Other men come to them and say, ’Of course there is a God; and when the universe is destroyed, He will save a certain number of the elect, or orthodox.  Do you take care that you are among that number, and leave the rest to Him.’  But they answer, ’That may be true; but I want more.  I want the living God.’

They will say so very confusedly.  They will often not be able to make men understand their meaning.  Nay, they will say and do—­driven by despair—­very unwise things.  They will even fall down and worship the Holy Bread in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, and say, ’The living God is in that.  You have forbidden us, with your theories, to find the living God either in heaven or earth.  But somewhere He must be.  And in despair, we will fall back upon the old belief that He is in the wafer on the altar, and find there Him whom our souls must find, or be for ever without a home.’  Strange and sad, that that should be the last outcome of the century of mechanical philosophy.  But before we blame the doctrine as materialistic,—­which, I fear, it too truly is,—­we should remember that, for the last fifty years, the young have been taught more and more to be materialists; that they have been taught more and more to believe in a God who rules over Sundays, but not over week-day business; over the next world, but not over this; a God, in short, in whom men do not live, and move, and have their being.  They have been brought up, I say, unconsciously, but surely, as practical materialists, who make their senses the ground of all their knowledge; and therefore, when a revulsion happens to them, they are awakened to look for the living God—­they look for him instinctively in visible matter.

But for the living God thoughtful men will look more and more.  Physical science is forcing on them the question, Do we live, and move, and have our being in God?  Is there a real and perpetual communication between the visible and the invisible world, or is there not?  Are all the beliefs of man, from the earliest ages, that such there was, dreams and nothing more?  Is any religion whatsoever to be impossible henceforth?  And to find an answer, men will go, either backward to superstition, or forward into pantheism; for in atheism, whether practical or theoretical, they cannot abide.

The Bible says that those old beliefs, however partial or childish, were no dreams, but instincts of an eternal truth; that there is such a communication between the universe and the living God.  Prophets, Psalmists, Apostles, speak—­like our Nicene Creed—­of a Spirit of God, the Lord and Giver of Life, in words which are not pantheism, but are the very deliverance from pantheism, because they tell us that that Spirit proceeds, not merely from a Deity, not merely from a Creator, but from a Father in heaven, and from a Son who is His likeness and His Word.