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eternity.

Communion with God is the great fact of life. All our forms of
worship, all our ceremonies and symbols of religion, find their meaning
here. There is, it is true, an ethic of religion, certain moral
teachings valuable for life: there are truths of religion to be laid
hold of by the reason: there are the consolations of religion to
comfort the heart: but the root of all religion is this mystical union,
a communion with the Unseen, a friendship with God open to man.
Religion is not an acceptance of a creed, or a burden of commandments,
but a personal secret of the soul, to be attained each man for himself.
It is the experience of the nearness of God, the mysterious contact
with the divine, and the consciousness that we stand in a special
individual relationship with Him. The first state of exaltation, when
the knowledge burst upon the soul, cannot, of course, last; but its
effect remains in inward peace, and outward impulse toward nobler life.

Men of all ages have known this close relationship. The possibility of
it is the glory of life: the fact of it is the romance of history, and
the true reading of history. All devout men that have ever lived have
lived in the light of this communion. All religious experience has had
this in common, that somehow the soul is so possessed by God, that
doubt of His existence ceases; and the task of life becomes to keep
step with Him, so that there may be correspondence between the outer
and the inner conditions of life. Men have known this communion in
such a degree that they have been called pre-eminently the Friends of
God, but something of the experience which underlies the term is true
of the pious of all generations.

To us, in our place in history, communion with God comes through Jesus
Christ. It is an ineffable mystery, but it is still a fact of
experience. Only through Jesus do we know God, His interest in us, His
desire for us, His purpose with us. He not only shows us in His own
example the blessedness of a life in fellowship with the Father, but He
makes it possible for us. United to Jesus, we know ourselves united to
God. The power of Jesus is not limited to the historical impression
made by His life. It entered the world as history; it lives in the
world as spiritual fact to-day. Luther's experience is the experience
of all believers, "To me it is not simply an old story of an event that
happened once; for it is a gift, a bestowing, that endu