Levels of Living | Page 6

not by whether it is pleasant or looks respectable, but by whether it is the work in which we know the Lord of all can lay His hand to the tool or weapon alongside of our hands.
With a consciousness like this, one attempts anything. The practical question is not, "Can this be done?" but "Ought this to be done?" "Is it such a task as will enlist the co?peration of the eternal spirit of truth and right?" With the cry of Gideon on their lips, men have fared forth facing fearful odds; their hands have fallen from their swords, but the unseen hand has carried them on until the cause has won.
The Almighty, who would have love and peace and righteousness to prevail, needs your hand for His sword; the sword of the Lord is vain without Gideon. Ideals and spiritual forces may exist, but men must be their realizations, their visible hands. God's work waits for you to put your hand to the sword; you will find His already there.
This helping hand is always unseen; spiritual things are often apparently unreal. God cannot be reduced to figures nor to material elements. This hand that works with ours may mean one thing to one and another to another. What we all need is to simply grasp the great fact of the spiritual forces that strengthen every good resolve, that give vigour in every good work, and give victory at last to the right.

THE ONE IN THE MIDST
There are always a thousand blind men to one who can see. All have eyes, but not all have vision. The things we most need and the things for which we most long are often nearest to us, while we, with eyes fast shut, grope our way to the place where we think they ought to be. The best things are the things we miss. The crowd by the fords of the Jordan was longing to see the Messiah; yet of them all there was only one, the son of the desert, who saw that He was actually with them already. John had eyes that pierced the husk of things. He looked on this son of the carpenter and a thousand years of prophecy sank into insignificance beside its fulfillment; the multitude became as nothing beside the all glorious Son of Man. He alone knew his Lord, because he alone looked with eyes of love.
John announced the sublime central truth that all the world's great seers have declared; God is in His world. Man is an animal who seeks God; he finds Him when his eyes are opened. Some are looking for Him in the records of His ways with men; many are hoping to see Him in some other world; a few see Him by their side.
Some, priding themselves on their spiritual vision, and boastingly describing God as He was or God as He will be, have eyes of stone when it comes to seeing God as He is. They do not stop to think that we want a God in the present tense--a God in our homes, on our streets, in our affairs. And others say, this thing is unthinkable, for, if you say that this is a spiritual presence, you at once remove the whole question from touch with real things.
They forget that the most real things lie beyond the senses. Who ever saw mother-love? Yet who will not believe in it? Ambition, affection, pity, memory, hope; these are the real things, the lasting things; these are the spiritual things. No one ever saw these things, and yet they can be seen everywhere; it only needs the vision; we all have seen them at times.
There are the selfish, gross, and sensual who tell us there is no love in the world; and there are those to whom every common bush is aflame with God. So hearts that have forsaken the good see nothing but a God-forsaken world; and, in this same world, hearts that are lifted up find Him everywhere, they see Him in the movements of history, in the forces of nature, they hear Him in the hum of commerce and in the silence of the fields, in every human voice they catch His tone. He is ever in the midst. He is more than a force, a dream, a thought. He is to men to-day what He was to men when He walked their streets and touched their sick; all that we think He would have been in that long ago He is to-day.
Personal? Yes, that He may reach persons, for we cannot know impersonal love or impersonal help. His personality turns the universe from an institution into an organism. Yet more than personal; this one in the midst is infinite; He is the whole where we are but