it is not limited to reason.  In employing his intellect in the search for truth a student is drawing nearer to the Christ who said, “I am the way, the truth and the life.”  We talk a great deal about Christ as the way and Christ as the life, but there is a side of Christ especially for the student:  “I am the truth,” and every student ought to be a truth-lover and a truth-seeker for Christ’s sake.

II.

Another element in life, which of course is first in importance, is God.

The Angelus is perhaps the most religious picture painted this century.  You cannot look at it and see that young man standing in the field with his hat off, and the girl opposite him with her hands clasped and her head bowed on her breast, without feeling a sense of God.

Do we carry about with us the thought of God wherever we go?  If not, we have missed the greatest part of life.  Do we have a conviction of God’s abiding presence wherever we are?  There is nothing more needed in this generation than a larger and more Scriptural idea of God.  A great American writer has told us that when he was a boy the conception of God which he got from books and sermons was that of a wise and very strict lawyer.  I remember well the awful conception of God which I had when a boy.  I was given an illustrated edition of Watts’ hymns, in which God was represented as a great piercing eye in the midst of a great black thunder cloud.  The idea which that picture gave to my young imagination was that of God as a great detective, playing the spy upon my actions, as the hymn says: 

    “Writing now the story of what little children do.”

That was a very mistaken and harmful idea which it has taken me years to obliterate.  We think of God as “up there,” or as one who made the world six thousand years ago and then retired.  We must learn that He is not confined either to time or space.  God is not to be thought of as merely back there in time, or up there in space.  If not, where is He?  “The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth.”  The Kingdom of God is within you, and God Himself is among men.  When are we to exchange the terrible, far-away, absentee God of our childhood for the everywhere present God of the Bible?  Too many of the old Christian writers seem to have conceived of God as not much more than the greatest man—­a kind of divine emperor.  He is infinitely more; He is a spirit, as Jesus said to the woman at the well, and in Him we live and move and have our being.  Let us think of God as Immanuel—­God with us—­an ever-present, omnipresent, eternal One.  Long, long ago, God made matter, then He made the flowers and trees and animals, then He made man.  Did He stop?  Is God dead?  If He lives and acts what is He doing?  He is

          MAKING MEN BETTER.

He it is that “worketh in you.”  The buds of our nature are not all out yet; the sap to make them comes from the God who made us, from the indwelling Christ.  Our bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost, and we must bear this in mind, because the sense of God is kept up, not by logic, but by experience.