because in Christ, and Christ alone, God gets the "underhold" on human nature and lifts it into acceptable communion with Himself. Why, when I read the Annunciation, the Magnificat, the Benedictus, the Nunc Dimittis, my imagination takes fire and I seem to go over the top of things into the presence of the pre-incarnate purpose and counsel. "The fullness of time hath come," said God, "and I, the Creative Word, am going to earth to become flesh." Instantly the heavenly societies were thrown into a tumult of holy eagerness and excitement. Gabriel, Raphael, Michael, and Uriel-archangels dazzling with "bright shoots of everlastingness"-approached the throne of God and prayed: "Grant unto us, O Jehovah, the privilege of descending to earth that we may work out the salvation of man.” But God said: "No! You shining ones may have part in the work; you may be couriers announcing the Good News to come; but no archangel can take My place-I, the Eternal and Everlasting God, must undertake this mission Myself." Next came cherubim and seraphim, praying that they might come to earth for man's redemption. But they were likewise restrained by the redemptive passion surging in the Divine Nature. "No," said God, "you are ministering spirits to the heirs of salvation; you may sing in Time, as you have sung in Eternity, the glory of Heaven's disclosure to the sons of men; but neither archangel nor angel nor seraph nor cherub may take My place in yonder manger."

Therefore, when God looked the universe through and wondered that there was none to help or uphold, His own arm brought salvation. And behold! that Holy Thing, that made a woman cry and angels sing, hath mysteriously come from behind the stars into our humanity and worn it up the Hills of Light, whence it began, and toward which the whole creation moves. Thanks be to God for His Unspeakable Gift!

VI

TWO PICTURES OF GOD*

"The eternal God is thy dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms."-DEUT. Xxxiii. 27.

G

OD'S forward movements for the world

are first sown, like seeds, in the rich soil

of great human personality. Intrusting His thoughts and purposes to a perceiving and responsive human, God introduces new epochs and larger orders for the groping millions. Thus, certain aspects of the Divine Mind got their foothold in our racial consciousness through a man named Moses. It is a part of the pathos of the Deity that He is compelled to wait for a man ample and tall enough to reach up and lay hold of His purposes and bring them down to earth. According to our methods of computation, the August Father waited a long time for Moses to come along, seize God's thoughts, and make them current coin for all generations. Therefore, to measure Moses, and all opulent humans, we must consider their infinite backgrounds, their relations to God. Ultimately, men are big or little according as their thoughts of God are big or little. "Learn to think magnificently of God,"

*Preached in Tompkins Avenue Congregational Church, March 10, 1918.

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pleaded William Law. So Moses walks the centuries in his imperial ideas of God. It is not enough to say that his vision of God was millenniums in advance of his generation; we must add that, in certain spiritual and ethical conceptions, Moses has not, and can never be, outgrown, because his are the foundations of morality.

My text is an instance of Moses' mighty vision of God. His life work is done; he has "laid the world away"; his leadership is to be taken by another. How does he behave? Is he querulous, fretful, jealous? Does he think the world is going to smash because he has received orders to retire? Not at all! Death affords him opportunity to assert the poise, serenity, and majesty of his triumphant faith and regnant personality. Speaking to his people, he says: "The eternal God is thy dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms." Richard Watson Gilder defines the sonnet as "a little picture painted well." Here, then, in this poetry of Heaven, is not one, but two, pictures of God; and they are not little, though they are painted exceedingly well.

I

In this first thought of God—a kind of medallion of Deity-we have God pictured as a home: "The eternal God is thy dwelling-place." The phrase is rich in itself, but the ideas it contains are of that superlative quality which partakes of all true thinking of God. The foremost idea is,

of course, personality. Unless we are to relinquish our mental and spiritual grip upon the very idea of God, we must think of Him in terms of personalism. "Complete personality," says Lotze, "can be in God only, while to man can belong but a weak and faint copy thereof." Certainly our own knowledge or experience of personality does not compass the personality of God. Far from it! Rather, He is all that we can think or imagine of the best in human personality, and so much more that thought and imagination are dazzled by the overwhelming richness of His nature. And if there be those who are constrained to pity us for such anthropomorphous notions, they are simply wasting pity upon the laws essential to human thought. Moreover, the supremely satisfying apology for anthropomorphism is the Incarnation itself. God became flesh that we might assuredly know and believe that He is not altogether unlike personality as we see its manifestations in human beings. You think, you feel, you will: that is your badge of personality. Is there, then, no such thing as thought, emotion, will, in the being of God? Verily, God is the self-conscious Person-Thinker, Lover, Actor-who wears the universe as a garment.

The second idea is permanence. "The eternal God," says Moses. The phrase must have struck into the Hebrew consciousness with delicious poignancy. The Jews to whom Moses spoke were a nomadic people, dwelling in tents. They were here today, on the morrow they were gone, hav