Should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him. — The word for “feel after” expresses strictly the act of groping in the dark. From the Apostle’s point of view, anticipating in part the great Theodikæa — the vindication of the ways of God — in the Epistle to the Romans, the whole order of the world’s history was planned, as part of the education of mankind, waking longings which it could not satisfy, leading men at once to a consciousness of the holiness of God and of their own sinfulness. The religions of the world were to him as the movements of one who climbs
“Upon the great world’s altar stairs,
That slope through darkness up to God;”
who can only say —
“I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust, and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.”
Their ritual in all its manifold variety was but as the inarticulate wailing of childhood —
“An infant crying for the light,
And with no language but a cry.”
— Tennyson, In Memoriam, liv.
The “if haply” expresses the exact force of the Greek particles, which imply a doubt whether the end had been attained in its completeness. The altar to the Unknown and Unknowable was a witness that they had not been found. “The world by wisdom knew not God” (1 Corinthians 1:21). It had not got, in the language of another poet of our own, beyond
“Those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;”
which are as the
“Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realised.”
— Wordsworth, Ode on Immortality.
Though he be not far from every one of us. — Better, and yet He is not far. The speaker appeals, as he does in Romans 2:15, to the witness borne by man’s consciousness and conscience. There, in the depths of each man’s being, not in temples made with hands, men might find God and hold communion with him. It was natural, in speaking to the peasants of Lystra, to point to the witness of “the rain from heaven and fruitful seasons.” (See Note on Acts 14:17.) It was as natural, in speaking to men of high culture and introspective analysis, to appeal to that which was within them rather than to that which was without. But it will be noted that he does not confine that witness to the seekers after wisdom. God is not far from every one of us.” St. Paul accepts the truth which St. John afterwards proclaimed, that Christ is the “true Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” (See Notes on John 1:9.) The writer of the Book of Deuteronomy (Deuteronomy 30:11-14) had asserted a like truth when he taught Israel that “the word was not in heaven, or beyond the sea,” but “in thy mouth and in thine heart, that thou mayest do it.” At this point the Stoics, we may believe, would recognise the affinities which St. Paul’s thoughts presented to their own teaching. The Epicureans would be more and more repelled by this attack on the central position of their system.