is love, and He has sent His Spirit into my heart crying, Abba, Father.'

But the instant we say 'God is love,' we are asked, Then why this cruelty? Does God care for man any

more than He cares for cattle? Why does God take away our children, and our wives and husbands? Why does not He protect us from shipwreck and other catastrophes if we are dear to Him? Why all this pain, why this torment, why are we left desolate? Why do great losses crush our sensibilities, and make us sour, and bitter, and infidel-we who want to worship the Father-a Father who never seems to take any notice of us?'

21. Brethren, in my last address I tried to show you how, by the constitution of our minds, by the necessary limits of human thought, we could only apprehend God relatively, could not know Him in His totality. To those who know so little, much may seem unjust and cruel which is neither. Even when our human knowledge is imperfect, our acquaintance with facts limited, we misconstrue each other's actions, we lay to men's charge feelings of cruelty which do not belong to them. Suppose I had never heard of surgery and were suddenly to see a surgeon cutting off a man's arm, I should immediately exclaim, 'What a brutal man!' But he is not a brutal man, he is doing for the sufferer that which is going to save his life, that which is the best thing to be done. But suppose my intelligence were hardly raised above that of the lower animals, and by the constitution of my mind I could not in any way be made to understand the nature of surgery, I should retain my opinion about the cruelty of the surgeon, nor would any explanation make me think otherwise, owing to the essential

limitations of my mind. And I will not scruple to remind you here of another illustration which I employed. A member of Parliament, when he votes for great measures which are for the good of the country, but which may happen to weigh heavily on his own constituency, so votes because he belongs to a larger world than the narrow circle of his own constituency, yet men immediately accuse him of being remiss in his duties to the constituency. And politicians who have the good of the country at heart well know how difficult it is to carry any great beneficial measures in the teeth of a number of local oppositions, or to get people to understand patriotism when the shoe pinches at home. God is in the highest sense man's representative, but He is more. We cannot, poor provincialists of a narrow world, understand the immensity that must be beyond; we can hardly realise the puny nature of our own mind; we may gaze into the starlit heavens at night, and dream of peopled worlds like ours, only vaster, and guess vaguely at some possible spiritual connection between ourselves and their inhabitants, some mode by which in the present or future our destinies may be bound up with theirs, as the physical order and motion of the planets certainly are bound by one law into a mysterious unity of motion; and then with adoring humility we may recognise the illimitable, the unimaginable ranges of God's legislation, and admit that He alone is master of the larger whole, and we but a little cloud-speck in the azure of the all'!

Some such thoughts as these, which I can never sufficiently dwell upon, and which must often force them

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