God and Modern Men: Four Sermons - Paul K. Moser · scanned original is available on the Internet...

God and Modern Men: FourSermons

Herbert H. Farmer

1934

About this version

This book was originally published as:

Herbert H. Farmer, God and Modern Men:Four Sermons, King’s Chapel Publica-tions: New Series 25 (Julia Lyman Fund,1934).

This version has been typeset using LATEX. Thescanned original is available on the InternetArchive. Original page numbers are indicated in themargins and linked to the original scanned pages.

Please report any typos or errors by leaving acomment on this version’s Internet Archive page.

2

https://archive.org/details/FarmerGodAndModernMan

https://archive.org/details/FarmerGodAndModernMan

https://archive.org/details/FarmerGodAndModernManB

Contents

I. Godlessness. 4

II. How God comes to a man today. 15

III. God and personal relationships. 26

IV. Jesus today. 36

3

I. Godlessness.3

Some years ago in the Lake District in EnglandI lay in the heather high up on the mountain sideoverlooking a deep, broad valley. Near by, and jut-ting out from amongst a tangle of bushes, was a rockone side of which dropped steeply into the valley.I watched a large spider on the edge of this rock.He was letting out filaments from his body in or-der to construct his web, and as he let them forththey floated out over the vast deep spaces of the val-ley, waving hither and thither, catching on nothing,pathetic, futile. Then he gave it up. He turned hisback on the infinite spaces of the valley and wentinto a narrow crevice of the rock, dark and overhungby the bushes, and began again. Here the filamentssoon caught on something, and swiftly he spun hisweb. It was not long before a fly was entangled in it,its life being sucked away by its triumphant enemy.

That little incident from nature has come back tomy mind many times since I saw it; it comes backwhensoever I am stung into thinking with less thanour usual casualness about this strange and awfulfact, usually taken for granted, of being alive, beinga man, chucked into existence, along with millionsof others, God alone knows whence. What is it allabout? Walk through a great city such as this, andobserve man. Better still, observe him as he hurriesabout in your own shoes. What a tumult of activ-

4

https://archive.org/stream/FarmerGodAndModernMan#page/n3

Godlessness 5

ity and busy-ness from day to day, month to month,year to swiftly vanishing year. Who then are these 4creatures, who am I, rushing up to town in automo-biles and swaying railway trains, selling this, buyingthat, tapping out letters and invoices on writing ma-chines, ’phoning hither and thither, eating, drinking,love-making, money-making, having children andtraining them to do exactly the same, filling picturehalls, concert halls, dance halls, reading newspapersin the morning and newspapers again at night, andthen sinking in sleep for a few hours, being subjectto the same crude physical weaknesses and necessi-ties as the dog, who also has been doing his caninebusiness all day and is now curled up on the mat.Then the next day it begins all over again.

Who then are these creatures? They are men, yousay, and I note a touch of dignity in the voice. Yes,but what is a man, and why be so pleased about it?Suppose I say that they are only highly organized,intelligent, two-legged spiders, wherein should I bewrong? That spider spun his web in the crevice ofthe rock and caught his fly. What are these creaturesdoing, as they move around hither and thither, ifthey are not merely spinning a highly elaborate web,in accordance with their different powers, to catcha fly, fix and hold and enjoy some swiftly passingand always precariously held nourishment and sat-isfaction? And are they not all, like the spider, un-der sentence of ultimate death? One hundred yearsor so and not one of them will be here, any morethan my spider is still up there on that Lakeland hill-


6 God and Modern Men

side. Ah, but you say, look at man’s achievements,his great buildings, his wireless communications, hisaeroplanes, his science and art. I’m sorry, but I can-not see, when I sit down and think about it, that thatmakes the least difference. The spider after all hashis points, for such a tiny frail creature. His web is amasterpiece of structure and beauty.

Ah, but you say again, there is something else.This creature man has something which no othercreature has: he has thoughts and aspirations aftersomething transcending this life and outlasting it;5he dreams of beauty and truth and goodness; hehas a sense of kinship with the eternal. There arechurches and temples as well as factories and offices.Yes, my friend, you are right. There is somethingin the soul of a man that makes him feel not quitesatisfied with this whole business of spreading websand catching flies, even highly cultured and refinedflies like music and art; makes him feel not quitesure that, when all is said and done, there is nota hollow meaninglessness at the heart of it. Andthere stirs in him the yearning for something elsemore permanent, something that shall escape theuniversal sentence of death. Yes, but does he find it?Did not the spider also stand for a moment on theedge of the rock and let forth a few filaments of hislife into the infinite vastness of the valley, wavingpathetically about, touching nothing but emptiness?Then gave it up and turned him about and went intothe narrow crevice which he had always known,and built his little familiar web there, and went on


Godlessness 7

catching flies?Now I do not want this image of the spider

pressed too far, so that it begins to suggest falsehoodrather than truth; yet to me, as I hope it may nowdo for some of you, it has always served to throwup with a pungent sharpness of definition a quiteultimate fact and issue of our lives which, whetherwe think about it or not none of us can escape. Andsince we cannot in any case escape it, we may aswell think about it and not run away from it. Thespider on that mountain side has dramatized forme what may be called the modern man’s dilemma,and it is no less his dilemma even when he does not,could not, put it to himself in explicit terms.

On the one hand, there is just this business ofkeeping ordinary human life going from the ordi-nary human motives of food, sex, money-making,desire for comfort and pleasure and security, andall the rest. It has a certain inherent zest in it,especially if you are young, provided you can win 6some success in it. But it has this fatal flaw in it,namely, not merely that you may not win successin it, as millions today are not, but also that, evenif you do win success in it, it doesn’t bear thinkingabout as a whole. For directly you begin to thinkabout it as a whole, in and for it itself with noreference to anything beyond itself, then it seems tohave no meaning. It all suddenly begins to dwindleand shrink to something chillingly like that spiderspinning his web for flies in a crevice of the rock.Or it becomes like the back-cloth of the stage which



gives an illusion of reality for an hour or two ofexcitement, but which subconsciously you knowis so thin and flat that you could put your bootthrough it. And this is true, even if you happen tobe amongst those who find their delight in refinedand cultured things, things that are usually countedamong the higher dignities of human life. Whatdoes it matter whether I spin a highly artistic weband catch butterflies rather than horseflies, if inthe end nothing has any significance beyond itselfand death annuls everything, even, as the scientiststell us it will, the whole human race itself? One ofour modern authors, having descanted eloquentlyon man’s achievements in science, art, architectureand all the rest, ends with the statement, that nonethe less we must accept the fact that it will all beswept away as a spider’s web is swept down by themaid’s broom in the cellar. Curious he should haveused the same image of a spider’s web. But thereyou have one side of the modern man’s dilemma.Confine your thought and interest and activity tothis present scene and you dare not sit down andthink about it as a whole. If you do, a man’s dignitybegins to vanish away. He becomes simply a ratherpathetic animal, carried along by instincts anddesires whose objects have no more permanenceand significance than the honey after which the antsrun in accordance with their instincts and desires.

