A man may look another in the face for a hundred years and not know him.
Men _have_ looked Jesus Christ in the face, and not known either Him or
his Father. It was needful that He should appear, to begin the knowing
of Him, but speedily was His visible presence taken away, that it might
not become, as assuredly it would have become, a veil to hide from men
the Father of their spirits. Do you long for the assurance of some
sensible sign? Do you ask why no intellectual proof is to be had? I tell
you that such would but delay, perhaps altogether impair for you, that
better, that best, that only vision, into which at last your world must
blossom--such a contact, namely, with the heart of God Himself, such a
perception of His being, and His absolute oneness with you, the child of
His thought, the individuality softly parted from His spirit, yet living
still and only by His presence and love, as, by its own radiance, will
sweep doubt away forever. Being then in the light and knowing it, the
lack of intellectual proof concerning that which is too high for it,
will trouble you no more than would your inability to silence a
metaphysician who declared that you had no real existence. It is for the
sake of such vision as God would give that you are denied such vision as
you would have. The Father of our spirits is not content that we should
know Him as we now know each other. There is a better, closer, nearer
than any human way of knowing, and to that He is guiding us across all
the swamps of our unteachableness, the seas of our faithlessness, the
desert of our ignorance. It is so very hard that we should have to wait
for that which we can not yet receive? Shall we complain of the shadows
cast upon our souls by the hand and the napkin polishing their mirrors
to the receiving of the more excellent glory! Have patience, children of
the Father. Pray always and do not faint. The mists and the storms and
the cold will pass--the sun and the sky are for evermore. There were no
volcanoes and no typhoons but for the warm heart of the earth, the soft