Page:The Doctrines of the New Church Briefly Explained.djvu/29

Rh its wanderings; followed it with his patient, yearning, pitying love; followed it with outstretched arms of mercy into thickest darkness and lowest depths of degradation and sin; followed it with remonstrance and warning and rebuke and correction and instruction and tender entreaty, yet never infringing man's proper freedom, but forever guarding that as the apple of his eye.

And the same deep, tender, patient love which has pursued our race through ages past, pursues it still;—pursues peoples and states and individuals from hour to hour. Nothing can turn it from this pursuit. Nothing can alienate it. Nothing can quench or diminish its ardor. We may be deaf to its remonstrances; we may despise its warnings; we may mock at its counsels; we may be heedless of its chastenings; we may trample on its laws; we may even crucify that love again and again in our hearts; yet for all this and spite of this, it patiently waits the hour when it may rise from its tomb and make its gentle pleadings heard.

Yes: God loves and cares for us, says the New Theology, even when we forget and turn away from Him. He loves and cares for us in our follies and our sins. With pitying eye and outstretched arms and ceaseless longing to save and bless. He pursues the vilest of his rational creatures; pursues them into the lowest haunts of degradation