ogether independent of
place, time, services, sacraments, or ceremonies. We limit God's
communication with us in this way--that He is communicable to us
only in so far as we ourselves respond and are able, apt, and willing
to receive Him.

Is the condition of blessed nearness to God permanent? No, not as a
condition but as a capacity only. We have need to perpetually renew
this condition by a positive active enthusiasm toward God. We can
in laziness no more retain and use this condition as a permanency
than we can sleep one night and eat one meal and have these suffice
for our lifetime. But slowly, with work and with pain, we learn
perpetually to regain this condition by that form of prayer which is
the spiritual breathing-in of the Spirit of Christ.

All God's help, all God's comfortings are to be had by us by Grace.
This Grace will constantly be withdrawn so that we may learn that
we arrive at nothing by our own power but by gift of God, who is
ever willing to give to us provided we whole-heartedly respond.
This Response to God is surely amongst the most difficult of our
achievements; unaided by Grace it is an impossibility, but we know
that every man born into the world is invited by Christ to ask for and
to receive this Grace. The effect of Response to God is a unity of our
tiny force to the Might-Presence and company of God as much as
we are able to bear it, producing in us while with us such wealth of
living; and such happiness as passes all description. As we have
capacity to respond to God so we shall know that of God which is
not known by those as yet unlearned in response. For God, we know,
is neither This nor That, but so infinitely more than any
particularisation that we are able to know Him only and solely
according to our own capacity to receive Him. To one He is a
Personal Power that ravishes with might, whose awful magnetism
draws the very heart and soul in longing anguish from the body. To
another He is the dimly known silent Manipulator of the Universe,
the secret Ruler to whose mighty Will creation bows--because
needs must. To another He is yet even more remote, being the
unresponsive, impersonal, incomprehensible, immovable Instigator
of all law.

What is it in our religion that we need for a full happiness? Not the
God of our mere faith, nor the God of the theologian veiled behind
great mysteries of book-learning. It is the Responsive God that we
long for, and how shall we reach Him? There is o