This then on the one side. What then on theother? Many, many modern people feel, dimly or7clearly, this hollowness and futility which underlies


Godlessness 9

human activity, however immediately zestful itmay be, when it is closed up in itself. One of themost competent minds in Europe once said in myhearing these words: “the most disquieting thingin this modern age is the growing sense of futilitywhich is spreading through all classes.” He wasright. Why then do not men break through thisenclosedness of their life, which is the source of itsapparent meaninglessness and futility, into a faith insomething above and beyond life which alone cangive it meaning? Why do they not link it up to thethought of God and find in Him that which will fillthe hollowness, and lift life above the level of theirrational brutes?

I will tell you why they do not. It is because thethought of God has no reality to them, and they can-not release themselves sufficiently from preoccupa-tion with all their merely secular business to givethemselves wholeheartedly to seeking to know Hisreality. That is peculiarly the modern man’s situ-ation. If for only a few moments he stands petri-fied before the apparent meaningless of his own ex-istence and beings to yearn after the eternal, afterGod, behold there is an inhibition resting on his soul.He yearns in a dim sort of way, but he cannot makethe object of his yearning real. God seems a mereidea, a void. He is like that spider again. He letsout a few filaments into the vast spaces, perhaps atsome crisis of life when he is suddenly brought upshort and made to think; and they wave about in theemptiness and catch on nothing. What then? Again


like the spider, he turns from it, back into the narrowenclosed crevice, and beings building his web againthere, perhaps with redoubled energy.

Well, says someone, why not? Why not becontent to live a life with no meaning beyond itself,not thinking too much about it, and salving fromit some satisfactions as we can, so long as it lasts?Why not be content to be Godless? Alas,—and hereyou get the essential tragedy, the essential dilemma8we are all in,—the matter is not so simple as that.The dilemma is that it is in fact a frightfully difficultthing to make anything of our lives satisfactory toourselves, still less satisfactory to others with whomwe have to live. Here the analogy of the spider com-pletely breaks down. It was a simple thing for thespider having failed to make anything of the openspaces of the valley, to settle into the crevice andcatch flies. But it is not simple for man. Life for manhas a terrible way of tangling itself up into reallyhorrible troubles. Look at human life today. Therewas a war a few years ago in which eleven millionsof young men were slain by their fellows, millionsof children bereaved, women’s hearts well-nighbroken, babies starved, minds sent insane,—theasylums in Europe are still full of war-wrecks. Andthe clouds of another and worse horror gathering,as the nations arm again and compete ruthlessly likeanimals with one another for food and wealth. Lookat this country alone. Millions unemployed andhalf-starving in a world of plenty, employers andemployed in many sections in a state of veiled war-


Godlessness 11

fare with one another, a vast underworld of crimewhich ever and anon flares up in some horror ofruthless killing, hideous slums with rotten, festeringtumble-down houses on the east side of New York,princely palaces on Long Island, and so on. We areall aware of these things. What do they reveal abouthuman life? Or, coming to things more individualand personal,—for, after all, these social evils arebut the magnifications of what goes on in privatelives,—since when has it been easy for a man tomanage his own life in a way that will give himor other people any deep and abiding satisfaction?Since when has it been easy to rise above the fearsand worries and insecurities of life so that yoursis an inward peace of mind which no nervousbreakdown,—that peculiarly modern trouble,—everthreatens, which has no frayed, irritable edgesneeded to be continually smoothed down with 9mental sedatives and diversions of various sorts?Since when has it been easy to make a tolerablesuccess of married life and all the intimate elbow-rubbing relationships of home life? The problem ofliving together, the failure of almost everybody tomake anything very satisfactory of that problem,runs through every level and aspect of life from thedifficulties parents have with their children and thedifficulties children have with their parents, right upto the insane confusion and resultant vast misery ofthe national and international situation today. Whatan enormous wastage of peace and happiness, whata widespread harvest of malaise and frustration



there is, through wrong personal relationships inhome and street and office and college, wherever infact men’s purposes impinge on one another. Youdo not need to be a very idealistic or even reflectivesoul to realize that human satisfaction is on the onehand very largely a function of personal relations,and on the other hand that those personal relationsare most infernally quick to go wrong.

Now do not please be saying to yourself, whata gloomy pessimistic fellow this is; things aren’t sobad as all that. There are other things in life, thingsof beauty and goodness and truth and joy. Of coursethere are; if there were not, it would be absolutelyunendurable. But they only serve to point to the con-trast, to throw up into sharper relief the things thatare all confused and wrong. And for all the beauty,there are people for whom life is well nigh unen-durable as for that wretched man who recently couldsee no way out of his difficulties but to suffocate hischildren and shoot himself. There are both sides, butthat only makes the question more insistent, whatthen has gone wrong with human life?

This then is the modern dilemma. On the onehand man finds it enormously difficult to believe inthe reality of God, to believe that there is anythingabove and beyond this present world; on the otherhand he finds it enormously difficult to make any-thing very satisfactory of this present world if he10shuts himself up in it. Shut up from anything aboveand beyond itself, enclosed in upon itself, it begins,like a light in a closed space, to suffocate itself in its


Godlessness 13

own vapours. I believe that a great many people arewoefully conscious of this dilemma. They feel thathuman life, for all the man delightful things in it,is fundamentally a tale told by an idiot signifyingnothing, unless it can be lifted into relationshipwith something above and beyond itself, with God,with the Eternal. Yet, as I have said, somehow thethought of God has lost its reality. It has not grip,no pungency; it does not stir feeling, it does notengage our will. It is a mere idea which they feel isoutmoded and not quite intellectually respectable.

