Then comes the final question: How are we, being helpless, to
reach Him? How are we, being guilty, to find Him?
When men deal with these queries, with this range of experience, this
set of inward perceptions, then they are preaching religiously. And
then, I venture to say, they do not fail either of hearers or of
followers. Then there is what Catherine Booth used to call "liberty
of speech"; then there is power because then we talk of realities.
For what is it that looks out from the eyes of religious humanity?
Rebellion, pride? no! Humility, loneliness, something of a just and
deserved fear; but most of all, desire, insatiable, unwavering, an
intense desire. This passion of the race, its never satisfied hunger,
its incredible intensity and persistency of striving and longing,
is at once the tragedy and glory, the witness to the helplessness,
the revelation of the capacity of the race. The mainspring of human
activity, the creative impulse from which in devious ways all the
thousand-hued motives of our lives arise, is revealed in the ancient
cry, "My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God!" That unquenched
thirst for Him underlies all human life, as the solemn stillness of
the ocean underlies the restless upper waves. The dynamic of the world
is the sense of the divine reality. The woe of the world is man's
inability to discover and appropriate that reality.
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