God's intervention is his condescension.
"Bow thy heavens, and come down." This prayer follows on the acknowledgment of man's frailty and transitoriness. His sphere is altogether below God, who must stoop down to help him. God's intervention involving his condescension may be illustrated in several spheres. To create material things; to remedy the disturbance of things; to provide for the wants of things; to recover self-ruined things;—all involve the Divine condescension.
I. TO CREATE MATERIAL THINGS. We want the mind of a Hindu philosopher in order to conceive of God as an absolute, uncaused, unrelated, independent existence; eternally and infinitely happy in himself, without what we call "personality," because without relations. Just in the measure in which we can conceive such a being, we can realize his condescension in coming out of the abstract into the concrete, and making, and putting himself into relation with, a world of things.
II. TO REMEDY THE DISTURBANCE OF THINGS. Once let things be in any sense separate from himself; once let there be forces (which we call laws) in nature, and free-will in man, and God's order will be sure to get disturbed. But he may be sublimely indifferent to the disorder in his creation. It is his condescension that he is the constant Rectifier of the difficulties and disasters which come in his creation.
III. TO PROVIDE FOR THE WANTS OF THINGS. What impresses us so greatly is the minuteness of attention which creation daily needs. We bow ourselves to do a thousand insignificant but necessary things in our households. How God must bow himself to guard the life of every grass-blade, and to feed every gnat that hums in the summer evening!
IV. TO RECOVER RUINED THINGS. This brings to view the havoc which man's sin has made in individual lives and in God's fair world of things. For there is a ruin of the world which answers to the self-ruin of man. Why should not God let things go, and leave men to ruin themselves, and the world in which they dwell, if they please to do so? He is not bound to intervene. If he does, it can only be in condescending love.—R.T.
The known God and the unknown foe.
"Stretch forth thine hand from above; rescue me out of the hand of strangers." This is but saying, "I do not know those who trouble me, but I do know thee."
I. ALL AROUND US IS THE UNKNOWN.
1. There is so little that we can understand. Spite of all the attainments of science, the "known" today bears no comparison at all to the "unknown." The philosopher has but scooped up in his shell a little of the water of the great ocean of truth. The mute a man knows, the more he feels how little he knows. We need not be philosophers, and argue that man never does know more than phenomena, the accidents of things; it is enough to see that, concerning almost everything, a child can ask questions which the wisest man cannot answer.
2. There is so much that never comes into the field of human thought at all. For we have no right to say that the laws which we apprehend as controlling the movements of nature are the only laws that control them. We are constantly baffled by intimations of the working of laws of which we know nothing at all.
3. And the human experience through which we have to pass is hopelessly unknown to us. Known to no man are his coming positions, relations, friends, or foes. Every day every man has to say to himself, "I have not gone this way heretofore." It just has to be accepted as the fact for every life, "We are of yesterday, and know nothing."
II. UP ABOVE US IS THE KNOWN. In a recent exhibition there was a very touching picture of an old farm-laborer, dressed in his smock-frock, and with a lined, wearied face that told of a long life of troubles, but over the seams and lines seemed to spread a soul-smile as, looking away through the clouds, he said, "Up beyond is the blue sky." It may be thus with every man. For the mind there is no rest; there is nothing but a fretful worrying with the surrounding unknown. But for the soul there is rest. It does not look around; it looks up, and knows God—knows as love can know, knows as trust can know. And that is the only satisfying knowledge. A man can only be an agnostic till his soul finds God; then he knows as souls only can know.—R.T.