William Gray Elmslie

Professor W. G. Elmslie, D.D. William Gray Elmslie

God is close to us. Every moment of our life He is doing countless things in us and around us. If a man were to do these things we should see him with our eyes, we could touch him with our hands; we should not fail to observe his presence. Because we cannot see God with our bodily eye, or grasp Him with our hand, we forget His working, we lose sight of His nearness. When you were children, some time or other, I suppose, in your young lives, you got hold of a flower-seed, and planted it in a pot of moist earth, and set it in the sunniest corner of your room. Morning after morning, when you awoke, you ran to see if the flower had begun to grow. At last your eagerness was rewarded by the sight of some tiny leaves which had sprung up during one night. Then the stalk appeared, frail and tender, and then more leaves, and buds, and branchlets, till at length there stood, blooming before you, a fair and fragrant flower. Who made it? Somebody worked to produce that flower. It could not make itself. The dead earth could not shape that lovely leaf; the bright sunshine could not paint those tendrils. A deep-thinking man, when he sees these wonderful things, must ask himself, Who fashioned them? Not the sunshine nor the air, but God, if there is a God, willed that that plant should grow. God toiled to make the plant-in your room, at your side. At this moment, in your breast, your heart is beating. All your life it has gone on beating. It is not you who sustain its motion. Even when you forget it, when you are asleep, its pulsations do not cease. Somebody works to keep your heart beating. God, who is the foundation of all life, out of whose loving heart it streams, and back to whom it must return, has to remember your heart.