that is, to bring
Christ down; or who shall descend into the abyss? that is, to bring
Christ up from the dead. The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth and in
thy heart." The divine reality offers itself to faith in and through
the scope and sweep of life. The order of God is in the life of
society. The ideal for man, the method by which it is realized, and
the power, are set in the spiritual tissues of the race. If you see no
God, no soul, no genuine religion, believe rather that you are blind
than that your human environment does not contain them. You are the
product of nature. It follows that nature must be great enough to
account for you and your race and the Christ who is your race at its
best. Back of the nature that gave birth to you, that bore your kind,
and brought forth Christ, there must be the sufficient Spirit. You
are sure that you can not live by bread alone. You have thoughts that
wander through eternity. You can not rest until you rest in God. You
are a being made for religion, and again here is the gospel that meets
your intelligence with its wisdom, your heart with its love, your will
with its moral authority. Nothing puts your being in tune, and nothing
rings out the best music that is in you, as the gospel does. It is
omnipresent in our civilization, working everywhere to crush the
beast and to free the man. It is in a mother's love, the soul of its
tenderness; it is in a father's heart as ideal and incentive. The
history and the experience and the hope of our homes are transfigured
in its light, as if the earth should repose in an everlasting evening
glow. Patriotism is alive with its fire, and the new and growing
passion for humanity is the great token of its quickening spirit.
It is the box of ointment, very precious, which has been broken in
society and all Christendom is filled with its perfume. Birth and
death, love and sorrow, achievement and failure, human life and its
immemorial content, the old room and the dear and dreary things in it,
take on new dignity and grace. To detect the new spirit in the old
dwelling is the best and most rewarding of all intuitions. To live in
the human homestead consecrated by the diffusion of Christ's gospel is
to undergo an unconscious conformation to exalted ideals. Because of
our Christian civilization, behind every morning is the Father, who
makes His sun to shine upon the evil and the good, and who sends His
rain upon the just and the unjust. Nature has been li