my dear friends, there is a truth in fancy as well as in science.  We need not believe that this aspiration that shows itself in the pure mind of a little child is a trailing glory that he has brought with him from some pre-existent state.  We need not think that it is physiological fact that the sky colored the eyes of the babe as the babe came through.  Nor need we suppose that man was a clay image into which God breathed a physical breath, so animating him.  But beyond all this imagery is the vision of the poet.  God in man; a divine life throbbing in humanity; man the offspring of God; man coming forth from the eternal and going forth into the eternal.

This is the starting-point of the Bible.  Starting with this, it goes on with declaration after declaration based on this fundamental doctrine that man and God in their essential moral attributes have the same nature.  It is human experience which is used to interpret divine experience.  According to pagan thought, God speaks to men through movements of the stars, through all external phenomena, through even entrails of animals.  Seldom so in the Bible, save as when the wise men followed the star, and then that they might come to a divine humanity.  In the Old Testament God speaks in human experience, through human experience, about human experience, to typify and interpret and explain Himself.  God is like a shepherd that shepherds his flock.  God is like a king that rules in justice.  He is like the father that provides for his children.  He is like the mother that comforts the weeping child.  All the experiences of humanity are taken in turn and attributed to God.  The hopes, the fears, the sorrows, the joys, the very things which we call faults in men—­so strong and courageous are the old prophets in this fundamental faith of theirs that man and God are alike—­the very things we call faults in men are attributed to the Almighty.  He is declared to hate, to be wrathful, to be angry, to be jealous; because, at the root, every fault is a virtue set amiss; and the very faults of men have in them something that interprets the power and will of God, as the very faults of a boy interpret the virtues of his father.  All through the Old Testament God manifests Himself through human experience.  He speaks in the hearts of men; He dwells in the experience of men; He interprets Himself through the life of men; and, finally, when this one selected nation which has a genius for spiritual truth has been so far educated that there is no danger that it will go back and worship man, that it will become a mere hero-worshiper, when it has been so far educated that there is no danger of that, then Jesus Christ comes into the world—­God manifests Himself in human life.