Within the Veil

The word ‘apostle’ means “one sent, a messenger.” The first section of this epistle is devoted to the consideration of Christ as God’s last messenger to men.
The opening sentence of this epistle is most impressive, standing out like an inscription cut in stone over the entrance to some majestic building, or, like the frontispiece of some great volume. Three words compose this majestic message, “God hath spoken.” “God . . . hath spoken unto us by his Son.”
Long and vainly had the world waited for some message from above. Nature had spoken, but her message was too confused and vague to tell us what we needed to know. Written on the glowing skies and the verdant earth the dullest eye could read the two words, “God is.” But there the sentence ended with a note of interrogation, and another voice was needed to complete the sentence and write it fully out, “God is Love.” Philosophy had sought to penetrate the mysteries of truth and from human intuition and natural reasoning find out the unknown God; but the best that philosophy could find was the dead, cold, abstract trinity of Plato, “The True, the Beautiful, the Good.” But this had no power to lift humanity from its wretchedness and sin. Idolatry had spoken, but its gods were monsters of cruelty and corruption, and it had no light or help for hopeless humanity. Sorcery and spiritualism pretended to speak, and they brought some messages from the darkness of the unseen and the future world, but their words were idle and unsatisfying and only ignis fatuus gleams that left us in deeper darkness.