It Is In God – A Quote

by John Venlet

It is in God that the universe begins to blaze with light and glow with warmth. It is in God that we first see man in the blaze of possible glory. But the word “God” must have a certain meaning. And we must meet God in actual experience. The God in whom we find the meaning of existence must be conscious intelligence, perfect in goodness, and radiant with love. A God who cannot be conscious of every individual in the world would be no God at all. A God who cannot consciously hear prayer and perfectly apprehend the moral and spiritual longing back of it is not even a false God. To use the word “God” for an abstract principle or an unconscious tendency or an ideal only conscious in human thought is to put spiritual vacuum at the heart of religion and to baptize it with the name most sacred in all the centuries of experience of personal religion. A God who cannot consciously conceive and hold to a purpose for the individual, for the group, and for the race is a mere figure of speech, the empty echo of unrequited hopes. A God who is not the Creator and Maintainer of all that exists leaves the universe a body without a soul, leaves existence a succession of sensations with no rational meaning, and serves no purpose for the clarification of thought, the creation of noble purpose or the justification of temporal or immortal hopes. If you successfully deny the sovereignty of God, you can never have anything important or significant to say about man.

Lynn Harold Hough, Free Men, The Abingdon Press, New York, Cincinnati, Chicago, 1939, pgs.184-185

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