Men and women, my desire in the remainingtalks of this week is to try to make God real toyou, in such wise that it will lift your life, andthrough you those of the men and women withwhom you have to deal, on to a different level. Ihave tried to indicate that there is no more urgentquestion, whether you are young or old. It is thechoice between being only a gifted spider catchingflies and for all your gifts always on the point ofmaking a horrible mess of it, or being a personalitywith something of the eternal in his mind andheart. I find it difficult to be patient with, to avoidhaving something approaching contempt for youngstudents, and still more for young lecturers andprofessors, and old ones, too, for that matter, whodismiss the idea of God and of religion as thoughit were only at best a matter for children and oldwomen. As though, things being as they are, therecould be any question more profoundly significant,more worthy of the most earnest wrestling with all a


man’s best powers, than the question whether thereis at the heart of this awful universe, this life sostrangely mixed of things lovely and things evil, ahigh and holy purpose whom we may know and towhom we may give ourselves utterly in an eternalservice. Reject the thought of God, if you will, giveup the idea of ever feeling His living touch on your11spirit, but do it, I beseech you, not jauntingly andflippantly, but with something of solemnity andsadness that a word which has come down historysoaked in the deepest yearnings and aspirations ofmen, their finest heroisms, their martyrdoms, theirvery life’s blood, should prove after all a mirage anda dream. To do it with that attitude may perhapsmake you pause again and wonder whether after allyou can be right.


II. How God comes to a man today.12

The subject we are not to think about is, howGod comes to modern people like ourselves. Itis clearly impossible even to begin to answer thatquestion without first saying in a preliminary waywhat I mean when I say God. When I say that Ibelieve in God, and when I say that I very muchwant you to believe in God, I mean at least this, thatI believe and want you to believe that there is at theheart of this universe in which we find ourselvesalive, the ultimate reality in it, sustaining it, giving itthe actual character which it has, an unseen eternalpurpose of good with which I, and you also, canenter into fellowship, with which we must enter intofellowship if we are to fulfil the true meaning andpurpose of our lives. I do not mean by God simplysome great first cause of some sort or other, or someinscrutable life force, or some vague philosophicalprinciple or unity underlying the phenomena ofthe created world, but definitely a high and holypersonal purpose which is addressing itself to meand is seeking my co-operation and fellowship withitself.

I want you to see the importance of this prelim-inary description. It is important because it deter-mines our whole approach to this very serious ques-tion we are asking ourselves, the question, namely,how we may become livingly aware of God in this

15



modern world. The answer to that question obvi-ously depends on the kind of reality God is. It isobvious when you come to think of it, though I amafraid not very many ever come to think of it, thatthe sort of evidence required to establish any sug-gested truth or fact depends on the sphere of expe-rience to which the said truth or fact belongs. Themode of experiencing, becoming aware, of one sortof truth or fact is not appropriate to another. Thus,if you wish to know the truth of a proposition inmathematics, you must direct your thoughts alongthe channels marked out by symbolic logic. That13is the only way in which the vast, austere world ofmathematics can impinge upon your mind, can getthrough to you. Or if you wish to know the beautyof a picture it is no use measuring it with a ruler, oranalysing its ingredients in a test tube, or tracing itshistory, or in any way fussing round it in probing,scientific enquiry. You have to sit still and contem-plate it, and let it make that sort of impression uponyou that beautiful objects do Or if you wish to knowfor yourself the character of a man, it is no use ex-amining his bank-balance, or the cut of his clothesor testing the alkalinity of his body; it is no use evenarguing from purely circumstantial evidence whichis always deceptive; you have got to enter into di-rect personal rapport with him in a variety of cir-cumstances over many months. Similarly in respectof our awareness of God: if He is one sort of real-ity rather than another, then He will become livinglyknown to us in one way rather than another.


How God comes to a man today. 17

We may put it another way by saying that manypeople find it difficult in these modern days to be-lieve in God not because the evidence is inadequateand unconvincing, but because their minds, throughwrong presuppositions and expectancies, are out offocus with the only evidence which in the nature ofthe case is appropriate and available. Thus therelurks in many people’s minds in these days, whenwe are all unconsciously dominated in our thinkingby the laboratory methods of science and industry,the feeling that it ought to be possible to prove Godby irresistible logical and scientific proof. Yet howabsurd, how self-blinding, if God happens to be notthe sort of reality which is amenable to that sort ofenquiry and approach. If God be indeed a high andholy purpose addressing Himself personally to menand woman as persons, then it is emphatically onceand for all not possible to prove his reality by ab-stract reasoning. In the realm of personal relation-ships, logic and science can after all tell you verylittle. I should find it extremely difficult to prove 14by logic, and beyond the reach of any intellectualcavil, that my wife really is a living personality andnot merely a highly elaborate automaton; and evenmore difficult to prove that she is what I know herto be, namely a truly good personality. These thingslike outside the realm of strict logic. I have come toknow the reality and goodness of the personal pur-pose I call my wife simply by having personal re-lations with her, and living in fellowship with her.The man who wants a strictly logical demonstration



of God before he will make a serious start with thebusiness of religion is as irrational as the man whowould insist on using a private enquiry agent beforehe would marry his wife, or before he would trusta single living soul as a friend. Life cannot be livedon a high personal level on such principles, and theChristian faith is nothing if not the living of life on ahigh personal level with the highest personal realitythere is in the universe, namely God.

How then does this high and holy divine purposemanifest itself to us?

The first and most fundamental thing is this, andof it, and it alone, I want to speak. I want to declareto you that if God is to be brought down out of therealm of merely dead ideas and is to become knownto you as a living reality, it will be primarily and cen-trally through something which happens in the sphere ofyour will. I want to make as clear as I can why I saythis and what I mean by it. And in order to do so,will you turn your minds away from the thoughtof God for a moment to something more immediateand familiar, I mean our personal relations with oneanother?

