infinitely magnified image of the human self. Man's unworthy motives, opinions, and ideas of justice, as though seen through a great telescope, are clothed with divine outlines and proportions. The vindictive man worships a vindictive God. The austere, selfish morality of the "elder brother" is often associated with the divine character. Besides these selfreflected false images of God, systems of theology have painted many unlovable views of Him, and men are repelled by their hard outlines. Towards any true divine concept, humanity is drawn naturally and unconsciously. Man feels the link which binds him to God so distinctly that atheism would be almost impossible, were it not that a falsity has been set up and called God. Scholastic theology has represented Him as an august Monarch, seated upon a great throne, who glories in his sovereignty and imperialism. It has made his character autocratic and wrathful, and the natural outcome has been a formal worship inspired by fear and dread. Conscious of his weakness and sin, man cringes before God as an offended, omnipotent Personality, instead of seeking Him for strength and succor. Not wishing to bring God into his own guilty consciousness, so far as possible he has kept the "Present Help" out of his thoughts. The human elements in the Old Testament Scriptures are filled with perverted ideals of God, which have the qualities of men, and these were re-enforced by the traditions and interpretations of medieval theology. Oh, broken and bruised humanity! how have you suffered and agonized as you looked up to such a God! Oh, weak and timorous children of men! bound in iron fetters, how have you trembled as such a nightmare overshadowed you! What floods of tears have expressed the desolation and helplessness of stricken souls who had only a caricature of God placed before them! How the love-tendrils from infantile and childish hearts, spontaneously thrust out to "feel after Him," have been chilled and paralyzed! Thank Heaven, such monstrous perversions belong mainly to the past, and golden rifts are now everywhere seen in the clouds which for so long were impenetrable. By filling humanity with a slavish fear of God, designing men more effectively promoted their monarchical and ecclesiastical dominion. It has been a moral impossibility for the human heart to “pant after” Him when presented in such false proportions. God cannot be seen through the intellect. Dogmatism has built up a logical and institutional Deity, and though he be moral and lawful, he is not lovable. In order to kindle love in the breast of man, he must behold that which in its own nature is attractive. The scholastic conceptions of God have been so sharply drawn, that they amount to a mental graven image. There is a world-wide chasm between a spiritual perception of God, and the very best concept which can be formed by intellectual processes. The one sees and feels the Eternal Life, Love, and Truth, while the other theorizes upon a legal or mechanical force, as an objective Deity. The first glows in the depths of its own being with reflected warmth and brightness, while the last is a frame-work of system, fitted together by scholastic logic. The unaided intellect is colorblind to divine harmony. Idolatry was never more prevalent than at the present time. It is only when the gods of worldly ambition, of mammon, of fleshly appetites, of the baser self and the material body, are hurled from their pedestals, that our clarified vision begins to discern the Eternal One. We also pay unconscious homage to modern, material invention and scientific achievement. We are looking forward to some Golden Age which will be ushered in by a new social order; nationalized land, impossible poverty, perfected legislation, improved medication, sanitation and communication. When these external ideals occupy the thought, and form the great desideratum, they become idols. The belief that mankind can realize completeness and happiness in these achievements, rather than in God, amounts to an idolatrous homage. How ever desirable, they are secondary. How often the crudity of our childish ideas clothed God with material form and gigantic human outline, and such imagery is still pres ent in some degree in many adult and even scholarly minds. If the spoken name of the Deity brings before the mind any image having material quality, it is a graven image, and therefore an "other" other" god than the One who is Spirit. The gross ideals of the mediæval church, and also those of later periods, were grotesquely expressed by the old masters, who represented the Father as an aged man, with flowing hair and beard, and stern, dignified bearing. Anthropomorphism has insisted upon the conception of God as a person. In a sense we may call Him personal, and yet the term, to most minds, conveys the idea of limitation. To whatever degree our concept of Him involves such a quality, it is false, and therefore idolatrous. How impotent is human language for the expression of Divinity! Its narrow definitions do not fit the Infinite. Beware, Beloved, lest we hastily call our brother an atheist or a pantheist, because his idea of God does not quite coincide with ours. Of the two, his concept may be the truer and larger. The Infinite Love, Life, Will, and Intelligence, is |