He was found of them.' Yes; anything is possible rather than that a whole-hearted search after God should be a vain search. For there are, in that case, two seekers, God is seeking for us more truly than we are seeking for Him. And if the mother is seeking her child, and the child its mother, it will :be a very wide desert where they will not meet. The Father seeketh such to worship Him,' that is, the divine activity is going about the world, searching for the heart that turns to Him, and it cannot but be that they that seek Him shall find Him, or shall be found of Him.' Open the windows, and you cannot keep out the sunshine; open your lungs and you cannot keep out the air. In Him we live and move and have our being,' and if our desires turn, however blindly, to Him, and are accompanied with the appropriate action, heaven and earth are more likely to rush to ruin than such a searching to be frustrated of its aim.
Brethren! is there anything else in the world of which you can say, Seek, and ye shall find'? You, with white hairs on your heads, have you found anything else in which the chase was sure to result in the capture; in which capture was sure to yield all that the hunter had wished? There is only one direction for a man's desires and aims, in which disappointment is an impossibility. In all other regions the most that can be promised is Seek, and perhaps you will find'; and, when you have found, perhaps you will feel that the prize was not worth the finding. Or it is, Seek, and possibly you will find; and after you have found and kept for a little while, you will lose.' Though it may be
Better to have loved and lost,
a treasure that slips out of our fingers is not the best treasure that we can search for. But here the assurance is, Seek, and ye shall find; and shall never lose. Find, and you shall always possess.'
What would you think of a company of gold-seekers, hunting about in some exhausted claim, for hypothetical grains, ragged, starving, and all the while in the next gully were lying lumps of. gold for the picking up? And that figure fairly represents what people do and suffer who seek for good and do not seek for God.