How livingly and indubitably aware of oneanother as living personalities we are! When I talkto a neighbour I am never under the least temptationto think of him as a thing or an animal. As I gazeinto his eyes, observe the play of his features, hearhim say things with which I disagree, say thingswith which he disagrees, sense the swift passage of15feeling, whether of accord or antagonism, from the



one to the other, I just know that I am dealing withthat particular sort of entity I call personal. On whatis such clear, indubitable awareness based? How,for example, does a young child become so swiftlyable to distinguish between persons and things, sokeenly conscious of living not merely in a physicalworld of dead things, but also in a social worldof human purposes, to which it must adjust itself.Well, doubtless many things help in the building upof this profound certainty of one another’s existenceas persons which we all have, and which no amountof clever reasoning could ever really shake, but onething is quite central and indispensable, and that isthe interplay and clash of other people’s wills andpurposes and values with our own, especially theclash. It is in the collision of purpose, the tensionand clash of will and value, that our awareness ofwhat we call living personality in the other manbecomes most sharp and irresistible. With the youngchild, it is when the mother begins to resist, tothwart, to check, to thrust her values resistantlyinto the child’s values that she is thrown, as it were,into sharpest relief as personal on the backgroundof dead, inert things; and all through our life thesupreme personal problem, as distinct from anyother sort of problem, lies in the tension into whichwills enter with one another. It is so, is it not? In alldepartments of life we become most vividly awareof a reality other than ourselves at the point whereit offers resistance. In physical things the resistanceis to muscular pressure. You know the table is real


most keenly when you stub your toe against it. Inthe realm of personality the resistance which “hits”us with a sense of reality is the resistance of values,the other man’s will as against yours. The man whois entirely subservient to another’s will becomes acuriously flat, unreal, negligible being. We say ofhim, he has no personality, he is a rubber-stamp,he is a nonentity. A person becomes an entity to us16by having a purpose of his own, and we recognizesuch a purpose by its value-resistance, and by thefact that it is beyond merely physical manipulationand control. Here indeed the difference between ourawareness of things and our awareness of personsbecomes most apparent. The pressure resistance ofthings you overcome by manipulation; the valueresistance of persons you can overcome only bysomething quite different, by something of theorder or persuasion, agreement, trust, reconciliation,love. Directly you try merely to manipulate a valueresistance you reduce the man with whom you aredealing form the status of a person to the status ofa thing, and that is a very deadly and disastrousthing.

Now, in the light of this, let us return to the ques-tion of livingly meeting God. If there is any conti-nuity between the personal world in which we livewith our fellows and the personal world in whichwe are called to live with God, as I shall say in thenext talk there is, this simple, yet profound, truthemerges, which I stated a few minutes ago, namelythat there can only be a living awareness of God as



high and holy eternal purpose in and through some-thing which happens, and must continue to happenagain and again, in the sphere of our values and ourwills. It can only be through some sort of value re-sistance thrust into the midst of our own values andintentions and preferences, of such a kind that weknow it to be, by its essential impact upon us, thechallenge of another and higher will than our own,an eternal will, God. And we can only grow in theliving knowledge of God by rightly responding tothis resistance of His will against ours, this pressureand demand of His purpose upon ours.

Of what sort then is this value resistance whichthus carries the accent of the eternal to the humanspirit? It is always a value resistance that impressesus as being absolute and unconditional in its de-mands upon us, so that the only right response isto obey it absolutely, yea even at the cost of lifeitself, if need be. Whosoever says God, says, for 17the normal human heart, demand for the absoluteunconditional obedience; whosoever says demandfor unconditional obedience, says, for the normalhuman heart, God. Why, even popular speechshows that. If a man follows some pursuit withmore than usual persistency and obstinacy, it is saidof him, he makes a God of it, he does it religiously.Whenever a man contemplates a completed dedi-cation of himself even unto death he begins to talkthe language of eternity and the thought of God isnot far from his mind. He raises his hand to heavenand vows before God. Leonidas at Thermoplyae,



as Chesterton has suggest somewhere, did not sayto his fellow Greeks, I think on the whole Greekcivilization is preferable to Persian, therefore I begto move that we stay here and perish before thesuperior might of Persia. That would have seemedsilly, irrational; for what is the advantage of onecivilization over another if you are dead? No; hecried rather: Athens and Sparta forever! And whenmen see some great act of obedience even untodeath, a Father Damien going to tend the loathsomelepers, a Christ going to the Cross, they do notmerely admire it as they might admire the dexterityof a pianist or a baseball player; no, a new noteenters in, an attitude of reverence, a readiness tobow the head; they say this is sacred, they sense thepresence of a Divine Will higher than life asking thesurrender of life.

These things are surely deeply, deeply significantof the ultimate issues of our life as beings who arepersons, not animals. But do not interpret their sig-nificance in the wrong way. I do not mean that Godonly comes to us in situations where the final sac-rifices has in fact to be made. But I do mean thatthe living awareness of God begins in the sense of apressure on the will which in principle is recognizedto be just as absolute as that. Wheresoever, whenso-ever, you feel a disquiet in your soul about some wayof thinking and feeling and doing in which you aregetting entangled; whensoever you discern, or even18only begin to suspect, that in this your personal sit-uation, for which your will is responsible, this way



is better than that, this is right as against that wrong,this beautiful as against that ugly, this true as againstthat falsity, then I say, the beginning, the only begin-ning, of living awareness of God, is not to trifle withthese things, not to attempt to get over them, or getaround them, or explain them away, or find excuseswhy you cannot be expected to do anything aboutit, but to stop and bow the head and say: whencecomes this pressure on my soul and conscience?—this is none other than the voice of the eternal in mysoul, this is the resistance of a higher will, the de-mand of God; I dare not trifle with it.

The older I get, and the more I observe menand women, the more I observe myself, the moreconvinced I am that we are here at the heart of thiswhole business of life. The central thing about us,that which makes us personalities and not things,is that we have wills. The central thing about Godas He enters into relationship with us is that He iswill, and the He brings His will to bear upon ourswith a certain kind of resistance, a kind that asks usin principle to defy even death, rather than not givecomplete obedience to it. If we seek to make thatresponse of obedience, then the way is opened to ourown highest life in increasing fellowship with Him;if we refuse even to seek to make that obedience,then our awareness of the reality of God begins tofade away, so that all that is left is an aching senseof the futility and emptiness and confusion of life.He that seeketh to save his life, that is by refusing tomake surrender of it to the pressures of God even


unto death, loses it; he that loseth his life shall keepit unto life eternal. He that willeth to do the willshall know the truth. For him and him alone, doall the riches of God and the peace of God and thesolemn joy of the service of God, begin to open.I do not say that other things may not contributeto the awareness of the eternal,—the loveliness of19nature, the simple joys of human relationships andhuman love, the zest of doing creative work,—butthis fundamental attitude of obedience and loyaltyto God’s value resistances on the heart is central andfundamental and indispensable. Without that eventhese other things begin to fade out into a generalsense of emptiness and futility. After all, thingsare what they are and not something else. There isno reason in the nature of things why God shouldnot be high and holy personal purpose in dealingwith us as persons. If He is, how else could weenter into fellowship with Him, get to know Hisreality save by rightly responding to His will as itimpinges upon ours? You can only get to knowany reality by rightly responding to it. And howcould His will impinge upon ours in a personalway save through some pressure of invitation andchallenge and rebuke on our customary ways ofliving, on the customary direction of our will? Andwhat right response to it could there be, if it be thewill of God, but a solemn and serious endeavor,absolutely, without any trifling and postponementand arguing it away, to obey. It is because we refuseto do that, that God becomes desolatingly unreal to



us. We treat the divine purpose as though it werenon-existent, or as though it could be compromisedwith like a human purpose. Then we ask someoneto come and prove His reality to us. Yet all the timethe unreality is in ourselves.

