vii THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL 269

" Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the
waters : who maketh the clouds his chariot." 1

" He flew swiftly upon the wings of the wind. He
made darkness his hiding-place." 2

" Raise the stone and thou shalt find me ; cleave the
wood and there am I." 3

" And every common bush afire with God." 4

By the Special Presence, then, in any place or time
we must mean a special awareness of the divine presence
by human spirits. But just because the consciousness
or awareness of the divine presence is, in every in-
dividual, so dependent upon our subjective states, it
appears necessary that the faith of the Church in the
all-present Christ should be summed up and brought
home to the individual in a recurring action. Such
action expresses not only our assurance too deep for
words, but also our common relation to the all-present
Christ and our fellowship with one another. That is
the reason not only why this special awareness of the
divine presence can come to us with the supreme act
of the Church's language of action, but why we have
good ground for our belief that, however languid and
oblivious we may feel, we may verily come into touch
with the presence by our participation in that action. 5

Such periodic acts of attention are necessary, or at
least most helpful, to the soul's vitality. The finite life
of all things proceeds each by a certain rhythm peculiar
to itself. The living organism sleeps and wakes, acts
and rests, feeds and assimilates. The morning stars
sing together, the waves of the ocean clap their hands,
in rhythmic motion ; from the whole of creation there
arises a music in which time is meted out in regular
rhythm. So it is with the soul of man, except that he
has a certain power of controlling his own rhythm, and
a bad jar and jangle he often makes of it. But the
more he yields to the experience of salvation — the more

1 Ps. civ. 3. 2 Ps. xviii. 10. 3 Oxyrhynchus Logia.
