Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV The Need For A New Thought Of God Behind the languor of present-day religious life is the lack of a new thought of God?a profound, creative conception that shall weld our fragmentary e-xperience into a coherent and intelligible whole. ‘ That new experience has been granted us we dare not doubt. We have touched God at points at which a former generation would have deemed it impious to look for Him, gained insights into His purposes which re-created our world and gave a new spaciousness to life, realised our corporate relation to Him as the ages of individualism could not do. Yet, with all this spiritual wealth, we lack a deep, true thought of God; and the reason is not far to seek. While we are eager to touch life at every point, while large numbers are anxious to make contact with that spiritual world of which they are increasingly convinced, we largely lack any intense and impelling longing to know God as a Person; to know Him intimately, profoundly, and at first-hand; to apprehend Him as well as to feel Him; to know Him with the understandingand not merely with the religious instincts. It was this longing which drove men of old, not merely to live in the light that shames and purifies, but also to think deeply, patiently, yea, passionately, until out of this interaction of gnosis and praxis, this rubbing together of life and action out of which all true fire and light proceed, there came thoughts of God that moulded the lives of Churches and nations and created mighty world- movements. All through history there have been drab and arid periods in which man’s longing for God grew faint and dim. Between the Reformation and the Evangelical Revival there stretched such an arid desert; and when the hand of Wesley rekindled fires that had all but died out, it did n…
