unto the Son of Man is walking with us in the midst of the fire. Where shall we look for this assurance?

We know much more about the universe than the ancient world knew, but the more we know about it the harder it becomes for our spirits to accept the visible universe as the ultimate and final reality. The cold and pitiless forces of nature are not less cold and pitiless when we succeed in discovering their laws and habits. One comes back from his study of the march of suns, and planets, and the spiral movements of world-making nebulæ with very little to comfort the longings of the heart. He sees that these curves are all irrevocable and inevitable and that each event unfolds out of the one which preceded. It is a wonderful and amazing system, but it offers no tenderness, no love, no balm for the wounds of the spirit. It rolls mercilessly on, and he may be thankful if its wheels do not ride over him—the midget of an hour, riding on one of the flying globes of this mechanical system.

It is useless to expect tenderness and love and balm in a system of mechanical forces. That kind of world can reveal gravitation and electricity, attraction and repulsion; it can show us matter moving under law; it can exhibit the transforma

tion of one form of energy into some other form; but from the nature of the case it cannot manifest a heart of tenderness or a spirit of love. Those traits belong only to a person, and a mechanical system can never reveal a person. Physics and chemistry, geology and astronomy do discover a revelation of God, but it is necessarily a revelation limited to the possibilities of their field. The testtube and the air-pump help to demonstrate the fact that the universe is a realm of purpose, of order, and of inexhaustible energy, but they must not be expected to show us a divine face or a heart of love. God puts no more of himself into chemistry or physics or astronomy than chemistry or physics or astronomy will hold!

Even this external universe with its law and order, its forces and energies, can not be as cold and pitiless as it appears when it is mistakenly sundered and cut away from the deeper and more spiritual reality working endlessly through it and forever preparing for a higher stage to succeed and transcend a lower stage. Physical nature is always more than the bare mechanical fragment with which the descriptive sciences deal. "That is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual." Our life can not be completely sundered from the

physical universe. We are in some way organic with it and of it, and the God we seek can show at least some aspects of himself through it. He uses it steadily toward spiritual ends, though under obvious limits. It is a realm of mighty moral discipline and, fragment though it is by itself, it points all serious souls to the larger whole, the completer reality which supplements and fulfills it.

If the universe is deeper than physics and astronomy can reveal, if there is some greater reality than can be expressed in terms of energy and law, how could this deeper reality reveal itself? Where could the veil be lifted? Such a revelation could be made to humanity only through a person. Mountain peaks and stars can not embody love and sympathy they can embody only energy. Love and sympathy, tenderness and patience, forgiveness and grace are traits of character, attitudes of a personal spirit. If they are ever to be revealed, they must be revealed in the life of a person.

Now, once there was a Person who felt that his life was a genuine exhibition of the divine in the human, the eternal in the midst of time. He lived and died in the consciousness that through his life he was showing God to men; that his love

was a revelation of the real nature and character of God; that his sympathy for the weary, heavyladen, sin-distressed, heart-hungry people of the earth was a true unveiling of the heart of the universe; that his suffering over sin, his grace and patience made the Father's character visible and vocal in the world. He felt this, and consecrated his life to this deeper revelation of God. Some have doubted and some have been perplexed, but there have always been some and it is a growing number — who profoundly believe that here in him is the personal character of God revealed to us. However leaden and pitiless the march of the universe may be at other points, at this one point, at least, love and tenderness break through and enwrap us. This God who is unveiled in Christ is the God our world needs to-day. Not a God of abstract metaphysics, not a God apart in solitary bliss and perfection, but the God and Father of Jesus Christ, revealing himself to us in the closest intimacy of fellowship with us, and suffering like ourselves in the travail and tragedy of the world's suffering" A God who lives in the perpetual giving of himself." The Jesus whom Peter confessed and Mary loved can become the Christ of the world, and through him can come afresh to us the God whom our chemistry and astronomy were

UNSEEN AND INTANGIBLE REALITIES

"That which is not brings to naught that which is."

St. Paul's saying is not quite a paradox. It is rather a vivid and forceful way of saying what he often says, namely, that unseen and intangible realities build and shape the things we see. Indiscernibles are mighty factors. An invisible world is behind and within the visible one. We recognize this truth now in a multitude of ways. In the fine peroration of his great message on "The Leadership of Educated Men "— given at Brown University in 1882 - George William Curtis very impressively referred to the invisible force of gravitation which holds the world together and controls all its movements. He said:

"In the cloudless midsummer sky serenely shines the moon, while the tumultuous ocean rolls and murmurs beneath, the type of illimitable and unbridled power; but resistlessly marshaled by celestial laws all the wild waters, heaving from pole to pole, rise and recede obedient to that mild queen of heaven."

We have slowly come to realize, as science has piled up its inferences and conclusions, that our