I And Thou

thing is sought: actually there is no such thing as
seeking God, for there is nothing in which He could not"
be found. How foolish and hopeless would be the
man who turned aside from the course of his life in
order to seek God ; even though he won all the wisdom
of solitude and all the power of concentrated being he
would miss God. Bather is it as when a man goes
his way and simply wishes that it might be the way:
in the strength of his wish his striving is expressed.
Every relational event is a stage that affords hi™ a
glimpse intp the consummating event. So in each
event he does not partake, but also (for he is waiting)
does partake, of the one event. Waiting, not
seeking, he goes his way; hence he is composed
before all things, and makes contact with them which
helps them. But when he has found, his heart is not
turned from them, though everything now meets hi™
in the one event. He blesses every cell that sheltered
him, and every cell into which he will yet turn. For
this finding is not the end, but only the eternal middle,
of the way.
It is a finding without seeking, a discovering of the
primal, of origin. His sense of Thou, which cannot be
satiated till he finds the endless Thou, had the Thou
present to it from the beginning; the presence had only
to become wholly real to him in the reality of the
hallowed life of the world.
God cannot be inferred in anything—in nature, say,
as its author, or in history as its master, or in the
subject as the self that is thought in it. Something else
is not " given " and God then elicited from it; but God
is the Being that is directly, most nearly, and lastingly,
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