it makes our experience richer and clearer, remembering that it is only a man-made attempt to interpret Him who passeth understanding.  The important matter is not the orthodoxy of our doctrine, but the richness of our personal experience of God.  Dr. Samuel Johnson said:  “We all know what light is; but it is not so easy to tell what it is.”  Christians know, at least in part, what God is; but it is far from easy to state what He is; and each age must revise and say in its own words what God means to it.  Here is a statement in which generations of believers have summed up their intercourse with the Divine.  Have we entered into the fulness of their fellowship with God?

Do we know Him as our Father?  This does not mean merely that we accept the idea of His kinship with our spirits and trust His kindly disposition towards us; but that we let Him establish a direct line of paternity with us and father our impulses, our thoughts, our ideals, our resolves.  Jesus’ sonship was not a relation due to a past contact, but to a present connection.  He kept taking His Being, so to speak, again and again from God, saying, “Not as I will, but as Thou wilt.”  His every wish and motive had its heredity in the Father whom He trusted with childlike confidence, and served with a grown son’s intelligent and willing comradeship.  Fatherhood meant to Jesus authority and affection; obedience and devotion on His part maintained and perfected His sonship.

Further, we cannot, according to Jesus, be in sonship with this Father save as we are in true brotherhood with all His children.  God is (to employ a colloquial phrase) “wrapped up” in His sons and daughters, and only as we love and serve them, are we loving and serving Him.  In Jesus’ summary of the Law He combined two apparently conflicting obligations, when He said, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thou shalt love thy neighbor.”  If a man loves God with his all, how can there be any remainder of love to devote to someone else?  What we do for any man—­the least, the last, the lost,—­we do for God.  We do not know Him as Father, until we possess the obligating sense of our kinship with all mankind, and say, “Our Father.”

Do we know God in the Son?  There is a sense in which Jesus is the “First Person” in the Christian Trinity.  Our approach to God begins with Him.  In St. Paul’s familiar benediction, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ precedes the love of God.  We know God’s love only as we experience the grace of Jesus.  We cannot experience that grace except as we let Jesus be Lord.  Absolute and entire self-commitment to Him allows Him to renew us after His own likeness and equip us for service in His cause.  He cannot transform a partially devoted life, nor use a half-dedicated man.  Those who yield Him lordship, treating Him as God by giving Him their adoring trust and complete obedience, discover His Godhood.  To them He proves Himself, by all that He accomplishes in and through them, worthy of their fullest devotion and reverence.  He becomes to them God manifest in a human life.