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"And we do fearfully live, as it were, out of God's atmosphere. We do not keep that continual consciousness of His reality which, I conceive, we ought to have, and which should make Him more manifest to our souls than the Shekinah was to the minds of the Israelites." Thus wrote Dr. Arnold, of Rugby; and I think no one of us can read the words and not feel they say a truth. "Dare to be alone with God," wrote the true-hearted preacher, F. W. Robertson, to a friend. "Dare to be alone with God." Why should not the child gladly seek the Father's presence? The Indians of South America told the missionaries, "You say the God of the Christians knows everything, that nothing is hidden from Him; that He is everywhere and sees all that is done. But we do not desire a God so sharp-sighted; we choose to live with freedom in our woods, without having a perpetual observer over our heads." And the savages but said forth a feeling in which men civilised naturally share; for from purity conscious impurity slinks. Men may quarrel with the doctrine of depravity as they choose, but this instinctive hiding themselves from the eyes of the Lord is steady proof of the doctrine of a universal moral lapse. Consider, men are always trying to put out the eyes of the Lord. By atheism — letting the bad, foolish heart tell the head there is no God. By semi-pantheism — denying personality to God, calling Him "a stream of tendency." Simply a vague, impersonal "power not ourselves" — by trying to think of God in the ancient epicurean fashion, making Him but a huge and listless carelessness, as Thomas Carlyle so finely stigmatizes the notion, "an absentee God, sitting on the outside of His universe, and seeing it go"; by identifying God with law, hiding the thought and truth of God away in the muffling folds of natural law, and so imagining that they are somehow getting themselves out of God's real jurisdiction; by a sensual carelessness of God, living as though there were no God, though all the time His being and presence are theoretically confessed. But yet the eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good. Therefore —

1. We, in our conscious sinfulness before their gaze, need atonement for our sin.

2. And the readjustment with God the Holy Spirit works in us by regeneration.

3. And the sweet consciousness of forgiveness.

4. And so the making possible the noble bravery of welcoming His vision into our hearts and lives, that we may shun the evil and seize the good; and thus the living the true life only to be lived in "God's atmosphere."

(Homiletic Review.)

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KJV: The eyes of the LORD are in every place, beholding the evil and the good.

WEB: Yahweh's eyes are everywhere, keeping watch on the evil and the good.