Let a boy read the life of Lincoln, see his earnest thirst for
knowledge, the sacrifice he was willing to pay for it, his consecration
to his ideals of truth, the transparent honesty of the man, the supreme
contempt with which he could look down upon anything poor or mean or
low, the firmness and simplicity with which he assumes high office, the
faithfulness, the unassuming devotion, that he carries into the
fulfilment of the trust. Take him all the way through, study his
character and admire, and you are a worshipper of that which is divine.
So in the case of Jesus, the supreme soul of history in its
consecration to the Father, its simple trust in the divine love, its
superiority to fear, to question, to death. When we bow ourselves in
the presence of the Nazarene, we are not worshipping another God. We
are worshipping his Father and our Father as lie shines in the face of
Jesus, as he illumines and beautifies his life, as he makes glorious
the humble pathways of Galilee, and so casts a reflected glory over the
humblest pathways any of us may be called upon to tread.
The next step in our ascent brings us to the conscious worship of God
himself. We cannot grasp the divine idea. The finite cannot measure or
outline the infinite; and so, when we say God, we mean only the
grandest ideal that we can frame, that reaches on towards, but can
never adequately express the Deity. And so we worship this thought,
this ideal, growing as our capacity develops, advancing as the race
advances, and ever leading us Godward, as when we follow a ray of light
we are travelling towards its source.
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