hich God has given him in
finding out the truth. Faith is never opposed to reason, though it is
sometimes supposed by Bible teachers that it is; but you will find it
is not. Faith is opposed to sight, but not to reason, though it is not
limited to reason. In employing his intellect in the search for truth
a student is drawing nearer to the Christ who said, "I am the way, the
truth and the life." We talk a great deal about Christ as the way and
Christ as the life, but there is a side of Christ especially for the
student: "I am the truth," and every student ought to be a truth-lover
and a truth-seeker for Christ's sake.

II.

Another element in life, which of course is first in importance, is
_God_.

The Angelus is perhaps the most religious picture painted this
century. You cannot look at it and see that young man standing in the
field with his hat off, and the girl opposite him with her hands
clasped and her head bowed on her breast, without feeling a sense of
God.

Do we carry about with us the thought of God wherever we go? If not,
we have missed the greatest part of life. Do we have a conviction of
God's abiding presence wherever we are? There is nothing more needed
in this generation than a larger and more Scriptural idea of God. A
great American writer has told us that when he was a boy the
conception of God which he got from books and sermons was that of a
wise and very strict lawyer. I remember well the awful conception of
God which I had when a boy. I was given an illustrated edition of
Watts' hymns, in which God was represented as a great piercing eye in
the midst of a great black thunder cloud. The idea which that picture
gave to my young imagination was that of God as a great detective,
playing the spy upon my actions, as the hymn says:

"Writing now the story of what little children do."

That was a very mistaken and harmful idea which it has taken me years
to obliterate. We think of God as "up there," or as one who made the
world six thousand years ago and then retired. We must learn that He
is not confined either to time or space. God is not to be thought of
as merely back there in time, or up there in space. If not, where is
He? "The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth." The Kingdom of God is
within you, and God Himself is among men. When are we to exchange the
terrible, far-away, absentee God of our childhood for the everywhere
present God of the Bible? Too many of the old Christian writer