The God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob—is he really quite the same as our own God? our God of the womb of Mary, of the manger, of the wayside places in Palestine, and Mount Calvary, and now, of the silken-curtained Tabernacle, and the Blessed Eucharist, and the dear, ineffable moments of silent prayer—is he the same?
Of course we know that, literally and absolutely, he is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. Nevertheless, he appears to us under such different aspects that we find ourselves unintentionally contemplating the Old Testament as a revelation of the divine Being with very different emotions from those with which we contemplate him in the New Testament, and this, again, differing widely from our view of him in the church. It may be a mere matter of feeling, perhaps; but it is nevertheless a feeling which materially influences our form of devotion, the vigor of our faith, and the power of our hope and love.
If we could take in all these different impressions and amalgamate them; if we could group them together, or make them like the several rays of light directed into one focus, we should obtain a more complete and a more influential knowledge of God than we can do while we seem rather to be wandering out of one view of him into another, as if we walked from chamber to chamber and closed each door behind us.
Now, the only way we can arrive at this is by bearing in mind that the acts of God in governing the world are not momentary and solitary facts, but continuous acts, or rather one continuous act.
Our difficulty lies in producing a visibly satisfactory harmony in our own minds as regards the acts of God, and thus (though for our own appreciation of them, they are to us broken up into fragments, or, in other terms, into separate facts) arriving at the same mental attitude towards them as though we saw them as one continuous act.
It will aid us in our search if we, first of all, endeavor to qualify that act.
Its very continuity, its perpetual instantaneousness, must essentially affect its character and make the definition no complex matter. It is an act of love, and it is revealed as such in the whole creation, and in the way God has let himself down to us and is drawing us up unto himself. There have been many apparent modifications, but there have been no actual contradictions, in this characteristic; for even the existence of evil works round to greater good, to a degree sufficiently obvious to us for us to know that where it is less obvious it must nevertheless follow the same law. For law is everywhere; because God is law, though law is not God.
Modern unbelief substitutes law for God, and then thinks it has done away with him. To us who believe it makes no difference how far back in the long continuous line of active forces we may find the original and divine Author of all force. It is nothing but the weakness of our imagination which makes it more difficult to count by millions than by units.
What does it matter to our faith through how many developments the condition of creation, as we now see it all around us, may have passed, when we know that the first idea sprang from the great Source of all law, and that with him the present state is as much one continuous act as the past state and the future state? You may trace back the whole material universe, if you will, to the one first molecule of chaotic matter; but so long as I find that first molecule in the hand of my Creator (and I defy you to put it anywhere else), it is enough for my faith.
You do not make him one whit the less my Creator and my God because an initial law or force, with which he then stamped it, has worked it out to what I now see it. You may increase the apparent distance between the world as it is actually and the divine Fount from whence it sprang; you may seem to remove the creative love which called the universe into existence further off, by thus lengthening the chain of what you call developments; but, after all, these developments are for ever bridged over by the ulterior intentions of the Triune Deity when he said,“Let us make man in our image,” and by the fact that space and time are mere accidents as viewed in relation to the Qui Est. They are, so to speak, divinely-constituted conventionalities, through which the Divinity touches upon our human condition, but which in no way affect the Divine Essence as it is in itself. On the contrary, in the broken-up developments and evolutions which you believe you trace, and which you want to make into a blind law which shall supersede a divine Creator, I see only the pulsations of time breaking up the perpetually instantaneous act of God, just as I see the pulsations of light in the one unbroken ray. The act of God passes through the medium of time before it reaches our ken; and the ray of light passes through the medium of air before it strikes our senses; but both are continuous and instantaneous.