change is rung in the great religions of the world between
identification, complete separation, equality, and disproportion of

these Beings; but it will be found that these two ideas are, so to
speak, the basal elements of all theology in the world. The writer

is chary of assertion" target="_blank" title="n.断言；主张；论述">assertion or denial in these matters. He believes that
they are speculations not at all necessary to salvation. He

believes that men may differprofoundly in their opinions upon these
points and still be in perfect agreement upon the essentials of

religion. The reality of religion he believes deals wholly and
exclusively with the God of the Heart. He declares as his own

opinion, and as the opinion which seems most expressive of modern
thought, that there is no reason to suppose the Veiled Being either

benevolent or malignant towards men. But if the reader believes
that God is Almighty and in every way Infinite the practical outcome

is not very different. For the purposes of human relationship it is
impossible to deny that God PRESENTS HIMSELF AS FINITE, as

struggling and takingl,
whether the God in our hearts is the Son of or a rebel against the

Universe, the reality of religion, the fact of salvation, is still
our self-identification with God, irrespective of consequences, and

the achievement of his kingdom, in our hearts and in the world.
Whether we live forever or die tomorrow does not affect

righteousness. Many people seem to find the prospect of a final
personal death unendurable. This impresses me as egotism. I have

no such appetite for a separate immortality. God is my immortality;
what, of me, is identified with God, is God; what is not is of no

more permanent value than the snows of yester-year.
H. G. W.

Dunmow,
May, 1917.

GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
CHAPTER THE FIRST

THE COSMOGONY OF MODERN RELIGION
1. MODERN RELIGION HAS NO FOUNDER

Perhaps all religions, unless the flaming onset of Mohammedanism be
an exception, have dawned imperceptibly upon the world. A little

while ago and the thing was not; and then suddenly it has been found
in existence, and already in a state of diffusion. People have

begun to hear of the new belief first here and then there. It is
interesting, for example, to trace how Christianity drifted into the

consciousness of the Roman world. But when a religion has been
interrogated it has always had hitherto a tale of beginnings, the

name and story of a founder. The renascent religion that is now
taking shape, it seems, had no founder; it points to no origins. It

is the Truth, its believers declare; it has always been here; it has
always been visible to those who had eyes to see. It is perhaps

plainer than it was and to more people--that is all.
It is as if it still did not realise its own difference. Many of

those who hold it still think of it as if it were a kind of
Christianity. Some, catching at a phrase of Huxley's, speak of it

as Christianity without Theology. They do not know the creed they
are carrying. It has, as a matter of fact, a very fine and subtle

theology, flatly opposed to any belief that could, except by great
stretching of charity and the imagination, be called Christianity.

One might find, perhaps, a parallelism with the system ascribed to
some Gnostics, but that is far more probably an accidental rather

than a sympatheticcoincidence. Of that the reader shall presently
have an opportunity of judging.

This indefiniteness of statement and relationship is probably only
the opening phase of the new faith. Christianity also began with an

extremeneglect of definition. It was not at first anything more
than a sect of Judaism. It was only after three centuries, amidst

the uproar and emotions of the council of Nicaea, when the more
enthusiastic Trinitarians stuffed their fingers in their ears in

affected horror at the arguments of old Arius, that the cardinal
mystery of the Trinity was established as the essential fact of

Christianity. Throughout those three centuries, the centuries of
its greatest achievements and noblest martyrdoms, Christianity had

not defined its God. And even to-day it has to be noted that a
large majority of those who possess and repeat the Christian creeds

have come into the practice so insensibly from unthinking childhood,
that only in the slightest way do they realise the nature of the

statements to which they subscribe. They will speak and think of
both Christ and God in ways flatly incompatible with the doctrine of

the Triune deity upon which, theoretically, the entire fabric of all
the churches rests. They will show themselves as frankly Arians as

though that damnable heresy had not been washed out of the world
forever after centuries of persecution in torrents of blood. But

whatever the present state of Christendom in these matters may be,
there can be no doubt of the enormous pains taken in the past to

give Christian beliefs the exactest, least ambiguous statement
possible. Christianity knew itself clearly for what it was in its

maturity, whatever the indecisions of its childhood or the
confusions of its decay. The renascent religion that one finds now,

a thing active and sufficient in many minds, has still scarcely come
to self-consciousness. But it is so coming, and this present book

is very largely an attempt to state the shape it is assuming and to
compare it with the beliefs and imperatives and usages of the

various Christian, pseudo-Christian, philosophical, and agnostic
cults amidst which it has appeared.

The writer's sympathies and convictions are entirely with this that
he speaks of as renascent or modern religion; he is neither atheist

nor Buddhist nor Mohammedan nor Christian. He will make no
pretence, therefore, to impartiality and detachment. He will do his

best to be as fair as possible and as candid as possible, but the
reader must reckon with this bias. He has found this faith growing

up in himself; he has found it, or something very difficult to
distinguish from it, growing independently in the minds of men and

women he has met. They have been people of very various origins;
English, Americans, Bengalis, Russians, French, people brought up in

a "Catholic atmosphere," Positivists, Baptists, Sikhs, Mohammedans.
Their diversity of source is as remarkable as their convergence of

tendency. A miscellany of minds thinking upon parallel lines has
come out to the same light. The new teaching is also traceable in

many professedly Christian religious books and it is to be heard
from Christian pulpits. The phase of definition is manifestly at

hand.
2. MODERN RELIGION HAS A FINITE GOD

Perhaps the most fundamentaldifference between this new faith and
any recognised form of Christianity is that, knowingly or

unknowingly, it worships A FINITE GOD. Directly the believer is
fairly confronted with the plain questions of the case, the vague

identifications that are still carelessly made with one or all of
the persons of the Trinity dissolve away. He will admit that his

God is neither all-wise, nor all-powerful, nor omnipresent; that he
is neither the maker of heaven nor earth, and that he has little to

identify him with that hereditary God of the Jews who became the
"Father" in the Christian system. On the other hand he will assert

that his God is a god of salvation, that he is a spirit, a person, a
strongly marked and knowable personality, loving, inspiring, and

lovable, who exists or strives to exist in every human soul. He
will be much less certain in his denials that his God has a close

resemblance to the Pauline (as distinguished from the Trinitarian)
"Christ." . . .

The modern religious man will almost certainly profess a kind of
universalism; he will assert that whensoever men have called upon

any God and have found fellowship and comfort and courage and that
sense of God within them, that inner light which is the quintessence

of the religious experience, it was the True God that answered them.
For the True God is a generous God, not a jealous God; the very

antithesis of that bickering monopolist who "will have none other
gods but Me"; and when a human heart cries out--to what name it

matters not--for a larger spirit and a stronger help than the
visible things of life can give, straightway the nameless Helper is

with it and the God of Man answers to the call. The True God has no
scorn nor hate for those who have accepted the many-handed symbols

of the Hindu or the lacquered idols of China. Where there is faith,
where there is need, there is the True God ready to clasp the hands

that stretch out seeking for him into the darkness behind the ivory
and gold.

The fact that God is FINITE is one upon which those who think
clearly among the new believers are very insistent. He is, above

everything else, a personality, and to be a personality is to have
characteristics, to be limited by characteristics; he is a Being,