There are those who think they must be atheists because they cannot
believe in the God of the Hebrews, the God of the Old Testament--a
limited personality. But the genuine atheists are more likely to be
those who are without a sense of the divine, because they have taken
definitions and descriptions prepared by others instead of seeking
truth for themselves.

We are but poor learners of those ancient teachers if we have not
discovered that their greatest lesson to us is not truth, as they had
found it, but the blessing of the persistent search after truth. To
cherish as final past presentations of truth is to be false to its
present possibilities.

We do not need to worry over definitions of the divine. We do need to
cultivate the temper of mind and the sensitiveness of spirit that will
save us from blindness to the higher facts of life, that will save us
from the blasting whirlwind of materialism, with its sense of nothing
but a soulless world of things.

We need to avoid the mind that shuts the divine up in some far off
heaven to be reached only by formal telephony called prayer; that fails
to see the infinite in all things--in sunlight and flower, in
children's laughter, and in misery's wail, in factories and stores, as
well as in churches. We need the mind that argues not about
omnipresence, but in duty and delight cries, Always and everywhere,
Thou art near.


THE GREAT INSPIRATION