In these ways, God lights up our minds by means of His gifts. Under this illumination, I now look upon creation and find it to be alive with the traces of God’s presence. Nature becomes the very loveliness of His vesture and I say to myself: If I can touch but the hem of His vesture, I shall be made whole. Even in the relentless preying of beast on beast, I see somehow the wonderful work of God. The machinery of man is no longer a sight of ugliness; instead, it becomes colored by the brightness of His power. It is the child’s toy that reproduces on an infinitely smaller scale the creative energy of the Creator.
The linked reasoning of philosophy is the imitation of an infinite intelligence. Then, I lift my mind higher to the ampler regions of faith. Here surely is the very splendor of God. In the depths of mysteries that my intelligence is too faulty and finite to fathom, lurk the wonder of His truth and the ways of His wisdom. Justice, mercy, loving-kindness, and overpowering majesty are all crowded upon my imagination by the thought of all that He has revealed to me of Himself. Here, if anywhere, I can at least understand that God is altogether above me.
Then again, the highest gift of all floods my soul with even clearer light and I see the interrelation of all things. I see how the death of a sparrow, the sunset, and the Incarnation are all parts of a perfect whole. It is not an uplifting of the soul from earth to heaven, but a perception that earth and heaven are themselves the fragments of a larger scheme.