This then is the answer to our question. Godcomes to us modern people as he came to theHebrew prophets, as he came to Jesus, to Paul, to theChristian martyrs, to all souls down the ages greatand small,—as a haunting pressure within theirown souls, a pressure in the most intimate places oftheir will, too pure, too piercing, to searching, to bea mere figment of their own minds. And the crisisin which we all stand is the crisis of what we aregoing to do with that pressure. Obey, as the senseof the reality of God grows and deepens, until it isproof against all the darkest challenges of life, all the 20clever scepticisms of the unbelieving scientists andphilosophers. You begin then to know that it is theywho are in the unreal world, not you.

I ask you to take time to consider again whether,in the words of George Macdonald, before your owndoor stands not a gate, lies not a path to walk in.Enter by that gate, walk in that path, and you shallarrive at the conviction, which no man can give youand none take away, that there is a living Love andTruth at the heart of your being and pervading allthat surrounds you. There is no other way.


III. God and personal relationships.21

I said that the most fundamental and indis-pensable thing in any living awareness of God asa high and holy purpose dealing with us in lifeis something that happens in the sphere of thewill. We begin to be aware of God in a way that isnot merely theoretical directly we feel in our ownimmediate personal situation, for which we have aresponsibility of action, the call of something higherover against something lower, so that our will mustof necessity choose the one or the other and bearthe responsibility for the choice. We become stillmore aware of God when we feel that this call of thehigher way over against the lower has an accent ofthe unconditional in it, so that we are aware of beingunder obligation to obey it absolutely whatever maybe the consequences; it is not a matter of liking ornot liking, as a man may like or not like to go to aconcert or take another cup of tea, but a matter offeeling yourself under a challenge to do this thingrather than that, whether you like it or not. Onlyat the point where a man feels this thrusting intohis soul of an unconditional demand to walk thisway rather than that, no matter what his naturalinstincts may say, no matter what his friends maysay, no matter if it should mean all kinds of worldlyloss, can he be livingly conscious of a higher divinepurpose in life challenging his own. If a man says

26


God and personal relationships. 27

that he is not conscious anywhere in his being, inany of his relationships, of such absolute demandsaddressed to his soul, then there is nothing moreto be said. No amount of argument will ever makeGod a living pungent reality to him. All that can bedone is to wait until something happens which shallstab his spirit awake again into some awareness,however dim and confused, of these high andaustere challenges of God. But as a matter of factit is more often than not the case that when a mansays that he is not aware of these imperatives in hissoul, he is not being quite sincere; they are there 22all the time, but they involve such a criticism of hiscustomary ways of living that directly he begins tofeel their pressure he runs away from them and saysthey are not there, or otherwise explains them away.

There is then no way to a deepening awarenessof God, and an increasing sense of the true meaningand use of this our otherwise so meaningless exis-tence, save through taking seriously these high im-peratives and girding our loins to their obedience.Yet some of you may be thinking that this way ofputting it, this way of rooting everything in God’shigh challenge to our will and the necessity of a re-sponse of surrender and obedience from our will,is to make the whole business of religion bleak andgrey and repellant from the beginning. I can under-stand how that feeling should arise in your mindas it does in mine. For it is precisely part of ourwhole modern temper and approach that it shouldarise. Anything that smacks of austere living, of self-



discipline, of surrender of immediate satisfactionsand securities, throws the modern man, brought upas he is to believe that the one standard of life is com-fort, the one supreme right of a man the opportunityto fulfil his imperious demands for self satisfaction,at once into a suspicious attitude. Yet how wrong,how fatally wrong, it all is. Let me say one or twothings on this point.

First, when I sit down and think about it, I see atonce and very clearly, that there is, and there can be,no sense in speaking about God without the accentof austerity entering in, if we are using the term Godwith any serious meaning at all. For whatever elsethe term God means, it means the highest, holiestreality with which we men have to deal, and what-ever else religion means it means entering into thehighest and holiest and most enriching relationshipinto which we can enter. Why then should we ex-pect to have and to enter into this highest destiny oflife on cheap terms? Why should we ask and expectto have God on cheaper terms than almost anything23else in life? Whether we like it or not, nothing in thisworld that is worth the having can be had for theasking. Always it is for those who can summon theirbest powers, keep their lamp lit and their loins girtin some austerity of dedication and endeavor. Howcould it be otherwise with the richest of all the thingsthat this universe offers to living souls, which is fel-lowship with God? Yet, I declare, many folk seemto think that if they link their lives to God the firstthing He ought to do is to take them out of the bat-



tle and make things easy for them. People think ofGod as a sort of celestial money lender to whom theycan run and take a loan when things go wrong; or asa plumber whom they never see, and of whose ex-istence they are hardly aware, until the pipes burst.Then they run to him. Thank God, He does not makeHimself cheap to us like that. Thank God, He neverdoes approach our souls, even when we need Hisstrength and comfort, without this accent of austerechallenge and call. A God on less terms is no God;He is just a figment of egocentric, frightened minds.

Second, I do see, and I want you to see, that itis precisely through this addressing to our will of anabsolute demand which we are called upon to obeyat any cost that God is seeking to bestow upon us thehighest of all blessings which is to have the dignityof being truly a personality. Let me explain.

