Our faith in God as Self-imparting by His Spirit makes possible our confident expectation that He can and will incarnate Himself socially in the whole family of His children, as once He was incarnate in Jesus.  Christians who devote themselves to fashioning social relations after the mind of Christ, and inspiring their brethren with His faith and purpose, are conscious that through them the Spirit of God is entering more and more into His world, revealing the Father in the new community of love, which is being born.  Sir Edward Burne-Jones once wrote:  “That was an awful word of Ruskin’s, that artists paint God for the world.  There’s a lump of greasy pigment at the end of Michael Angelo’s hog-bristle brush, and by the time it has been laid on the stucco, there is something there, that all men with eyes recognize as Divine.  Think what it means:  it is the power of bringing God into the world—­making God manifest!” Men and women who are molding homes and industries, towns and nations, so that they embody love, and influencing for righteousness the least and lowest of the children of men, are putting before a whole world’s eyes the Divine, are helping build the habitation of God in the Spirit.  Through them God imparts Himself to mankind.

God over all—­the Father to whom we look up with utter trust, and from whom moment by moment we take our lives in obedient devotion; God through all—­through Jesus supremely, and through every child who opens his life to Him with the willingness of Jesus; God in all—­the directing, empowering, sanctifying Spirit, producing in us characters like Christ’s, employing and equipping us for the work of His Kingdom, and revealing Himself in a community more and more controlled by love:  this is our Christian thought of the Divine—­“one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”

CHAPTER V

THE CROSS

The human life in which succeeding generations have found their picture of God ended in a bloody tragedy.  It was a catastrophe which all but wrecked the loyalty of Jesus’ little group of followers; it was an event which proved a stumbling block in their endeavor to win their countrymen to their Lord, and which seemed folly to the great mass of outsiders in the Roman world.  It was a most baffling circumstance for them to explain either to themselves or to others; but, as they lived on under the control of their Lord’s Spirit, this tragedy came gradually to be for them the most richly significant occurrence in His entire history; and ever since the cross has been the distinctive symbol of the Christian faith.  It had a variety of meanings for the men of the New Testament; and it has had many more for their followers in subsequent centuries.  We are not limited to viewing it through the eyes of others, nor to interpreting it with their thoughts.  We are enriched as we try to share their experiences of its power and light; but we must go to Calvary for ourselves, and look at the Crucified with the eyes of our own hearts, and ask ourselves of what that cross convinces us.