Page:God and His Book.djvu/170

160 of our thought had risen—the loftiest cloud whose fringe had ever been touched by the white wings of our hope. You gave a depth and meaning to the busy day and the melancholy night while we were yet strangers to the march of thought and the discipline of schools. The lightning was the gleam of your sword, the thunder was the battle-cry of God. You are not framed, O Jehovah, for the age when the steam-engine rushes through the glens and crashes through the bowels of the everlasting hills; when, on the wings of the lightning, we speed our messages over the nations of the continents and under the billows of the oceans; and when the press lays at the feet of the humblest the mind-wealth of the world. Such an era needs not, and never would have framed, a god like you.

We are parting company with you, Jehovah, impelled to do so by the civilisation of mankind rising to loftier levels. You have played your part, and now we must play ours; and, in the interests of our race, argue you and jeer you out of the world. But we are students of history and anthropology, and we are not ungrateful. There lies an awe under our levity and a solemnity under our ridicule. We have tender reminiscences of the days when the world was young, of the dim and stormy flight of ages stretching between Abraham and Ur of the Chaldees and the day that Columba founded you a Church on Iona's lonely isle. You have waded with our fathers through rivers of blood and lakes of fire when, on the pillars of carnage, rested the thrones of the world. You were their guardian, God, in their few days of peace when the sun glinted down through the forest leaves, and when the hills lay dreaming under the silent stars. Your blessing was invoked over the cradles of our sires, and your benison over their graves. In old churchyards, and in churchyards which the dead never enter now, but which are streets over which the feet and wheels of commerce clash and whirl, there are memories and relics of you. We dig down to the broken marbles and the ancient graves, and we find references to your Book and you mixed up with the epitaphs of our ephemeral and our immortal dead. The blood that runs in our veins is drawn from those who lie under the ancient and broken