There are in a general way always two alterna-tives which lie before us. One is to be carried along,in all our actions and responses to life, by our in-stinctive wants and desires. We want money, so wego after it; we want fame and influence, so we willdo this or that to get it; we want excitement, so wego to theatre or dance; we want sexual satisfaction,so we rush into any relationship that seems to offerit; some one annoys us, we feel angry, and we let“fly” at him; some one flatters us, we feel pleased,and we seek more of it; or on a higher level, we wanta book and we buy it; we like the preacher, so we go 24to church; we do not like him, so we stay away, andso on. Inclination, inclination, inclination! Now I am



not saying that these wants are wrong and shouldnot be satisfied. But I do say that to be merely car-ried along by them like that, even if they are quitelegitimate wants, is not to be a personality at all, oranything approaching one. It is to be a mere func-tion of the environment. It is to have no personalwill in the highest sense of that term. Your environ-ment soaks into you in stimuluses of various sortsand out again in responses of various sorts. You area mere vehicle, a mere transmitter of forces, just asthe plant is, or the moth which flutters, it knows notwhy, except that at that moment it wants to, into theflame. You are in fact, as I said in the first talk, onlya highly complex and gifted spider, a lively and mo-bile vegetable!

What then is the other alternative? The other al-ternative is to be a genuine personality. How? Notby escaping from these instinctive wants—we can’tdo that, of course,—but by being able in principleto say No! to them all, yea, even if need be, to thatmost passionate of all instincts which is the instinctto preserve our lives. Only when we have learnt todo that, do we cease to be a mere function of ourworld, do we begin to have a genuine will, do webegin to be personalities and to have the dignity ofpersonalities worthy of fellowship with God. God’schallenge to man in these absolute demands, askingobedience whatever his natural instincts may say, isin fact not so austere and bleak as it sounds. It is aninvitation to us to rise out of a state of subservienceto our world, to achieve the dignity of personalities.


There is no more tragic spectacle than merely instinc-tive human beings, human beings whose wills havenever been released. And God’s call to the soul to ab-solute surrender at any cost is His first step to saveit from that tragedy. And the wonderful thing is thatwhen a man does thus win his freedom through sur- 25render to God, he begins to realize the true richesand joys of his instinctive life. The whole thing ispurified and lifted on to a new level, as for examplein the relationship of marriage. Seek ye first the ruleof God and all things else are added unto you.

I am the more anxious to insist on this because,as I have hinted, it is precisely part of our modernoutlook to minimize this matter of the will andto rebel against the thought of God as one whoausterely challenges men to stand on their feet, andrule their instinctive life, and achieve the dignity oftrue freedom. You see this coming out in much thatpasses as religion today. A great many people havegrown tired of the merely secular life; they yearn forsomething more, they are minded to be religious.But note the sort of religion they run to. It is areligion of feelings, and satisfactions of feelings; notone which challenges and searches the will. Theytalk about worshipping God in nature. They talkabout mystical feelings of unity with the cosmos.They go out under the stars, or watch the sunset sky;they grow lyrical about the beauty of the flowers;as Mr. Irving Babbitt, that fierce critic of all thatsort of emotional romanticism, once put it,—theymix themselves up with the landscapes and call it



religion. Or they insist that unless the church isbeautiful and the curtains just the right shade andthe music perfect, they cannot feel, yes, that’s theword, feel God. When they have all these things,they feel soothed and call that ‘meeting God.’ Isometimes wonder whether aspirin would not haveworked just as well. They do not see that they arestill only functions of their environment, a reed witha cosmic wind blowing through them playing apretty tune. Not until wind is challenged can theybe anything but functions of their environment.Did anybody ever have his conscience cleansed,feel himself searchingly rebuked and humbled andbrought to his knees in shame for his crudely selfish,instinctive treatment of his wife or his neighbor,26by the song of a lark trilling in the sky? Do notmisunderstand me. I believe there is a ministry ofnature to the sensitive spirit, but the ministry isentirely different according as you bring to it theawareness of the righteous will of God meetingyours always in absolute challenge and demand.

Which leads me to the quite definite and par-ticular thing which I want to say. If it is not invague cosmic transports of feeling that God lays Hisaustere will alongside of ours and makes Himselfpungently felt in absolute demand, where then isit? It is primarily and centrally in the sphere ofour personal relationships with one another. Justbecause God is seeking to challenge and win us intotrue personality it must be that His high and austeredemands should have their primary reference to our



relations with other personalities, for personalityhas no meaning except in and through its relationswith other personalities. All the highest, mostdemanding exercises of will are just there, namely,where wills meet one another. All this is summedup in the great Christian affirmation that God islove, and that the highest obedience to God is in themastery of ourselves in the service of the high endsof love to one another. We have to identify ourselveswith God’s purposes in others. Only in so far as wedo that, can we win our true freedom as children ofGod. That doubtless sounds a truism, but like alltruisms its real import and challenge are too oftenoverlooked. It is precisely in our relations withothers that our natural instincts are most fiercelyaroused, and it is precisely there that God challengesour wills first. Really to lay it unto your soul andlive in the light of it, that the one supreme andunconditional value of life is to be in right relations,as the one supreme failure and sin is to be in wrongrelations, with those who daily cross our path, is themost difficult thing conceivable, as the whole stateof the world today amply witnesses. Yet on no otherbasis can the reality of God be livingly known. 27

It is because so many folk fail entirely to realizethis, that God remains so unreal and impersonal tothem. They try to work up a feeling of the near-ness and reality of God by some feverish techniqueof private devotion, or at some religious meeting, orby the contemplation of beauty, whilst their relationswith the people with whom they have to deal are all



shot through with wrong attitudes and repudiatedresponsibilities of various sorts. And they fail, ofcourse; for God’s purpose, being personal and seek-ing to deal with them as persons, must cut the planeof their lives primarily in their personal world, intheir relations with other persons. Jesus himself putthis point with the utmost insistency and power. “Ifthou art offering thy gift upon the altar and there re-memberest that thy brother hath aught against thee,leave there thy gift upon the altar and go thy way.First be reconciled to thy brother.” And He wouldhave said the same to some of our moderns whowould make a garden the temple and a birdbath thealtar. “You are nearer God’s heart in a garden thananywhere else on earth.” That is false; that is thatsloppy unethical romanticism which is so commontoday. The people who are nearest God’s heart arethose who are seeking at some cost to themselves toset right some broken human relationship, whereso-ever it lies within their power to do so. The samepoint comes out in Jesus’ picture of the final judg-ment which is passed upon men’s lives. You may notknow it, you may be surprised when you are told it,but in the giving or withholding of a cup of cold wa-ter you are directly involved with God, so directly,so inescapably, that the first thing and the only thingGod will want to speak to you about at the end willbe just that.

