"but I know Who is there"

Divinity Library, Yale University

"For weeks in that autumn of 1925 I realized that I was at least an agnostic and perhaps an atheist.  If that attitude persisted I would, in all honesty, have had to resign from the faculty of the Divinity School [at Yale] and the ministry.  I can still remember almost the precise spot in a street in Portland when, like an illumination, the beginning of the answer flashed on me.  'Here,' I said, or a voice seemed to say to me, 'is my father.  He has never let me down and has always been dependable.  Unless there is Some One in the universe who is at least as dependable and as intelligent as he, by whatever means he has been brought into being, the universe does not make sense.'"

     Kenneth Scott Latourette, Beyond the ranges:  an autobiography (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 1967), 72.  And from p. 155, the last, itself an expansion upon what he says about his ever-thereafter growing confidence in "the Evangelical faith in which [he] had been reared", a confidence clearly rooted in life-long practice, way back on pp. 73-74:

     The emeritus years passed quickly.  They were the richest and happiest of my life.  That was . . . chiefly because of growing friendship with God.  Wondering and grateful appreciation of the Good News grew. . . .  What lies beyond this present life I cannot know in detail, but I know Who is there and am convinced that through God's grace, that love which I do not and cannot deserve, eternal life has begun here and now, and eternal life is to know God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent.