Man is an intellectual being.  I need not quote the praises of knowledge in the Old Testament.  They must be fresh in your mind.  But the practical Peter writes, “giving all diligence add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge.”  And Paul prays that the love of the Ephesians may “abound more and more in knowledge and in all judgment.”  But the important knowledge is the knowledge of God, and of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Master.  And similarly science emphasizes that the chief end of all knowledge is that we should know the environment to which we are to conform.  Knowledge is useful to strengthen and clarify the mind, that it may see and conform to truth and God:  and if it fails to become a means to conformity, it has failed of the chief, and practically the only, end for which it was intended.  We are to come “in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”  But knowledge which only puffs up and distracts the mind from the great aims and ends which it should serve is rebuked with equal emphasis by the Bible and by science.

I would not claim that we have set too high a value upon knowledge, perhaps we cannot; but there is something far higher on which we are inclined to set far too low a value.  This is righteousness and love; and true wisdom is knowledge permeated, vivified, and transfigured by devotion to these higher ends.  And in this highest realm of the mind feeling and will rule conjointly.  Love is a feeling which always will and must find its way to activity through the will, and it is an activity of the will roused by the very deepest feeling, inspired by a worthy object.  If you try to divorce them, both die.  Hence Paul can say, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing.”  And John goes, if possible, even farther and says, “Every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.  He that loveth not, knoweth not God; for God is love.”  And this sort of love bears and believes and hopes and endures, and never fails.  And for this reason the Bible lays such tremendous emphasis on the heart, not as the centre of emotion alone, but as the seat of will as well.  And science points to the same end, though she sees it afar off.

And what of God?  God is a Spirit, Creator, Author, and Finisher of all things, and filling all.  But while omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, these are not the characteristics emphasized in the Bible.  He is righteous.  “Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?” is the grand question of the father of the faithful.  And when Moses prays God to show him his glory, God answers, “I will make all my goodness pass before thee.”  He is the “refuge of Israel,” the “everlasting arms” underneath them, pitying them “as a father pitieth his children.”  And in the New Testament we are bidden to pray to our Father, who is love, and whose temple is the heart of whosoever will receive him.  Truly a very personal being.