May 13
Companions of the Way (Evening)In Him we live and move and have our being.
THE belief in God's Fatherhood is the belief in the immanence of God. It is the faith that His interests are bound up with the interests of the tiny sparrow, maimed by a stone from some ruthless hand, and perishing in its pain, as surely as with the spiritual progress of Augustine or St. Paul or the genius of Shakespeare. If a sparrow could fall to the ground without God, then one would have very little confidence in the Divine dealings with the greatest soul. A God unjust to a sparrow would be unjust to all. But if God is really the principle, both differentiating and integrating, that made and guides and informs the whole universe, that is the glory of the wayside flower, and of the farthest star; if the hurt sparrow dies into the life that gave it being, then we have hope for the sparrow and for the souls of men. The universe was not cast off by God, to plunge itself into this terrible travail—conflict and anguish and death—without Him. His life and thought are in the slayer and the slain. At the last analysis of inorganic or organic matter we come to God. It is our name for the sum of Being—the All in All.
MAY KENDALL