Job 4:16.---There was silence, and I heard a voice.'

What are the conditions of such intercourse?

There must be the sense of God's presence. We cannot be in the presence of God, or at least we cannot wake to the consciousness of the Divine Presence, and not receive the speech of God. When other sounds have been made to cease, when the busy and restless brain has been stilled, and the whole nature, by deliberate and constant practice, silenced, then in that silence you will find the speech of God. The speech of God is not as the speech of men. He does not frame His messages in the words of any language. The speech of God is communication of the Spirit with spirit. That communion lies deeper than words.

A special place is an aid, if not a necessity. God is to be found everywhere, it is true. There could not be a more deluding superstition than that He is more truly present in one place than in another, or that the Ineffable chooses, as if by arbitrary fancy, favorite shrines for the manifesting of His Presence. We are surely well rid of the whole business of holy wells and sacred grottos, of privileged sanctuaries and sepulchers, if they are to carry with them, as they so readily tend to do, the old crude conceptions of localized deity. But though the Presence is universal, the conditions favorable to its realization are not universal. God is everywhere, and may be found everywhere, but not everywhere equally easily. The presence of God will be found as promised; in the the gathering of the brethren.

In Christ, timothy. our Lord comes.