close, that a reconciliation is at hand, that a larger truth is looming on the horizon which includes all that is true in both of these one-sided conceptions of the universe-the truth, namely, that matter as well as mind is the temple of the Eternal Spirit, the covering, the habiliment, the phenomenal manifestation of deity. "Surely the Lord is in this place, and we know it not.”

We thought of Him as inhabiting only mind or spirit. We thought of the material world as something altogether outside Him, and beneath Him, merely the work of His hands, created by Him, maintained and ruled by Him, but not informed, indwelt by Him. We smiled at the notion of the old Greek poets that every grove was God-haunted, that a soul of deity dwelt in every tree and every stream; we excommunicated and anathematized the pantheist for saying, Nothing exists but God; the All is God and yet pagan poets and pantheistic philosophers were feeling after a truth which we let slip, possessed in their errors something of truth which we are apt to ignore. Beneath the floating drapery of Nature they felt a living warmth. As they gazed upon the matchless symmetry of the human form, upon the cataract leaping in the noonday sun, its foam transfigured into alpine snow, its limpid drops into scattered jewels; as their eye rested on the pine tree trunks fringing the mountain edge, touched with crimson by the sinking orb of day, or on their dark green spires lifting themselves up out of the nether shadows and standing sharply defined against the still ruddy sky-these old poets felt their bosom heave with strong emotion, their

lips were opened to sing the songs that have floated down to us through the ages, and they said this inspiration is from God-it comes not from mere interlacing lines and blending colours as such, but from something divine that dwells in them; and they were right. We are beginning to see it and to own it. There is a sense in which Professor Tyndall's much-censured dictum is true. In the despised atom of matter dwells the promise and potency of all life, for God dwells there, the fountain of all life. He is there, or the atom would not be. Nothing can exist apart from Him. Where matter is, He is. And this is why the ocean whispers to us of eternity, and the summer evening landscape breathes on us heavenly calm. This is why a beautiful face can become an inspiration for a lifetime, and

"The meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

God is in it that is why!

pantheism.

This doctrine of the immanence of God in His world is not pantheism, but the negation of If God dwells in and pervades all nature, then He must be distinct from the nature that He pervades. Distinct from but dwelling inthat is the immanence of deity.

As this truth works its way into the mind of the age, spreading wide and sinking deep, Art will be ennobled and Science sanctified. Art has become degraded, Science divorced from religion largely because the Church, proud of a higher revelation of God, has poured contempt on the lower. Nature, robbed of her divinity, has been considered a book

almost unworthy of the Christian's perusal. Matter treated by the Church as earthly, sensual, devilish, has too often been handled by the artist in a manner earthly, sensual, devilish. But with the hearty embrace of this truth, this new perception of God in matter, Art will revive; we shall have again sculpture, painting, poetry instinct with divine life. Science, no longer regarded as an antagonist to religion, will become her reverent ally, and all material things be handled with a purer touch, because of the indwelling deity.

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Such things shall be. Over this bare plain of matter the heavens shall open; there shall be angels ascending and descending"-divine communications—we see it as yet, like Jacob, only as in a dream. We stand but on the threshold of the age gazing on the ever-multiplying wonders which the field of matter discloses to our view, and even now whisper softly, "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not."

II. THE UNEXPECTED FINDING OF GOD IN CREEDS AND COMMUNIONS OTHER THAN OUR OWN.

Jacob thought that God was not to be found save in the precincts of Isaac's altar, and in the worship of his domestic circle. And a similar idea prevailed very widely among good people up to a comparatively recent date. Probably many of us in early childhood received the impression that if God were not approached as we had been taught to approach Him, He could not be found at all. We looked on the Church of Rome as idolatrous and God-forsaken,

on Unitarians as little better than atheists.1 No God there," we said, in accents of sorrowful compassion or perhaps of scornful bigotry. We thought so in simple sincerity. But as we grew older our knowledge and our experience widened. Through books and men we came to know something of the inner spirit pervading communities that we had banned from the outside as unchristian and practically godless. We found our deepest spiritual consciousness vibrating in response to the hymns of a Xavier, a Faber on the one side or a Grant and a Bowring on the other, and quotations from Vedic or Buddhistic or Parsee literature, flashed on us as light from above. We came across men of very heretical creed, but very saintly lives, whose profound reverence, delicate conscientiousness and beautiful consistency of character, put us to the blush. Applying the Saviour's test "by their fruits ye shall know them," we could not but acknowledge these as His disciples, and confess that God was in them of a truth: and what we said at first in dubious, half-grudging tones, we learned to say at last with glad and grateful assurance, Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not."

But mark-it by no means follows that it matters little what a man believes so long as he is sincere and acts up to his belief. It is marvellous that men otherwise sane should ever have given utterance to

1 Even in this twentieth century I have heard a minister argue in mournful accents that it was impossible for a Unitarian to be saved. Then, in happy unconsciousness of its Unitarian origin, he closed the service by giving out Admiral Bowring's beautiful hymn, "God is Love; His mercy brightens."

such an absurdity as that. What a man really believes cannot fail to influence his conduct; and the more sincere and consistent he is, i.e., the more thoroughly he acts up to his belief, so much the more certain it is that every error in his creed will produce corresponding error in his life. We are bound to seek truth in every direction, and eschew all errors of belief. But truth and error lie strangely mingled. And, whatever be the proportion in which they are mingled, wherever truth is, God is, contending against the superincumbent mass of error. Truth moreover, lies often in the direction where we least expected to find it. Prejudice often marvellously misleads us. When Nathanael was first pointed to the Nazarene as the Way, the Truth, and the Life, full of local prejudice he exclaimed, "Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" But following Philip's excellent advice, “Come and see," he was presently fain to confess that truly the Lord was in that place though he knew it not.

III. GOD IS TO BE FOUND IN ALL THE PATHS OF OUR INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE, EVEN WHERE WE LEAST LOOK FOR HIM.

We are apt like Jacob to limit the presence of the Almighty, to recognize His hand only in "special dispensations of Providence" as they are sometimes called. When some trivial incident has prevented our travelling by the train or the vessel that was wrecked, we say the hand of God was in it." When some undesigned combination of circumstances brings us unexpected good fortune, we say