, there
the God of the New Testament will come--"the light which lighteth every
man coming into the world."

Consider, for illustration, the many people in this generation who have
given up active relationship with the Church and assured faith in God.
They may even call themselves agnostics. Would it not be true to speak
to them like this: You have not succeeded in getting rid of God. There
is a flame in your heart that will not go out. You try to say there is
no God and then you go out under the stars at night and you begin to
wonder how such a vast, law-abiding universe could come by accident, as
if a man were to throw a font of type on the floor and by chance it
should arrange itself into a play of Shakespeare. Strange universe,
without God! You try to say there is no God and you pick up a book: a
life of Phillips Brooks or David Livingstone or Francis Xavier, and you
begin to wonder that, amid these whirling stars and solar systems, a
race of men should have emerged with spiritual life like that which we
possess, with ideals that beckon us, conscience that warns us and
remorse that punishes us! You cannot easily think that this long
spiritual struggle and achievement of the race is an accident struck
off unwittingly like sparks from falling stones in a material world
without abiding meaning. Or you try to say there is no God, and then
you are married and your first baby is born and there wells up in your
heart that purest love that man can know, the feeling of a parent for a
little child. And you cannot help wondering how a man can walk about
the world with love like that in the center of his life, thinking that
there is nothing to correspond with it in the reality from which his
heart and his baby came. You try to say there is no God, and then you
begin to grow old and the friends you love best on earth pass away, as
Carlyle said his mother did, like "the last pale rim or sickle of the
moon which had once been full, sinking in the dark seas." You cannot
help wondering whether great souls can be so at the mercy of a few
particles of matter that when these are disturbed the spirit is plunged
into oblivion! You never really have gotten rid of God. There is a
flame in the center of your heart which you cannot put out. If there
were no God it would be easier to disbelieve in him than it is. You
cannot get rid of him because the best in you is God in you. The flame
is he and there in the center of your lif