God of my Fathers

In one of Edna Lyall’s novels, We Two, we have the story of Erica Raeburn. Erica is the daughter of Luke Raeburn, the sceptic; and she has been taught from infancy to despise all holy things. But as life, with its stress and struggle, goes on, she finds that she cannot satisfy her soul with denials and negations, * At last,’ Edna Lyall says, ‘ Erica’s hopelessness, her sheer desperation, drove her to cry to the Possibly Existent.’ She stood at the open window of her little room, looking out into the summer night. Before she knew what had happened, she was praying ! ‘O God,’ she cried, ‘I have no reason to think that Thou art, except that there is such fearful need of Thee. I can see no single proof in all the world that Thou art here. But af Thou art, O Father, 7f Thou art, help me to know Thee! Show me what is true!’ A few days later the answer came. Erica was at the British Museum, making some extracts, in the ordinary course of her business, from the Lrfe of Livingstone. All at once she came upon the extract from Livingstone’s Journal in which he speaks of his absolute reliance upon the text, ‘Lo, I am with you alway.’ ‘It is the word,’ says Livingstone, ‘ it is the word of a gentleman of the strictest and most sacred honour, and there’s an end of it!’ The words profoundly affected Erica. * Lo, I am with you alway!’ ‘They represented, not a Moral Principle, nor a Logical Proposition, but a Living Presence ! Exactly how it came to her, Erica never knew, nor could she put in words the story of the next few minutes. When God’s great sunrise finds us out, we have need of something higher than human speech: there are no words for it. All in a moment, the Christ who had been to her merely a noble character of ancient history became to her the most real and vital of all living realities. It was like coming into a new world ; even dingy Bloomsbury seemed beautiful. Her face was so bright, so like the face of a happy child, that more than one passer-by was startled by it, lifted for a moment from sordid cares into a purer atmosphere.1