pryings to do with the needs of the heart and the finding of God!
Within the last few years there have been a score or so of such

volumes as that recently compiled by Dr. Foakes Jackson, entitled
"The Faith and the War," a volume in which the curious reader may

contemplate deans and canons, divines and church dignitaries, men
intelligent and enquiring and religiously disposed, all lying like

overladen camels, panting under this load of obsolete theological
responsibility, groaning great articles, outside the needle's eye

that leads to God.
6. THE COMING OF GOD

Modern religion bases its knowledge of God and its account of God
entirely upon experience. It has encountered God. It does not

argue about God; it relates. It relates without any of those
wrappings of awe and reverence that fold so necessarily about

imposture, it relates as one tells of a friend and his assistance,
of a happy adventure, of a beautiful thing found and picked up by

the wayside.
So far as its psychological phases go the new account of personal

salvation tallies very closely with the account of "conversion" as
it is given by other religions. It has little to tell that is not

already familiar to the reader of William James's "Varieties of
Religious Experience." It describes an initial state of distress

with the aimlessness and cruelties of life, and particularly with
the futility of the individual life, a state of helpless self-

disgust, of inability to form any satisfactory plan of living. This
is the common prelude known to many sorts of Christian as

"conviction of sin"; it is, at any rate, a conviction of hopeless
confusion. . . . Then in some way the idea of God comes into the

distressed mind, at first simply as an idea, without substance or
belief. It is read about or it is remembered; it is expounded by

some teacher or some happy convert. In the case of all those of the
new faith with whose personal experience I have any intimacy, the

idea of God has remained for some time simply as an idea floating
about in a mind still dissatisfied. God is not believed in, but it

is realised that if there were such a being he would supply the
needed consolation and direction, his continuing purpose would knit

together the scattered effort of life, his mortality" target="_blank" title="n.不死，不朽，永生，来生">immortality would take
the sting from death. Under this realisation the idea is pursued

and elaborated. For a time there is a curious resistance to the
suggestion that God is truly a person; he is spoken of preferably by

such phrases as the Purpose in Things, as the Racial Consciousness,
as the Collective Mind.

I believe that this resistance in so many contemporary minds to the
idea of God as a person is due very largely to the enormous

prejudice against divinepersonality created by the absurdities of
the Christian teaching and the habitualmonopoly of the Christian

idea. The picture of Christ as the Good Shepherd thrusts itself
before minds unaccustomed to the idea that they are lambs. The

cross in the twilight bars the way. It is a novelty and an enormous
relief to such people to realise that one may think of God without

being committed to think of either the Father, the Son, or the Holy
Ghost, or of all of them at once. That freedom had not seemed

possible to them. They had been hypnotised and obsessed by the idea
that the Christian God is the only thinkable God. They had heard so

much about that God and so little of any other. With that release
their minds become, as it were, nascent and ready for the coming of

God.
Then suddenly, in a little while, in his own time, God comes. This

cardinal experience is an undoubting, immediate sense of God. It is
the attainment of an absolutecertainty that one is not alone in

oneself. It is as if one was touched at every point by a being akin
to oneself, sympathetic, beyond measure wiser, steadfast and pure in

aim. It is completer and more intimate, but it is like standing
side by side with and touching someone that we love very dearly and

trust completely. It is as if this being bridged a thousand
misunderstandings and brought us into fellowship with a great

multitude of other people. . . .
"Closer he is than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet."

The moment may come while we are alone in the darkness, under the
stars, or while we walk by ourselves or in a crowd, or while we sit

and muse. It may come upon the sinking ship or in the tumult of the
battle. There is no saying when it may not come to us. . . . But

after it has come our lives are changed, God is with us and there is
no more doubt of God. Thereafter one goes about the world like one

who was lonely and has found a lover, like one who was perplexed and
has found a solution. One is assured that there is a Power that

fights with us against the confusion and evil within us and without.
There comes into the heart an essential and enduring happiness and

courage.
There is but one God, there is but one true religious experience,

but under a multitude of names, under veils and darknesses, God has
in this manner come into countless lives. There is scarcely a

faith, however mean and preposterous, that has not been a way to
holiness. God who is himself finite, who himself struggles in his

great effort from strength to strength, has no spite against error.
Far beyond halfway he hastens to meet the purblind. But God is

against the darkness in their eyes. The faith which is returning to
men girds at veils and shadows, and would see God plainly. It has

little respect for mysteries. It rends the veil of the temple in
rags and tatters. It has no superstitious fear of this huge

friendliness, of this great brother and leader of our little beings.
To find God is but the beginning of wisdom, because then for all our

days we have to learn his purpose with us and to live our lives with
him.

CHAPTER THE SECOND
HERESIES; OR THE THINGS THAT GOD IS NOT

1. HERESIES ARE MISCONCEPTIONS OF GOD
Religion is not a plant that has grown from one seed; it is like a

lake that has been fed by countless springs. It is a great pool of
living water, mingled from many sources and tainted with much

impurity. It is synthetic in its nature; it becomes simpler from
original complexities; the sediment subsides.

A life perfectlyadjusted to its surroundings is a life without
mentality; no judgment is called for, no inhibition, no disturbance

of the instinctive flow of perfect reactions. Such a life is bliss,
or nirvana. It is unconsciousness below dreaming. Consciousness is

discord evoking the will to adjust; it is inseparable from need. At
every need consciousness breaks into being. Imperfect adjustments,

needs, are the rents and tatters in the smooth dark veil of being
through which the light of consciousness shines--the light of

consciousness and will of which God is the sun.
So that every need of human life, every disappointment and

dissatisfaction and call for help and effort, is a means whereby men
may and do come to the realisation of God.

There is no cardinal need, there is no sort of experience in human
life from which there does not come or has not come a contribution

to men's religious ideas. At every challenge men have to put forth
effort, feel doubt of adequacy, be thwarted, perceive the chill

shadow of their mortality. At every challenge comes the possibility
of help from without, the idea of eluding frustration, the

aspiration towards mortality" target="_blank" title="n.不死，不朽，永生，来生">immortality. It is possible to classify the
appeals men make for God under the headings of their chief system of

effort, their efforts to understand, their fear and their struggles
for safety and happiness, the craving of their restlessness for

peace, their angers against disorder and their desire for the
avenger; their sexual passions and perplexities. . . .

Each of these great systems of needs and efforts brings its own sort
of sediment into religion. Each, that is to say, has its own kind

of heresy, its distinctive misapprehension of God. It is only in
the synthesis and mutualcorrection of many divergent ideas that the

idea of God grows clear. The effort to understand completely, for
example, leads to the endless Heresies of Theory. Men trip over the

inherent infirmities of the human mind. But in these days one does
not argue greatly about dogma. Almost every conceivable error about

unity, about personality, about time and quantity and genus and
species, about begetting and beginning and limitation and similarity

and every kink in the difficult mind of man, has been thrust forward
in some form of dogma. Beside the errors of thought are the errors

of emotion. Fear and feebleness go straight to the Heresies that
God is Magic or that God is Providence; restless egotism at leisure