Page:Sermon at the Church Congress 1902.djvu/9

 fresh force to men's minds. For it was not always so. The Deists, we know, in forms characteristic of the eighteenth century, thought of God as above, not within, His creation; as impelling or having once impelled it, not as informing it; a first cause of its being and movement, not their inspiring Spirit. And then in the nineteenth century and well within the time of the older among us, the swiftly-disclosed fascination of natural things, the recognition of law and uniformity, the apparent sufficiency of nature to explain herself, seemed to leave no room for Goal; a popular materialism paid Him no heed; and His believers were baffled and puzzled to say where they found room and place for His work.

It is different now. Science is reverent in the presence of mystery which she has herself helped to reveal. The inadequacy of merely materialist explanations is recognized. Matter itself has almost lost substance and reality under the ever-advancing power of analysis; it has lost the solidity which could exclude God; the spiritual side of things is felt to be at least as real. And this means not that there is a place left for God somewhere, but that there is room for Him everywhere.

Movements of religious thought and feeling tend the same way. There is a great vogue for the name of mysticism, and though much of it is superficial and its meaning indistinct, it is pretty clear that men are not thinking so much of that mysticism which seeks God by abstraction from all visible and created things, but rather of that which would penetrate through them to some meaning at their heart, some presence which they half disclose and half conceal. What is it again which lends attraction to that strange farrago which calls itself "Christian Science," and in spite of all its irritating paradoxes and pseudo-science, secures it a welcome from many who are both able and good? The problem has been studied by one of the ablest and most vigorous of contemporary philosophers, and he finds as the secret that it comes to weary and baffled minds with a strong summons to recognize and respond to the divine presence, the divine element, in themselves. The thought of it gives to people the special stimulus which comes of being "brought to themselves" and finding in themselves (as S. Augustine did though in a very different way) what they had sought in vain outside.

Thus, I think, in ways upon which I must not weary you by dwelling, there is in thought around us congeniality with, there is preparation for, that truth which the Apostle declared: "It is God that worketh in you."

When we come within the religious sphere, properly so called, when we come to the interpretation of the Christian Revelation, what do we find? We find, indeed, at first sight a heartbreaking and internecine strife. We find within the area of Christian belief, even within the limits of our own part of