diminish our reverence and awe for the One behind them, Whom we now
regard as infinite in power and in wisdom?

True, the natural human heart cannot bear this thought of the direct
acting throughout nature of the infinite Creator. It brings us too close
beneath His gaze in our sinful shortcoming and nakedness.

[Footnote 55: A recent clever writer likens some of these metaphysical
speculations to the act of a baby sucking at a nursing bottle. So long
as there is any milk in the bottle, the baby sucks with pleasure and
profit. Unfortunately the little fellow does not always stop sucking
when the supply of milk gives out, but still keeps on sucking empty air,
with resulting discomfort and colic. We all need to recognize the limits
of the intellectual milk supply, and not keep on trying to solve
problems that are in their very nature beyond the limits of the human
mind.]

And so men draw the veil of their pantheistic or monistic philosophy
over their hearts, to hide them from His all-searching gaze. In ancient
times they seem to have done the same, as the monuments of Egypt and
Babylonia declare; and the intimate knowledge of Nature and its Creator
which they had in the morning of our world, degenerated into the nature
worship and polytheism which we find so nearly universal at the first
dawn of secular history. It is only the child of God, the redeemed man,
who can view without flinching the sublime fact of a direct Creation, or
face the other great fact that what we call second causes are not the
real causes of natural action, that the ordinary phenomena of light,
heat, gravity, vital action, etc., do not occur because certain
"properties" have been once imparted to matter and it then left to act
of itself, any more than the child of God is left to struggle along with