God and Christ Author:Stopford Augustus Brooke 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: THE OMNIPRESENCE OF GOD. But will God in very deed dwell with men on the earth ; behold the heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee; how much less this house wh... more »ich I have built.—2 Chronicles vi. 18. ' I AHE thought of God's Omnipresence contained - in this text is so infinite that we are not always able to conceive it. And being of that quality, it has a tendency to glide from our mental grasp, and to be lost in the thoughts that belong to actual life. The natural wisdom of the religious spirit has, therefore, put it into form by setting apart places where we say that God is present, not in order to declare that He is more present in them than in other places, but to represent through them the truth that He is everywhere, and by representing it to keep it alive in the hearts of men. To realise more vividly the Omnipresent, we make Him presentin one place. That we may conceive the Un- containable, we make Him contained; that we may feel that God's presence makes all spots on earth and sea a home to us, we build a home for Him in church and chapel, in temple and synagogue. We localize Him in form, that we may reach more easily in thought the belief that He never can be localized. And in truth, we, when we use our places of worship wisely in imagination, do win through them the power of better conceiving God's Omnipresence. We think, as we collect together in places where we worship, that from the days when God was first worshipped on the hill-side at the grassy altar, through thousands of years of growing and connected religious thought, in times of peace and war, of triumph and martyrdom, of poverty and wealth, in every nation under heaven, a great and varied multitude of men and women have met together, as we meet now, in dedicated places to ask His love in much the same words...« less