How to define God? Yes, that is our longing. That was the longing of the
man Jacob, when, after wrestling all the night until the breaking of the
day with that divine visitant, he cried, "Tell me, I pray thee, thy
name!" (Gen. xxxii. 29). Listen to the words of that great Christian
preacher, Frederick William Robertson, in a sermon preached in Trinity
Chapel, Brighton, on the 10th of June, 1849: "And this is our
struggle--_the_ struggle. Let any true man go down into the deeps of his
own being, and answer us--what is the cry that comes from the most real
part of his nature? Is it the cry for daily bread? Jacob asked for that
in his _first_ communing with God--preservation, safety. Is it even
this--to be forgiven our sins? Jacob had a sin to be forgiven, and in
that most solemn moment of his existence he did not say a syllable about
it. Or is it this--'Hallowed be Thy name'? No, my brethren. Out of our
frail and yet sublime humanity, the demand that rises in the earthlier
hours of our religion may be this--'Save my soul'; but in the most
unearthly moments it is this--'Tell me thy name.' We move through a
world of mystery; and the deepest question is, What is the being that is
ever near, sometimes felt, never seen; that which has haunted us from
childhood with a dream of something surpassingly fair, which has never
yet been realized; that which sweeps through the soul at times as a
desolation, like the blast from the wings of the Angel of Death,
leaving us stricken and silent in our loneliness; that which has
touched us in our tenderest point, and the flesh has quivered with
agony, and our mortal affections have shrivelled up with pain; that
which comes to us in aspirations of nobleness and conceptions of
superhuman excellence? Shall we say It or He? What is It? Who is He?
Those anticipations of Immortality and God--what are they? Are they the
mere throbbings of my own heart, heard and mistaken for a living
something beside me? Are they the sound of my own wishes, echoing
through the vast void of Nothingness? or shall I call them God, Father,
Spirit, Love? A living Being within me or outside me? Tell me Thy name,
thou awful mystery of Loveliness! This is the struggle of all earnest
life.
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