of conduct, is so far from the fact that it is not worth discussing.  Religion is the realised friendship of God; it is a personal relation of the deepest and purest sort; and, like all personal relations, is kept alive by the mutual activities of those concerned.  The action of one party will not suffice to keep the relation in healthy state.  The love of God itself will not suffice to maintain a being in holiness and carry him on to happiness who is himself quite indifferent to the entire spiritual transaction—­whose attitude is that of one willing to be saved if he be not asked to take much trouble about it.  That lackadaisical attitude can never produce any result in the spiritual order; it can only ensure the spiritual decline and death of one who has not thought it worth while to make an effort to live.

Jesus can be found; but the finding depends upon the method of the seeking.  There are many men who claim, and quite honestly, to be in pursuit of truth:  to find the truth is the end of all their efforts.  Yet they do not succeed in finding it.  Why is this?  I think that the principal reason is that they are constituting themselves the judges of the truth; they first of all lay down certain rules which God must obey if He wishes them to believe in Him!  They insist on having, before they will believe, a kind of evidence that is impossible of attainment.  They assert that this or that is impossible, and the other thing incredible.  They partially ascertain the laws that govern the material universe, and they deny to the Maker of the universe the power to act otherwise than in accord with so much of the order of nature as they have discovered!  They deny to God the sort of personal action in this world that they themselves constantly exercise.

The method is not a method that can be hopeful of success.  And it is worth noting that it is not a method that these same men followed in their investigations of the natural world.  They have not accumulated information about natural law by first laying down rules as to how natural law must act, and refusing to listen to any evidence which does not fall in with these rules:  rather, they have set themselves to observe how nature does act, and then deduced rules from their observation.  Why not pursue the same method in religion?  Why not in an humble spirit observe how God does act?  Why start by saying, “Miracles do not happen?” Why reject as incredible the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection?  Why not get a bigger notion of God than that of a mechanician running a machine, and think of Him as a Person dealing with persons?  The relation of persons cannot be mechanical or predetermined; they are and must be free and spontaneous:  they have their origin, not in the pressure of invariable law but in the impulse of love.