I can’t understand what must be in a man’s mind if he doesn’t feel seriously that there is a God when he sees the sun rise. It must at times occur to him that there are eternal things, or else he must push his face into the dirt like a sow. For it’s incredible that they [the planets] be observed to move without inquiring whether there isn’t somebody who moves them.
“Where is God? Where can I find him?” we ask. We don’t realize that’s like a fish swimming frantically through the ocean in search of the ocean.
We demand proof of God, forgetting that if we could prove God we would be within the compass of our rationalities, and then our logical mind would be our own grotesque god.
Some persons believe everything that their kindred, their parents, and their tutors believe. The veneration and the love which they have for their ancestors incline them to swallow down all their opinions at once, without examining what truth or falsehood there is in them. Men take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.
None but the Triune God that was fully represented by the personhood of Jesus Christ while He walked on the Earth will ever meet man’s spiritual need.
An impersonal God —well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads—better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap—best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband—that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (‘Man’s search for God’!) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?
The loving service which God sends His people into the world to render includes both evangelism and social action, for each is in itself an authentic expression of love, and neither needs the other to justify it.
There is one single fact to which we may oppose to all the wit and argument of being an atheist or agnostic namely, that no man ever repented of being a Christian on his death bed.
A glass window stands before us. We raise our eyes and see the glass; we note its quality, and observe its defects; we speculate on its composition. Or we look straight through it on the great prospect of land and sea and sky beyond. So there are two ways of looking at the world. We may see the world and absorb ourselves in the wonders of nature. That is the scientific way. Or we may look right through the world and see God behind it. That is the religious [Christian] way.
The best way to show that a stick is crooked is not to argue about it or to spend time denouncing it, but to lay a straight stick alongside it.