Exodus 15:26

"Handfuls of Purpose"

For All Gleaners

"I am the Lord that healeth thee." Exodus 15:26 .

Every man must have his own special revelation of God. Some have never seen God in what may be called his metaphysical relations; they do not, in that sense, know God. Others know him in his relation to affliction, sorrow, and the whole of the enduring side of life. They cannot account for their deliverances except by a superior power. In their memory is the recollection of a pit out of which they were lifted, and they know of a surety that no arms could have delivered them from that pit but the arms of the Almighty One. The infinity of true religion is thus shown by the infinity of the responses which it elicits from human nature. One man's religion is all music that is to say an expression of thanksgiving, delight, and confidence in God. He has no argument, no logic, no well-connected and highly-authenticated history by which to defend himself, or on which to rest his Christian beliefs. He knows who came to him in the day of sorrow, who walked with him to the edge of the grave, who gave him heart again in the time of great loss and pain. It is needless to argue with such a man; he is himself his own argument. When the debater has ceased his storm of words, the man retires upon his own consciousness, and in the recesses of his memory he finds a comfort which the war of words can never reach. This is the kind of experience open to all men. Few can be scholars, fewer still can be poets; to only one or two has it been permitted to enter into the holy of holies; but every life has had its own difficulty, or pain, or shadow, or cross its own awful affliction or bitter poverty. The Christian religion is strong upon every ground, but stronger, perhaps, on this ground than any. Every one of its believers has his own story to tell respecting the richness of Christian comfort and the cheering of the Divine light. Every man must base his argument upon the strongest point of his own consciousness. Let the restored blind man say, "One thing I know"; let him keep steadily to that plain story, and no band of Pharisees, how infuriated soever by malice, can unsettle his position or disturb his serenity.