o say, and must ultimately
feel, and should now be taught to realize that the soul has one
satisfaction, one only--"My soul is athirst for God, for the living
God." Well, if that be so, can we be wrong, dear friends, can we waste
our time, if we ask ourselves this morning something quite practical
about this thirst of the soul?

And, first of all, I submit that in such a verse as this, and in such
a work as this, we are face to face with one of those great governed
contrasts that are found throughout Scripture and throughout human
life. I may say, _par parenthese_, that that is one of the great
proofs of sacred Scripture. When your shallow thinker, when your wild
and profound philosopher, kicks the sacred Book with the toe of his
boot, and denounces it because he does not like the measure of Noah's
Ark or the exact activity of Jonah's whale, the moment you begin
to think beneath those mere sharpnesses of speech and those mere
quicknesses of the thought, you say this: "There may be this or that
about the surface of Scripture which I do not and cannot explain, and
cannot entirely understand; but at least there is no book--no, not
excepting Milton; no, not even excepting Dante; no, for us English
people, making no reserve for Shakespeare--there is no book that,
after all, expresses that deep, inner, serious fact of my being, of
my soul, of myself; the fact that lives when our facts are dying; the
fact that persists in asserting itself when the noise of the world is
still; the fact that does not care about daylight only, but comes up
in the dark; the fact that whispers low when I am in the crowd, but
speaks loud in the darkest night, when the clock is ticking on the
stairs, and conscience has stalked out and stood before me, asserting
facts that I cannot contradict--there is no look that can speak that
fact of facts, that thirst, that longing, that desolation, that
desire, that hope, that activity, that possibility of supreme
contention and final victory, there is nothing like the Bible that
does that." And so wise men, while they admit difficulties, thoughtful
men, while they do not controvert the fact that that which is divine
needs larger explanation, fall back upon such great governed truths as
that text to support the Bible. The Bible says, asserts, determines,
and insists upon the truth which the Church is insisting upon, which
you and I, in our better moments, emphasize and say "Amen" to--the
soul is athirst for God