There is a story told of Aggrey, the black Chris-tian saint. He came of a line of proud chieftains, andstill had to wrestle with an imperiousness of temper


derived from that lineage. Once at breakfast hesaid something which hurt his wife’s feelings in thepresence of her sister. That night it came upon him 28that he had been all wrong in that relationship andthat he must set it right; he must apologize. It wasthe pressure of God on his conscience and will. Yet,was it to be expected,—he, born of a line of chiefs,“eating humble pie” to a couple of women? Well, hewould slip into his wife’s room in the quietness anddarkness of the night and apologize. No, that wouldnot do. The sister had been involved in the wrongrelationship, for she also had been present. He mustapologize to her also. All night long he wrestleswith himself, or rather with God. Next morning atbreakfast, he apologized unconditionally, with noself-excusings, and the two women, knowing some-thing of him, were almost in tears at so complete agiving of himself to them; and all were conscious,as they had seldom been at any other time, of thepresence and the overshadowing of God.


IV. Jesus today.29

What I want to say now is a necessary supple-ment to what has already been said. I said that Godcomes to us primarily and centrally in the sphere ofour will; we become aware of a resistance there, a de-mand addressed to us to follow this way rather thanthat at any cost and whatever our inclinations maybe. This is the touch of the eternal on our spirits, andthe only way to get to know God in a living way isto make the right sort of response to it, which is torein in our inclinations and obey. I said further thatGod comes to us primarily and centrally on the planeof our personal relationships to one another. Exceptwe are meeting and rightly responding to Him there,in the dimension of the personal, we are not likelyto meet Him to much profit anywhere else. All ofwhich is summed up in the great Christian affirma-tion that God is love and that we enter into fellow-ship with God by loving one another, the word lovebeing used in the highest, purest, austerest sense ofthat term.

Now all this, true as it is, important as it is, urgentas it is that we should remind ourselves of it againand again, is none the less in the realm of more orless abstract generalisation. I am afraid of general-isations. It is so easy to assent to them sitting in aquiet place like this, and then when we get out intothe workaday world to find them curiously devoid

36


Jesus today. 37

of leading and light and power. Let us then try to getdown to the concrete, human, individual, personalJohn Smith, Tom Brown, Jane Robinson. Directly wedo that, we run up against a problem concern whichI want now to speak.

Here am I then, a concrete, particular individual.I have a definite sort of mental make-up and char-acter, the result of all my past history—my heredity,environment, education; my sins, disloyalties,failures; my experiences of other people and theirsins and disloyalties and failures towards me,—and 30so on. I am what I am because I have been what Ihave been, and because other people in my life havebeen what they have been. I cannot change the past,and because I cannot change the past I cannot in thetwinkling of an eye change myself, for I carry mypast in me. Very well, then, I, who am that sort ofconcrete person go forth from this place having reg-istered the resolve to obey the high imperatives ofGod in my soul, to stop living the merely instinctivelife, to seek the highest and austerest relationshipsof love with all whom I come into contact. That isa right resolve; without some such resolve, somesuch setting of the soul to a more sincere and loyalresponse to God, nothing can be achieved. Yet whenI actually get into the workaday world, what do Ifind? I find that the thing is not so simple. Why?Because I find that after upwards of forty years ofliving, I am just what I am, and no mere waving ofa wand of resolution is suddenly and miraculouslygoing to make me otherwise. Can I, who have in



countless ways, often without knowing it, let myinstinctive desires rule me, suddenly improvise thepower to leash them in and say them nay? Almostbefore I am aware of it, I am in the pressing practicalsituation which sets moving the old, take-the-line-of-least-resistance ways. Can I who, more oftenthan not, have run away from the high demandsof God, explained them away, smothered them ininsincere thinking, suddenly by an act of will cutmyself clean clear of my past and now always listenand obey? Almost without knowing it, when I amaway from the quiet, exalted atmosphere of thisplace, and the pressure of the real, concrete worldis upon me, I am doing the same thing again. CanI with a mind which has continually acquiesced inand helped to create wrong personal relationships, amind darkened and confused by all kinds of subtleegotisms and acquisitive desires, even begin to seeclearly what love really demands in the tangles ofpersonal relationships, all shot through as they are31by the egotisms and acquisitive desires of otherpeople in addition to my own? What a complex,chaotic, tangled thing life is when you get awayfrom generalisations down to the concrete; what achaotic, complex, tangled self-binding thing my ownsoul is when I get away from exalted aspirations tothe attempt to fulfil them in the real world; and yethere am I proposing to walk out into it from thisplace and henceforth fulfil the demands of God, as aman might put on his hat and go forth to register tovote.


Jesus today. 39

It is perfectly obvious, is it not? Whilst nothingcan be done without the continual renewed resolveto live in the light of the high imperatives of God,little can be done on that basis alone. Something else isnecessary. What is necessary is that our nature andcharacter should be set in some new relationship,given some new principle within it, which shallprogressively cleanse, illumine, redirect, reorientate,recreate it,—call it what you like,—from within. Irepeat it is no use my going out intending to wavethe airy wand of a resolution over my nature andmy situations. That is not realistic. That is the oldfutile attempt to life ourselves by our own bootstraps. It never has been done, and never will bedone. A new recreative, educative, continuouslycleansing process needs to be set moving in the soul,if it to grow out of, and away from, its past intoits true stature, if it is to become what Paul calleda freedman of God. If such a process is not possible,then for most of us I fear all that we have thought ofin this place, all that we may have resolved, will notcarry us very far.

Well, I for one believe that such a refashioningand cleansing of our inner life is possible. Indeed, ifI did not believe it, I would not have dared hold upthe high and searching principles of which we havespoken. How then is it possible?

I believe God has made it possible by setting inthe midst of our human life the perfect personal lifeof Jesus Christ, one in whose spirit were not ourweaknesses and blindness and egotisms, one who 32



was always perfectly surrendered and obedient tothe high imperatives of God in his soul, one whoin all his relationships with men saw clearly therequirements of love at its highest and austerest andbest and was loyal to them; one in whom there wasfully realised in this actual human scene that way,that truth, that life, which it is God’s will that allmen should follow and know and live.

