nyone begin, who takes us any great
distance? It is very hard to know. Where did our own thoughts of God
begin? What made them? How did they come? There is an inherited
element in them, but how much else? Whence came the inherited
element? How is it that to another man, with the same upbringing as
ours, everything is different, everything means more? Remark, at any
rate, in the teaching of Jesus, that there is no mysticism of the
type so much studied to-day. There is nothing in the least
"psychopathic" about him, nothing abnormal--no mystical vision of
God, no mystical absorption in God, no mystical union with God, no
abstraction, nothing that is the mark of the professed mystic. Yet
he speaks freely of "seeing God"; he lives a life of the closest
union with God; and God is in all his thoughts. A phrase like that
of Clement of Alexandria, "deifying into apathy we become monadic,"
is seas away from anything we find in the speech of Jesus. That is
not the way he preaches God. He is far more natural; and that his
followers accepted this naturalness, and drew him so, and gave his
teaching as he gave it, is a fresh pledge of the truthfulness of the
Gospels.

Again, his knowledge of God is not a matter of quotation, as ours
very often tends to be. He is conscious always of the real nearness
of God. He seems to wonder how it is that man can forget God. We do
forget God. Augustine in his "Confessions" (iv. 12, 18) has to tell
us that "God did not make the world and then go away." The practical
working religion of a great many of us rests on a feeling that God
is a very long way off. Our practical steps betray that we half
think God did go away, when he had made the world. Prayer to us is
not a real thing--it is not intercourse face to face; far too often
it is like conversation over a telephone wire of infinite length
which gets out of order. Even if words travel along that wire, there
is so much "buzzing" that they are hardly recognizable. No, says
Jesus, God is near, God is here--so near, that Jesus never feels
that men have any need of a priesthood to come between, or to help
them to God; God does all that. There is no common concern, no
matter of food or clothing, no mere detail of the ordinary round of
common duty and common life--father and mother, son, wife,
friend--nothing of all that, but God is there; God knows about it;
God is interested in it; God has taken care of it; God is enjoying
it. How is it that men can "r