Lord declared, that when a man comes to himself he is not far from God. There is no single realm of the human mind which is without its witness. The laws of thought imply a Lawgiver as certainly as do those outward laws by which the material universe is fashioned and controlled. Passing from the world of thought into that of the emotions, with "its vistaed hopes, and chasméd fears," we are made still more vividly aware of that awful Presence. Many profound students of life have found the sources of religious faith in our ultimate sense of dependence. Human need is a cry of the heart for God. We do not pray because we have argued ourselves into the reasonableness of prayer; when we pray we obey an impulse of our nature which goes deeper than any system of thought by which it has been defended. And who can hope to flee from God by turning to meet his own conscience? That inward monitor speaks with an authority which is derived from no human source. The human soul is no place for one to escape God. He knows those "labyrinthine ways" far better than we know them ourselves, and treads with sure foot where we falter and stumble. The key

of every door hangs upon his girdle. Others we may shut out, but He passes by unobserved. We have scarcely shut the door than we catch the steady footfall of "those strong Feet that follow, follow after."

(b) Driven from within himself, the hunted soul sought covert in human love. "I pled by many a hearted casement." 'But, if one little casement parted wide, the gust of His approach would clash it to." He hears, as so many have heard, in the beating of the human heart the gentle patter of the following feet. Love, and every one that loveth

"God is

knoweth

God." The heart "parted wide" admits Him whose love is the source of all human love. Once again the fugitive is dislodged and must seek fresh cover.

(c) The wonders of the vast universe, he thinks, will surely be sufficient to satisfy his human need. Like the Psalmist he ascends into heaven, and "smites for shelter at the gold gateways of the stars," he "clings to the whistling mane of every wind," but only to find, that "even there God's hand held him." There is no lawless place in all the world except where the will of

man clashes with the will of his Maker. And that thought drives him back to earth with the unperturbed and deliberate patter of the feet ever behind him.

(d) Coming back to earth he seeks a hiding place in the innocent life of little children. There is some kinship between the poet and the child, and Thompson was never quite at home save with children. He approached them, not as a psychologist anxious to analyse or study the child mind, but as one in whom the child-spirit had been kept alive. He was one of them in their glee and knew the wonderful world in which they live. In an Ode to his godchild he counsels where he may be found in Paradise should the grace of God bring him there at last.

"Turn not your tread along the Uranian sod Among the bearded counsellors of God."

Pass where majestical the eternal peers,
The stately choice of the great Saintdom meet.

Look for me in the nurseries of heaven."

But the nursery is no place for the man who would escape God. "And Enoch walked with

God after he begat Methusaleh," declares the ancient writer, suggesting that it was the child that led the patriarch to that "walk with God" which has so filled our hearts with desire. "Out of the mouth of children and of little children hast Thou made a fortress for Thyself" is one of the great utterances of the Psalmist a statement which afterwards received the sanction of our Lord Himself. The child heart is a favourite hunting ground of the Celestial Huntsman.

(e) The last attempt to escape is made in Nature-this time the Nature, not of the scientific observer, but of the artist,-into the changeful moods of which he seeks to enter by sympathy.

"I triumphed and I saddened with all weather. Heaven and I wept together.

And its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine.
Against the red throb of its sunset-heart
I laid my own to beat,

And share commingling heat;

But not by that, by that, was eased my human smart."

Lover of Nature as he was he discovered, as he wrote to a friend, that there is no heart there.

They "make believe" who say there is. She

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speaks by silences, we speak in sound;" the sea is salt unwittingly and unregretfully, our tears are of the soul which suffers and which cries. Nature is not our dwelling-place, though it has pointed the way home to many. Its splendid sunsets, its shimmering streams, its giant hills, its summer fields are open roads to Him Who calls us to His fellowship. And so, seeking to escape in these things, the soul hears again the footfall and the voice:

"Nigh and nigh draws the chase,
With unperturbèd pace,

Deliberate speed, majestic instancy;
And past those noised Feet
A voice comes yet more fleet-

'Lo! naught contents thee, who content'st not me.'

And so the chase comes to an end. The poet had sought to escape God in God's own world, and, naturally, had failed. He is like the prophet, in that little understood book of our sacred scriptures, who thought to put the seas between him and Jehovah, but found Him walking on the waters; who imagined that human life outside