And such a God is the God of love—­how He is it profits us not to ask, but rather let each consult his own heart and give his imagination leave to picture Him in the remoteness of the Universe, gazing down upon him with those myriad eyes of His that shine in the night-darkened heavens.  He in whom you believe, reader, He is your God, He who has lived with you and within you, who was born with you, who was a child when you were a child, who became a man according as you became a man, who will vanish when you yourself vanish, and who is your principle of continuity in the spiritual life, for He is the principle of solidarity among all men and in each man and between men and the Universe, and He is, as you are, a person.  And if you believe in God, God believes in you, and believing in you He creates you continually.  For in your essence you are nothing but the idea that God possesses of you—­but a living idea, because the idea of a God who is living and conscious of Himself, of a God-Consciousness, and apart from what you are in the society of God you are nothing.

How to define God?  Yes, that is our longing.  That was the longing of the man Jacob, when, after wrestling all the night until the breaking of the day with that divine visitant, he cried, “Tell me, I pray thee, thy name!” (Gen. xxxii. 29).  Listen to the words of that great Christian preacher, Frederick William Robertson, in a sermon preached in Trinity Chapel, Brighton, on the 10th of June, 1849:  “And this is our struggle—­the struggle.  Let any true man go down into the deeps of his own being, and answer us—­what is the cry that comes from the most real part of his nature?  Is it the cry for daily bread?  Jacob asked for that in his first communing with God—­preservation, safety.  Is it even this—­to be forgiven our sins?  Jacob had a sin to be forgiven, and in that most solemn moment of his existence he did not say a syllable about it.  Or is it this—­’Hallowed be Thy name’?  No, my brethren.  Out of our frail and yet sublime humanity, the demand that rises in the earthlier hours of our religion may be this—­’Save my soul’; but in the most unearthly moments it is this—­’Tell me thy name.’  We move through a world of mystery; and the deepest question is, What is the being that is ever near, sometimes felt, never seen; that which has haunted us from childhood with a dream of something surpassingly fair, which has never yet been realized; that which sweeps through the soul at times as a desolation, like the blast from the wings of the Angel of Death, leaving us stricken and silent in our loneliness; that which has touched us in our tenderest point, and the flesh has quivered with agony, and our mortal affections have shrivelled up with pain; that which comes to us in aspirations of nobleness and conceptions of superhuman excellence?  Shall we say It or He?  What is It?  Who is He?  Those anticipations of Immortality and God—­what are they?  Are they the mere throbbings of my own heart, heard and mistaken for a living something beside me?  Are they the sound of my own wishes, echoing through the vast void of Nothingness? or shall I call them God, Father, Spirit, Love?  A living Being within me or outside me?  Tell me Thy name, thou awful mystery of Loveliness!  This is the struggle of all earnest life."[43]