In this world of wondrous beauty God is speaking.  The glory-telling heavens, the winsome coloring of trees and all growing things, the soft round hills, the sublime mountains, the sea with its ever-changing mood but never-changing beneficence upon the life of the whole earth, the great blue and gray above, the soothing green below, the brighter colors in their artistic proportion, the wondrous blendings—­surely every bush and other green thing, every bright twinkler in the blue, everything is aflame with the presence that burns but in great love consumes not.  His eyes are indeed badly bothered that cannot see; his ears in queer fix that do not hear.  Yet sometimes the empty shoes seem few enough.  But they are ever increasing, and will yet more and more, by retail method, with wholesale result.

But God comes closer yet in His wooing.  The web of life’s daily run, with its strange mixing and blending, shadings and tints, is of His weaving.  He sits at life’s loom ever watching and weaving.  Were He but recognized oftener and His hand allowed to guide the skein, how different the weaving!

    “Children of yesterday,
      Heirs of to-morrow,
    What are you weaving—­
      Labor and sorrow? 
    Look to your looms again;
      Faster and faster
    Fly the great shuttles
      Prepared by the Master.
    Life’s in the loom,
      Room for it—­room!

    “Children of yesterday,
      Heirs of to-morrow,
    Lighten the labor
      And sweeten the sorrow: 
    Now—­while the shuttles fly
      Faster and faster,
    Up and be at it—­
      At work with the Master.
    He stands at your loom,
      Room for Him—­room!

    “Children of yesterday,
      Heirs of to-morrow,
    Look at your fabric
      Of labor and sorrow. 
    Seamy and dark
      With despair and disaster,
    Turn it—­and lo,
      The design of the Master.
    The Lord’s at the loom,
      Room for Him—­room."[4]

When men’s eyes seemed unable to see clearly these revelations of Himself, God picked out a small tribe, and through long, patient, painstaking discipline, gave to it, for the whole world, a special revelation of Himself.  In it, in the Book which preserves its records, in the Man who came through it, God came nearer yet.

In Jesus, God told out His greatness most, and His love most tenderly.  Man is the fairest flower of earth’s creation.  It was love’s fine touch that to him God should reveal Himself best and most in the fairest flower of the eternal creation.  Only man could fully appreciate Jesus, God’s Man, and man’s Brother.

But Jesus was known only to one generation—­His own generation—­to one narrow strip of country, one peculiarly exclusive tribe, the very small majority of all to whom He had come.  So there came to be a Book that all after-generations might know Him too.  We of later generations know of Jesus through the Book, in some shape or other, before we can come to know Himself direct.  And so we prize the Book above all others.  Not for the Book’s sake, at all, of course, but because through it we come to know Jesus.  With loving reverence we handle it, for it tells of Him, our God-brother.