NewThoughtLibrary.com / DivineLibrary.org

that is of value, not the doctrine that God and nature, or God and the soul are one. The experience of the presence of God has been a very real fact all through the ages. Hence the rhapsodies and poetic effusions of the mystics are in a sense religiously true, that is, in so far as they are regarded as descriptions of experience. But pantheism is poor philosophy, and mysticism is not ethics. When it is a question of what is real, what is true and what is right, one must turn from mere description to rational thought. The revelation of God in the realm of reason is far superior to the mere revelation of immediate feeling. The pantheists meant to utter something noble and true, but it has remained for the Christian theist really to express it. The Father-son relationship is the great fact. It is the upward look, the worship, the reverence that truly finds the Father--not the mystical merging of all that is beautiful into a vague whole. Hence the vast superiority of the revelation which makes God known as love.

It is not, then, the argument for God's existence that avails. It is not the mere theory, for that may be untrue to the supreme facts. It is the life, the love, the experience. He who can appreciatively suggest the relationship of the soul in the act of worship, in the fulness of love, is the one who most truly lays the foundations of theology, Only by persistently returning to the