In Him was life.  Out of His hand and heart is coming to us all the time all we are and all we have.  We may leave God practically out.  So many of us do.  But He never leaves us out.  The creating, sustaining touch of His Hand is ever upon each of us, upon all the world.

Though He cannot do all for us He would except as we gladly come and let Him.  What He is giving us is so much.  It’s our all.  Yet it is the smaller part.  There’s the fuller part.  This is the whole drive of John’s story, this fuller part.  Out of Him Jesus, into us will come the newer, the better, the abundant quality of life, if He may have His way.

And John adds,—­“and the life was the light of men." He was what we have.  He gives Himself; not things, but a person.  With God everything is personal.  We men go to the impersonal so much, or we try to.  We do our best at it.  We have a great genius for organization, especially in this western half of the earth.

As I came back from a four years’ absence from my own country, I was instantly conscious of a change.  Either my ears were changed or things about me were.  I think likely both.  But the wheels were going faster than ever.  There were more wheels, and their whir seemed never out of ear-shot.  Commercial wheels, and educational, philanthropic and religious, political and humanitarian, thicker and faster than ever, driving all day, and with almost no night there.

And the whole attempt is to make the machine do the thing with as little dependence as possible on the human element, even though the human element was never emphasized more.  Contradictory?  Yet there it is.  We men go to the impersonal.  Yet deep down in our hearts we hunger for the human touch, the warm personal touch.  This after all is the thing.  We all feel that.  Yet the whole crowding of life’s action is to crowd it out.

But with God everything is personal.  The life is the light of men.  What He is in Himself—­that is what He gives.  And this is all the light and life we ever have.  Men make botany.  God makes flowers breathing their freshening fragrance noiselessly up into your face.  Man makes astronomy.  God makes the stars, shaking their firelight out of the blue down into your wondering eyes on a clear moonless night.  Man makes theology.  And theology has its place, when it’s kept in its place. God gives us Jesus.

I don’t know much about botany.  My knowledge of astronomy is very limited.  And the more I read of theology, whether Western or Eastern, Latin Church or Greek, the first Seven Councils or the later ones, the more I stand perplexed.  It’s a thing fearsomely and wonderfully manufactured, this theology.  But I frankly confess to a great fondness for flowers, and for stars, and a love for Jesus that deepens ever more in reverential awe and in tenderness and grateful devotion.  The life was the light of men.  He Himself is all that we have.  We go to things.  We reckon worth and wealth by things.  He gives Himself.  And He asks, not things, but one’s self.