There is a difference between the way and the end which I am aiming at.  I might be traveling amid most beautiful scenery, in the most delightful company; but if I have a home to which I want to go, all the scenery, and all the company, and all the beauty and happiness around me can not satisfy me; I want to reach the end; I want my home.  And God is meant to be the home of our souls.  Christ came into the world to bring us back to God, and unless we take Christ for what God intended we should, our religion will always be a divided one.  What do we read in Hebrews vii?  “He is able to save to the uttermost.”—­Whom?  “Them that come to God by Him;” not them that only come to Christ.  In Christ—­bless His name—­we have the graciousness, the condescension, and the tenderness of God.  But we are in danger of standing there, and being content with that, and Christ wants to bring us back to rejoice as much as in the glory of God Himself, in His righteousness, His holiness, His authority, His presence and His power.  He can save completely those who come to God through Him!

Now, just a very few thoughts on the way by which I can come to know God as this God above all circumstances, filling my heart and life every day.  The one thing needful is:  I must wait upon God.  The original is,—­it is in our Dutch version, and it is in the margin, too,—­“My soul is silent into God.”  What ought to be the silence of the soul unto God?  A soul conscious of its littleness, its ignorance, its prejudices and its dangers from passion, from all that is human and sinful,—­a soul conscious of that, and saying, “I want the everlasting God to come in and to take hold of me and to take such hold of me that I may be kept in the hollow of His hand for my life long; I want Him to take such possession of me that every moment He may work all in all in me.”  That is what is implied in the very nature of our God.  How we ought to be silent unto Him, and wait upon Him!

May I ask, with reverence:  What is God for?  A God is for this:  to be the light and the life of creation, the source and power of all existence.  The beautiful trees, the green grass, the bright sun, God created that they might show forth His beauty, His wisdom and His glory.  The tree of one hundred years old—­when it was planted God did not give it a stock of life by which to carry on its existence.  Nay, verily, God clothes the lilies every year afresh with their beauty; every year God clothes the tree with its foliage and its fruit.  Every day and every hour it is God who maintains the life of all nature.  And God created us, that we might be the empty vessels in which He could work out His beauty, His will, His love, and the likeness of His blessed Son.  That is what God is for, to work in us by His mighty operation, without one moment’s ceasing.  When I begin to get hold of that, I no longer think of the true Christian life as a high impossibility, and an unnatural thing, but I say, “It is the