out.

But with God everything is personal. The life is the light of men. What
He is in Himself--that is what He gives. And this is all the light and
life we ever have. Men make botany. God makes flowers breathing their
freshening fragrance noiselessly up into your face. Man makes astronomy.
God makes the stars, shaking their firelight out of the blue down into
your wondering eyes on a clear moonless night. Man makes theology. And
theology has its place, when it's kept in its place. _God gives us
Jesus_.

I don't know much about botany. My knowledge of astronomy is very
limited. And the more I read of theology, whether Western or Eastern,
Latin Church or Greek, the first Seven Councils or the later ones, the
more I stand perplexed. It's a thing fearsomely and wonderfully
manufactured, this theology. But I frankly confess to a great fondness
for flowers, and for stars, and a love for Jesus that deepens ever more
in reverential awe and in tenderness and grateful devotion. The life was
the light of men. He Himself is all that we have. We go to _things_. We
reckon worth and wealth by things. He gives _Himself_. And He asks, not
_things_, but one's self.



Packing Most in Least.


And John goes quietly on with his great simple story: "_and the light
shineth in the darkness_," John has a way of packing much in little.
Here he packs four thousand years into three English letters. For he has