his own heart and give his imagination leave
to picture Him in the remoteness of the Universe, gazing down upon him
with those myriad eyes of His that shine in the night-darkened heavens.
He in whom you believe, reader, He is your God, He who has lived with
you and within you, who was born with you, who was a child when you were
a child, who became a man according as you became a man, who will vanish
when you yourself vanish, and who is your principle of continuity in
the spiritual life, for He is the principle of solidarity among all men
and in each man and between men and the Universe, and He is, as you are,
a person. And if you believe in God, God believes in you, and believing
in you He creates you continually. For in your essence you are nothing
but the idea that God possesses of you--but a living idea, because the
idea of a God who is living and conscious of Himself, of a
God-Consciousness, and apart from what you are in the society of God you
are nothing.

How to define God? Yes, that is our longing. That was the longing of the
man Jacob, when, after wrestling all the night until the breaking of the
day with that divine visitant, he cried, "Tell me, I pray thee, thy
name!" (Gen. xxxii. 29). Listen to the words of that great Christian
preacher, Frederick William Robertson, in a sermon preached in Trinity
Chapel, Brighton, on the 10th of June, 1849: "And this is our
struggle--_the_ struggle. Let any true man go down into the deeps of his
own being, and answer us--what is the cry that comes from the most real
part of his nature? Is it the cry for daily bread? Jacob asked for that
in his _first_ communing with God--preservation, safety. Is it even
this--to be forgiven our sins? Jacob had a sin to be forgiven, and in
that most solemn moment of his existence he did not say a syllable about
it. Or is it this--'Hallowed be Thy name'? No, my brethren. Out of our
frail and yet sublime humanity, the demand that rises in the earthlier
hours of our religion may be this--'Save my soul'; but in the most
unearthly moments it is this--'Tell me thy name.' We move through a
world of mystery; and the deepest question is, What is the being that is
ever near, sometimes felt, never seen; that which has haunted us from
childhood with a dream of something surpassingly fair, which has never
yet been realized; that which sweeps through the soul at times as a
desolation, like the blast from the wings of the Angel of Death,
leaving us strick