thoughts turn not that way. But then sometimes the Good Shepherd transfers to that shining shore a little lamb out of our flock, and that makes a difference. Our eyes begin to look that way, and our feet prepare to follow our eyes. Even in its death the little child doth lead us.

When we survey the ground we have traversed and see that Man has been raised from savagery to civilization under the leadership of the little child, and that the same leadership promises further progress, who can fail to admire the wisdom that has so ordered the whole scheme that the race shall be by one and the same means perpetuated and educated? But mark, in conclusion, that by human negligence the scheme may be in part defeated. The childleadership may be resisted, ignored. Like most of God's approaches to the soul, it is gentle and may be repelled. God draws; He does not drive. The influence is pleading, persuasive not compulsory. Oh, that we may give it hearty welcome! May ours be the observant eye, the open ear, the willing mind, the obedient feet; and the little child shall lead us into His presence, where there is fulness of joy; to His right hand, where there are pleasures for ever

more.

II

GOD IN UNEXPECTED PLACES

"And Jacob awakened out of his sleep and said: 'Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not.'"-GEN. xxviii. 16.

WE gather from these words that Jacob had not attained to a distinct belief in an omnipresent Deity. He knew that God was at Beersheba, where a great altar had been erected in His honour. He had knelt with his mother, Rebekah, and his brother, Esau, while his father, Isaac, offered sacrifice at that altar. He had watched the smoke of the burnt offering ascending heavenwards with his father's prayers. He believed that God was somewhere above those clouds looking down propitiously on His faithful servant. Yes, the Lord was at Beersheba doubtless, his father's God, great and powerful, where His altar stood and His name was revered. But Jacob never expected to find Him in the wilderness, halfway to Padan Aram. He had turned his back on his father's home and thought he had left his father's God behind him. The manifestation of His presence in that lone plain, where the bleating of the wild goats was the only sound that went up to heaven, and their rocky shelters the only habitations

visible, filled him with amazement. He exclaims: "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not."

There is ample evidence in the narrative before us that Jacob thought of God as a local and limited deity. Observe his vow. There was as he imagined a choice of duties before him. He was going to a land of strangers. He would meet with strange faces that he had not known, and strange gods that he had not known. They too might be great and powerful in their own place; but still he will have his father's God for his own God on conditions: "If God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my father's house in peace, then shall the Lord be my God, and this stone which I have set for a pillar shall be God's house; and of all that Thou shalt give me I will surely give the tenth unto Thee."

Jacob did meet with strange gods. His beloved wife, Rachel, was so devoted to them that she carried away their images with her when she left her father's house. But Jacob returned to Bethel and fulfilled his vow. The God he had met with there had complied with the conditions Jacob imposed upon Him, and he, on his part, was faithful to his side of the undertaking. But what narrow conceptions of God does the whole narrative disclose !this surprise in finding God was at Bethel as well as at Beersheba, this bargaining to serve Him if He would do certain things for him. What a dim twilight of religious knowledge did this early patriarch move in! He acted up to the light he had

more faithfully than many of us; but how dim that light was!

We miss much that we ought to learn from the Old Testament, if in reading it we fail to observe the progressive character of divine revelation; how as we pass on from the patriarchs to the prophets, from the earlier prophets to the later ones, the idea of God expands, the standard of morality rises, and the conception of the kind of service God requires grows clearer and purer. And if there has been progress in the past, surely there will be progress in the future. Not that we suppose the revelation of God in Christ will itself ever be transcended, but that our understanding of that revelation will grow clearer from age to age. If we firmly grasp the principle of progressive revelation we shall be preserved from many errors. We shall see, for example, the utter weakness of the argument that because a priesthood, a sacrifice, a ritual, were found expedient in the early religious development of the Hebrews, therefore they are to be perpetuated in the Christian Church. We shall not suffer reverence for our Puritan forefathers to place them in the chair of infallibility. We shall rather expect to find some errors in their theology, some imperfection in their modes of worship. We shall anticipate that the God who showed them so much will show us more, if only we cherish a spirit of loyal obedience to Him and keep our faces towards the light.

But whilst such reflections naturally arise as we contemplate the figure of Jacob in the early dawn of divine revelation feeling with trembling hand after God if haply he may find Him, it is not on these we

propose to dwell just now, but on the simple fact that he found God where he did not expect to find Him; and the fact that we too may find Him in unexpected places. Of course we all believe in the divine omnipresence, and yet Jacob's words suggest to us the truth that from time to time we are brought to recognise the presence of God where we had neither apprehended nor looked for it-and first

I. IN THE MATERIAL UNIVERSE.

We

God is in it in a sense that our fathers knew not, and that we are only beginning to recognize. have been accustomed to consider matter and spirit as mutually exclusive, belonging to two altogether different realms between which a great gulf is fixed. Matter has been relegated to an altogether inferior sphere, being related to spirit at best as its product and instrument. In the last few decades, however, the relation has been inverted. We are told now that spirit is the product of matter-that all spiritual activities originate in material activities, that matter is the great abiding reality, spirit the shadowy, fleeting phenomenon, that in the much despised atom of matter lies the promise and potency of all life. Such reaction is wont to avenge all overstraining of a truth, all one-sided perception and presentation of it. By-and-by the pendulum swings over to the other side. Exaggeration in one direction is followed by exaggeration in precisely the opposite.

But am I too sanguine if I think that the long war between idealist and materialist is drawing to a