The Vision of God

“T have set the Lord always before me.” — Psa.M xvi. 8. 3 fs re Tuts is the real practice of the Presence of

God. His the endeavour to see everything in the light of that Presence, and never to regard anything as detached from the divine relationship. In the flat miles of country round about Lincoln, everything can be viewed in relation to its noble cathedral, uplifted there on the mount. Whether you are toiling in the fields or walking along the road, or sitting by the way, the cathedral is ever before you, throwing its sacred suggestiveness over every common lot. And to have the Lord always before us on the broad plains of daily life, overlooking our playfields and our battlefields, our place of business and our place of worship, the green pastures and the green churchyard — this is to cultivate the vision of God. y “I saw the Lord, high and lifted up, and His train filled the temple.”

Now this kind of vision is not easily attained, nor can it be gained in a day. It was said of the late Bishop Westcott that ‘he only saw because he took time to see.” - That is where so many of us miss it. We do not give time to see. We are so feverish in action that we have no leisure for vision. We are more concerned about movement than we are about direction. We are more ambitious to have the wheels going round than we are to receive the divine sanction. And so the plain has no towering cathedral. The day is not overlooked by the Eternal. Life has no sacred mount.

It has been said that the poet is one who “sees the infinite in things.” Then in a very rich degree we can all be poets, seeir* the Infinite in our ordinary work, or in the country lane, or amid the festivities of a wedding, or in the shadows by an open grave. We can verily “set the Lord always before us.”