I am neither agnostic nor atheist. But to my atheist friends: this is is how I see it.
The Road that stretches before the feet of a man is a challenge to his heart long before it tests the strength of his legs. Our destiny is to run to the edge of the world and beyond, off into the darkness: sure for all our blindness, secure for all our helplessness, strong for all our weakness, gaily in love for all the pressure on our hearts.
In that darkness beyond the world, we can begin to know the world and ourselves, though we see through the eyes of Another. We begin to understand that a man was not made to pace out his life behind the prison walls of nature, but to walk into the arms of God on a road that nature could never build.
Life must be lived, even by those who cannot find the courage to face it. In the living of it, every mind must meet the rebuff of mystery. To some men, this will be an exultant challenge: that so much can be known and truth not be exhausted, that so much is still to be sought, that truth is an ocean not to be contained in the pool of a human mind. To others, this is a humiliation not to be borne; for it marks out sharply the limits of our proud minds. In the living of life, every mind must face the unyielding rock of reality, of a truth that does not bend to our whim or fantasy, of the rule that measures the life and mind of a man.
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God has said so little, that yet means so much for our living. To have said more would mean less of reverence by God for the spendor of His image in us. Our knowing and loving, He insists, must be our own; the truth ours because we have accepted it; the love ours because we have given it. We are made in His image. Our Maker will be the last to smudge that image in the name of security, or by way of easing the hazards of the nobility of man.
The Great Truths that must flood the mind of man with light are the limitless perfection of God and the perfectibility of man. The enticements that must captivate the heart of man are the divine goodness of God and man's gratuitously given capacity to share that divine life, to begin to posess that divine goodness even as he walks among the things of earth. The truths are not less certain because they are too clear for our eyes. The task before our heart is not to hold a fickle lover but to spend itself.
Without these truths, and the others that fill out the pattern of a man's days, we are underfed weaklings, starving waifs, paralyzed in our living not only by lack of strength but even more by lack of light. To live a man must move by these steps of his heart; and how can he move until he can see and be drawn by the beauty of Goodness and Truth?
No man can get such wisdom of himself in time to begin living his life or, indeed, in time to end it. Wisdom must be given to him, for it belongs to God. He can have this wisdom that must be had; but not through the stumbling steps of his own reasoning. He can have it if he will take it from his Maker. He can see in the darkness if he will look through the eyes of God. He can begin life with wisdom lent by God, and have his heart flooded with gratitude for the loan; or he can prefer the false light of the illusion that tells him he if self-sufficient, and die before he begins to live.
A man hardly dare face mere natural life alone; alone, he cannot even dream of sharing the divine. Yet, to escape disaster, he must not only so dream, he must make the dream come true.
BTS
