51st Psalm is as fresh as on the day it was written and on the day of his conversion any man, be he Englishman, Kafir, Chinaman or Hindoo, can understand the 12th Chapter of Isaiah. Indeed one of the chief objects of reading the Bible should be to compare and contrast the examples of God's dealings with souls which are described in it with the examples of His dealings which we ourselves observe in daily life. Nothing gives such interest to our Bible study as the discovery of something in the life of one of the patriarchs, prophets, or saints of which we can say Why after all that is no different from what happened to so and so whom I knew well." And equally nothing so deepens in us a sense of the realitythe "objectivity " if I may borrow a word from philosophy of religion as to find our own religious experience explained and justified in Holy Scripture. Let us examine one or two typical examples of mystical religious experience.

Take the wonderful dialogue between God and Moses recorded in Exodus xxxiii, verse 12 to the end. Read the passage carefully and you will notice, in the experience described, the following elements:

(i) Moses, oppressed by a sense of his own weakness, and of the magnitude of his task, cries to God "If Thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence." And God replies "My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest."

(ii) When God assures Moses of His protection and help He says "Thou hast found grace in my sight and I know thee by name." That is to say Moses has a deep sense of God's knowledge of, and interest in, him as an individual whom He knows personally.

(iii) Moses asks to see God's glory, but God, passing this request by without comment, promises that all His goodness shall be revealed to him.

(iv) Moses, desiring to see God, is hidden in a cleft in the rock, shadowed by God's hand, and it is not till the hand is removed, and God has passed by, that he sees God already passed, "for My face shall not be seen."

Can we recognise in these various elements of religious experience anything which we might expect to meet with to-day? Surely we may. Let us take them one by one.

That man can, and does, speak to God, and hear His answer, needs no proof. Saints in every age bear witness to this experience as the most vital in their lives. But one example I may give. A young officer in the Flying Corps once said to me "I suppose we all know what it is to go on our knees to pray for something we intensely desire, and to rise from our knees quite content not to have it." Yes, that is an experience which if not all, at any rate very many people, have had. But how would it be possible unless the person who prayed had heard God saying: "That I cannot grant. Trust Me; it is better for you not to have it," or unless He had shewed His child some better object of desire? If prayer is not real communion with God, real intercourse involving listening to His voice as well as speaking to Him, it is nothing.

And as there is no need to labour the point that we can both speak to God and also hear Him answering, so there is little need to show by examples drawn either from history or daily life, that men seeking to God in times of

anxiety and of stress do find Him always quick to answer My presence shall go with thee and I will give thee rest." When a friend asked General Gordon if he were not afraid to go all alone to China, where he did the great work which earned him his title of "Chinese Gordon," he replied, "But I am not going alone. My Saviour will go with me." And Marshal Foch, insisting on time for attendance at his Mass, in the most critical days of the war, and Lord Kitchener, turning into a London church for a short time for quiet prayer on his way daily to the War Office, are examples of men who, feeling the strain and the burden, cried to God "If Thy presence go not with us carry us not up hence."

But what shall we say of the second element we noted, of the sense of God's individual knowledge of, and love for, the soul? Rightly understood this is, I believe, one of the most fundamental experiences of religion, and one of the most universal. Let me take an example. I was speaking to one of my lads of the dreadful experience of a chaplain whose first duty in France was to prepare for death a young soldier who was to be shot for cowardice. My friend said "I can understand it. I once nearly gave way to panic myself. I'd been under bombardment once or twice myself and come through all right. And then one day I had a panic. It's no good my trying to explain to you what I felt, for no one can know till he has experienced it. And then, all of a sudden, when in another moment I should have thrown away my rifle and run, it passed. Suddenly I knew-no, I did not think, you can't think at a time like that; I just knew-that God had His eye on me, and that if I were blown to atoms that moment it would

not matter. God seemed to say to me 'Out of all the millions fighting on all the fronts I have My eye on you, and if you die this minute it won't matter; I shall take care of you.' After that I often felt afraid, but I never felt in a panic. I did not want to be hit in a painful place, and I did not want to be a cripple. Above all I did not want to be blinded. But I was never in a panic again." I asked him if he had ever had the same experience again. He just smiled and said "No! never again. But once is enough. You don't need that sort of thing often. I might grow careless and bad; though I hope I won't. But I could never say, as some chaps do, that there is no God. Because you see I know different."

Surely this lad's experience was absolutely identical with that of Moses. I say absolutely identical for under all differences of form and manner we can recognise the identity of what is essential. In the crisis of his life the young soldier, like the great leader of God's chosen people, heard God saying "I know thee by name and thou hast also found grace in My sight." That is to say he realized God's interest in him personally, as one individual clearly seen and known among all the other millions of God's children. And as he realized God's interest in him personally, so too he knew that that interest was a loving interest and that he, sinful and imperfect as he was, had yet found grace in God's sight.

But are not these two elements the most fundamental in all religious experience. Reasoning, so to speak, a priori, we should expect that if and when a man has actual first-hand experience of God, Infinite, Omnipotent, Holy, his chief feelings would be of his own utter

insignificance in the eyes of God, and of God's wrath at his sinfulness. The exact opposite is the truth. As soon as a man knows God he knows Him for what He is, and cries" Behold the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee '1 and asks in amazement, as he realizes God's greatness and his own nothingness "What is man, that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou visitest him?" 2 But over and above this feeling, transcending it and as it were swallowing it up, is a sense of his own value in the eyes of God, not because of his own worth but because of the goodness of God, and because of His nature, which is Love. At his call Jeremiah hears God say " Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee, and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee "3 S. Paul knows that during the years before he met his Master on the road to Damascus God had marked him for His own and had "separated me from my mother's womb "4 for his life's task of preaching the gospel. S. John knows that God's intimate and personal love for us is earlier than our love for Him and the cause of it, "we love Him because he first loved us.' And we all know, and must surely love, the supreme expression of this personal relationship of God to the soul given in the 139th psalm.

"5

But the religious experience of the saints in all ages does not only witness to the intimate and personal nature of God's knowledge of each one of us. It witnesses also the fact that God's interest is a loving one. If it is true, as we have seen that it is, that the experience of God, instead of oppressing us with a sense of our 2 Ps. viii. 4. Jeremiah i. 5. 5 1 St. John iv. 19.

11 Kings viii. 27.

4 Gal. i. 15.

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