children. The cross on Calvary is a picture of the age-long and present sacrifice of our God as He suffers with and for us. The open grave is for us the symbol of His unconquerable love, stronger than the world and sin and death. God's embodiment of Himself in this Son, made in all points like ourselves, attests the essential kinship between Him and us—God's humanity and our potential divinity.
Do we know God in the Spirit? His incarnation in Jesus evidences His "incarnability," and His eagerness to have His fulness dwell in every son who will receive Him. To know God in the Spirit is so to follow Jesus that we share His sonship with the Father and have Him abiding in us, working through us His works, manifesting Himself in our mortal lives.
Our Father is the great public Spirit of the universe, the most responsible and responsive Being in existence. The needs of all are claims on His service, their sins are burdens of guilt on His conscience, their joys and woes enlist His sympathy. He has His life in the lives of His children. The Spirit is God's Life in men, God living in
them. To possess His will to serve, His sense of obligation, His interest and compassion, is to have the Holy Spirit dwelling and regnant in us. It was so that the Father's Spirit possessed Jesus and made His abode in Him; and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and of the Son in the Christian community.
And what a difference it makes whether we feel that the responsibilities our consciences force us to assume, the sympathies in which our hearts go out, the interests we are impelled to take, the resolves and longings and purposes within us, are just our own, or are God's inspirations! If they are simply ours, who knows what will come of them? If they are His, we can yield to them assured that it is God who worketh in us to will and to do of His good pleasure.
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."