---
title: 'Purves on Man’s Supreme Need'
type: post
author: 'R. Andrew Myers'
date: 2025-07-06
url: https://confessional.org/blog/2025-purves-on-mans-supreme-need
---

# Purves on Man’s Supreme Need

“Now to be taught the way to God is man’s supreme need. We instinctively use the figure, even though we know that it is but a figure. Moral distance is naturally represented by spacial distance. The sinner is pictured not only by Christ but by himself as in a far country: and though God be not far from any of us, man feels after Him, like the blind who have lost their way, if haply he may find Him. To reach God is the confessed goal of human life. To know the way to Him is our chief necessity. So testify the history of all religions that ever have held sway over humanity. So testify the longings and felt needs of every thoughtful heart. Sometimes God is thought of as to be reached at the end of the present life; sometimes, and more correctly, as to be reached at once. But in either case the way to Him is what man needs to know. How is God to be made manifest to our thought and consciousness? How is the human soul, with its sins and fears, to ascertain God’s forgiveness and to be positively reconciled to Him? How are we to live so as at last to attain the divine presence in the world beyond? God is necessary for our happiness. Life is unfinished until it be in harmony with God. Only in God can we be satisfied and saved. And so the cry of all earnest, awakened souls the world over is for God. Jew and Gentile join in the search. The only question is, What is the way? To answer this question is to solve the supreme problem of human life.” — [**George T. Purves**](/authors/george-tybout-purves), “The Way, the Truth, and the Life” in *The Sinless Christ* (1902), pp. 122-123