18 



ANNUAL MEETING. 



It was a heathen philosopher who said, "So that when you 

 have shut your doors and darkened your room remember 

 never to say that you are alone, but God is within and your 

 genius is within and what need have they of light to see 

 what you are doing." 



Lactantius attributes to Seneca almost the identical 

 thought when he says that it is an admirable sentiment with 

 which Seneca concludes his exhortation. " Withal God," says 

 he, "is great, I know not what, an incomprehensible power. 

 It is to Him that we live and to Him that we must approve 

 ourselves; what does it avail us that our businesses are 

 hidden from Men when our Souls lie open to God T' 



Now let us have the Christian sage. 



" I mean then,^' said one now taken to his rest, "by the 

 Supreme Being, one who is self-dependent and the only 

 Being avIio is such ; moreover that He is without beginning 

 or eternal; that in consequence He has lived a whole 

 eternity by Himself, and hence that He is all-suflScient — 

 sufficient for His own blessedness, and all-blessed, and ever 

 blessed. Further, I mean a Being who, having these 

 prerogatives, has the supreme good, or rather is the supreme 

 good, or has all the attributes of good in infinite intenseness ; 

 all wisdom, all truth, all justice, all love, all holiness, all 

 beautifulness ; who is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, 

 ineffably one, absolutely perfect ; and such that what we do 

 not know, and cannot even imagine of Him is far more wonder- 

 ful than what we do or can. I mean, moreover, that He created 

 all things out of nothing, and preserves them every moment, 

 and could destroy them as easily as He made them ; and 

 that in consequence He is separated from them by an abyss, 

 and is incommunicable in all His attributes. And further. He 

 has stamped upon all things in the hour of their creation 

 their respective nature, and has given them their work 

 and mission, and their length of days, greater or less, in their 

 appointed place. I mean, too, that He is ever present with 

 His works, one by one, and confronts everything He has 

 made by His particular and most loving providence, and 

 manifests Himself to each according to its needs, and has on 

 rational beings imprinted the moral law, and given them 

 power to obey it, imposing on them the duty of worship 

 and service, searching and scanning them through and 

 through with His omniscient eye, and putting before them a 

 present trial and a judgment to come.^' 



Equally in the heathen as in the Christian utterances we 



