Now, out of these depths of human life, these vast antinomies of the spirit, has arisen man’s belief in a Saviour-God.  Sublime and awful are the sanctions upon which it rests.  Out of the extremity and definiteness of our need we know that He must be and we know what He must be like.  He is the One to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, from whom no secrets are hid.  Who could state the mingling of desire and dread with which men strive after, and hide from, such a God?  We want Him, yet until we have Him how we fear Him.  For that inclusive knowledge of us which is God, if only we can bear to come to it, endows us with freedom.  For then all the barriers are down, there is nothing to conceal, nothing to explain, nothing to hold back.  Then reality and appearance coincide, character and condition correspond.  I am what I am before Him.  Supreme reality from without answers and completes my own, and makes me real, and my reality makes me free.

But if He thus knows me, and through that knowledge every inner inhibition melts in His presence and every damning secret’s out, and all my life is spread like an open palm before His gaze, and I am come at last, through many weary roads, unto my very self, why then I can let go, I can relinquish myself.  The dreadful tension’s gone and in utter surrender the soul is poured out, until, spent and expressed, rest and peace flood back into the satisfied life.  So the life is free; so the life is bound.  So a man stands upon his feet; so he clings to the Rock that is higher than he.  So the life is cleansed in burning light; so the soul is hid in the secret of God’s presence.  So men come to themselves; so men lose themselves in the Eternal.  There is perfect freedom at last because we have attained to complete captivity.  There is power accompanied by peace.  That is the gift which the vision of a God, morally separate from, morally other than we, brings to the inward strife, the spiritual agony of the world.  This is the need which that faith satisfies.  It is, I suppose, in this exulting experience of moral freedom and spiritual peace which comes to those men who make the experiment of faith that they, for the most part, find their sufficient proof of the divine reality.  Who ever doubted His existence who could cry with all that innumerable company of many kindreds and peoples and tongues: 

  “He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay;
  And he set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings. 
  And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God.”

Here, then, is the preaching which is religious.  How foolish are we not to preach it more!  How trivial and impertinent it is to question the permanence of the religious interpretation of the world!  What a revelation of personal insignificance it is to fail to revere the majesty of the devout and aspiring life!  That which a starved and restless and giddy world has lost is this pool of quietness, this tower