But you say, how could a perfect personal lifelived so many years ago, of which we have only afew scanty records enter so significantly into my life?My answer is that that is a mystery which I can-not explain; but it is not the less a fact for being amystery. It is the mystery of the personality of Je-sus, the mystery of his significance in the counselsof God for the soul of man. Of any ordinary his-torical figure the fact that he lived so many yearsago, the fact that the records we have are so meagre,would make him irrelevant, and increasingly irrele-vant as the years pass, to our modern life. But it isprecisely the proof that there is something not ordi-nary about Jesus, that, all down the ages and just asmuch in our own age as in any earlier, he has beenable to lay hold of those who seek to center their in-ner life in him, and gradually lift them to somethingwhich, the more it is realised, the more it is seento be what we cannot call any other thing but justChristlike. It must be that somehow there is realisedand expressed in him the underlying Divine purposein human history which never changes from age toage; it must be that there is realised and expressed

Jesus today. 41

in him that permanent standard and ideal of humannature which is assuredly in every one of us seekingto realise itself, but which is dammed back and frus-trated by all our blindness and disloyalty and sin.Hence he is never really out of date, never remotefrom the deepest issues of our hearts, never irrele-vant. Hence also we never need a full length biog-raphy of him, and the scanty records do not matter; 33so long as there is enough for the tremendous pu-rity and power of his personality to shine through,then the hidden and frustrated Christ within us canbegin to do the rest; to break through all our innerdarkness and weakness and seize on Christ and say,Yes! That is perfect spirit, that is the living comple-tion and fulfilment of every dim vision of, and mo-tion towards, God my soul has ever known. So thepersonality, to use John’s image, feeds on Christ, iscleansed through him, grows through him.

But however we may care to figure it out to our-selves, I am convinced the fact remains as I havestated it. You are to centre your inner life in Jesus.You are to read the gospels and the New Testament.You are to watch him dealing with men and women.You are to think about him. You are to try to catch hisspirit, that which makes him so uniquely Jesus. Youare to test your own inner attitudes day by day byhis. You are to try to take what you can grasp of hisspirit into your relationships with men and women.You will fail, and then you must begin again withperhaps deeper humility and a deeper understand-ing of how much you need the patience and pardon



he showed to erring men, and how much you needto show it to others. Above all you are to ponderthose last dreadful days of His Cross, contemplatingall that the lovelessness of men did to perfect lovewhen it challenged them in its piercing austerity andpurity and power. Do this, I say, day by day, and youwill surely begin to be a different man and womanand grow ever more conscious of the overshadow-ing love of God. You will not know that you are be-ing refashioned. But your friends will know it. Theywill take note of you that you have been with Jesus.

Now I wish to say one quite special thing in con-clusion. It concerns the Cross of Jesus Christ and theawareness of God’s forgiveness. To those who seekto open their inner life to God in Christ, the need fordivine forgiveness and the power of Christ to showus that forgiveness particularly through his Cross,34becomes increasingly evident. Perhaps the best il-lustration I can give is to read you some words froma letter I once received from a friend. “Without theforgiveness of God, life, to one who is being cleansedand sensitised by Christ and his eyes opened to thetrue values of life, becomes even more a burden thanit would otherwise been. Thus when I look back andsee how much of evil I have put into human rela-tions and how now it is beyond recall, utterly be-yond recall, I feel pretty bad. Some years ago a half-blind woman with thick lensed glasses, selling cot-tons, and led by a thin pasty-faced little lad, came tothe door. I can make many excuses for myself. I wastired, and it was late, and there had been a stream of


Jesus today. 43

such people. I cut short a tale of domestic woe witha very sharp no. The lad said, Come away, Mum,and led her away, and I saw her thin round back andthe wisps of lank grey hair hanging untidily over herfaded threadbare coat. At the gate she paused whilethe little boy opened it, and gave a deep sigh, andthe boy turned and gave me a look which was a nearhatred as anything I have ever seen. And then theywent away and I have never seen them since. I haveoften thought of that woman and whenever I thinkof her and her weary sigh, and venom being distilledinto that lad’s soul through wrong and loveless rela-tionships to which I had thus contributed my part;when I recall that I can do nothing to amend what Idid, I feel I can only cry, “Undo what I have done, OGod, God in his manifold wisdom and love forgiveand be merciful to us all, to me, to that woman, andthe boy whom I shall never see again, and to whomI can never make amends, to all men tied up in thisjangled bundle of life.” Yes, I think I understand whyChristianity talks so much about forgiveness. OnceChrist beings to make sensitive the soul most of thethings we thought were quite tolerable begin to beintolerable and shocking.

Or to look out across the wider scene of humanlife how can anyone whose soul has ever even begun 35to be sensitised by the mind of Christ not feel it anagony too great to be endured? The horror of thethings men do to one another. Slums for example,and nothing being done about it; unemploymentand children undernourished in a world of plenty;



persecution of Jews and decapitation of half-wittedcommunists in Germany; exploitation of helplessnatives in Portuguese Africa; Japanese bombingShanghai and turning little children into mutteringimbeciles among the ruins; mobs lynching negroes;society shooting down, strangling, electrocutingcriminals which by its own rottenness it has helpedto create; armament firms working day and night todevise and create machines to turn the fair bodies ofmen and women into shapeless pulp. These thingsare our world. There are others things, but thereare those things. We can if we like avert our eyesfrom them, but that is dishonest. Certainly if youbegin to live close to Christ you cannot avert youreyes, for it is precisely his influence that makesyou increasingly sensitive to the heartbreak of itall. Yet I would say that Christ has no business tomake us sensitive to these things if that is all hedoes. But he does something more, and he doesit through that awful consummation of his life onthe Cross. Through that, I know not how, Godspeaks; as the Cross of his perfect love stands in themidst of human hatred and cruelty and stupidity,so you see in the midst there is the eternal love,the bearing, suffering forgiveness of God. Theburden of it is only on you because it is first on theeternal wisdom and love and forgiveness, whichwill not let men go. In all the affliction of men thereis a deeper underlying affliction, the affliction ofGod. To see that in the Cross of Christ, and to findyourself at peace about human life, yet under the

Jesus today. 45

call of God yourself to begin to redeem it, that isforgiveness. That is the peace of God which passesunderstanding. It is this paradox of peace in themist of poignant repentance for sin,—your ownand others,—which is forgiveness. But to hear the 36word of forgiveness to the soul through the crossof Christ, it is necessary to feel something of theburden of the world’s lovelessness and sin, and tofeel how insupportable it is. And to feel that youmust walk with Christ day by day in your ownpersonal relations, until the hard anaesthetic placesof the spirit become sensitive, and a woman’s sighand a boy’s wince will suddenly open up to youthe very heart of the eternal, and bring you to yourknees before the cross that is there.


God and Modern Men: Four Sermons - Paul K. Moser · scanned original is available on the Internet...

Documents

Transcript of God and Modern Men: Four Sermons - Paul K. Moser · scanned original is available on the Internet...