release from the rule of these ideas as essential ideas. Our modern
psychology is alive to the possibility of Being that has no

extension in space at all, even as our speculative geometry can
entertain the possibility of dimensions--fourth, fifth, Nth

dimensions--outside the three-dimensional universe of our
experience. And God being non-spatial is not thereby banished to an

infinite remoteness, but brought nearer to us; he is everywhere
immediately at hand, even as a fourth dimension would be everywhere

immediately at hand. He is a Being of the minds and in the minds of
men. He is in immediate contact with all who apprehend him. . . .

But modern religion declares that though he does not exist in matter
or space, he exists in time just as a current of thought may do;

that he changes and becomes more even as a man's purpose gathers
itself together; that somewhere in the dawning of mankind he had a

beginning, an awakening, and that as mankind grows he grows. With
our eyes he looks out upon the universe he invades; with our hands,

he lays hands upon it. All our truth, all our intentions and
achievements, he gathers to himself. He is the undying human

memory, the increasing human will.
But this, you may object, is no more than saying that God is the

collective mind and purpose of the human race. You may declare that
this is no God, but merely the sum of mankind. But those who

believe in the new ideas very steadfastly deny that. God is, they
say, not an aggregate but a synthesis. He is not merely the best of

all of us, but a Being in himself, composed of that but more than
that, as a temple is more than a gathering of stones, or a regiment

is more than an accumulation of men. They point out that a man is
made up of a great multitude of cells, each equivalent to a

unicellular organism. Not one of those cells is he, nor is he
simply just the addition of all of them. He is more than all of

them. You can take away these and these and these, and he still
remains. And he can detach part of himself and treat it as if it

were not himself, just as a man may beat his breast or, as Cranmer
the martyr did, thrust his hand into the flames. A man is none the

less himself because his hair is cut or his appendix removed or his
leg amputated.

And take another image. . . . Who bears affection for this or that
spadeful of mud in my garden? Who cares a throb of the heart for

all the tons of chalk in Kent or all the lumps of limestone in
Yorkshire? But men love England, which is made up of such things.

And so we think of God as a synthetic reality, though he has neither
body nor material parts. And so too we may obey him and listen to

him, though we think but lightly of the men whose hands or voices he
sometimes uses. And we may think of him as having moods and

aspects--as a man has--and a consistency we call his character.
These are theorisings about God. These are statements to convey

this modern idea of God. This, we say, is the nature of the person
whose will and thoughts we serve. No one, however, who understands

the religious life seeks conversion by argument. First one must
feel the need of God, then one must form or receive an acceptable

idea of God. That much is no more than turning one's face to the
east to see the coming of the sun. One may still doubt if that

direction is the east or whether the sun will rise. The real coming
of God is not that. It is a change, an irradiation of the mind.

Everything is there as it was before, only now it is aflame.
Suddenly the light fills one's eyes, and one knows that God has

risen and that doubt has fled for ever.
3. GOD IS YOUTH

The third thing to be told of the true God is that GOD IS YOUTH.
God, we hold, began and is always beginning. He looks forever into

the future.
Most of the old religions derive from a patriarchal phase. God is

in those systems the Ancient of Days. I know of no Christian
attempt to represent or symbolise God the Father which is not a

bearded, aged man. White hair, beard, bearing, wrinkles, a hundred
such symptoms of senile decay are there. These marks of senility do

not astonish our modern minds in the picture of God, only because
tradition and usage have blinded our eyes to the absurdity of a

time-worn mortal" target="_blank" title="a.不死的n.不朽的人物">immortal. Jove too and Wotan are figures far past the
prime of their vigour. These are gods after the ancient habit of

the human mind, that turned perpetually backward for causes and
reasons and saw all things to come as no more than the working out

of Fate,--
"Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe."

But the God of this new age, we repeat, looks not to our past but
our future, and if a figure may represent him it must be the figure

of a beautiful youth, already brave and wise, but hardly come to his
strength. He should stand lightly on his feet in the morning time,

eager to go forward, as though he had but newly arisen to a day that
was still but a promise; he should bear a sword, that clean,

discriminating weapon, his eyes should be as bright as swords; his
lips should fall apart with eagerness for the great adventure before

him, and he should be in very fresh and golden harness, reflecting
the rising sun. Death should still hang like mists and cloud banks

and shadows in the valleys of the wide landscape about him. There
should be dew upon the threads of gossamer and little leaves and

blades of the turf at his feet. . . .
4. WHEN WE SAY GOD IS LOVE

One of the sayings about God that have grown at the same time most
trite and most sacred, is that God is Love. This is a saying that

deserves careful examination. Love is a word very loosely used;
there are people who will say they love new potatoes; there are a

multitude of loves of different colours and values. There is the
love of a mother for her child, there is the love of brothers, there

is the love of youth and maiden, and the love of husband and wife,
there is illicit love and the love one bears one's home or one's

country, there are dog-lovers and the loves of the Olympians, and
love which is a passion of jealousy. Love is frequently a mere

blend of appetite and preference; it may be almost pure greed; it
may have scarcely any devotion nor be a whit self-forgetful nor

generous. It is possible so to phrase things that the furtive
craving of a man for another man's wife may be made out to be a

light from God. Yet about all the better sorts of love, the sorts
of love that people will call "true love," there is something of

that same exaltation out of the narrow self that is the essential
quality of the knowledge of God.

Only while the exaltation of the love passion comes and goes, the
exaltation of religious passion comes to remain. Lovers are the

windows by which we may look out of the prison of self, but God is
the open door by which we freely go. And God never dies, nor

disappoints, nor betrays.
The love of a woman and a man has usually, and particularly in its

earlier phases of excitement, far too much desire, far too much
possessiveness and exclusiveness, far too much distrust or forced

trust, and far too great a kindred with jealousy to be like the love
of God. The former is a dramaticrelationship that drifts to a

climax, and then again seeks presently a climax, and that may be
satiated or fatigued. But the latter is far more like the love of

comrades, or like the love of a man and a woman who have loved and
been through much trouble together, who have hurt one another and

forgiven, and come to a complete and generousfellowship. There is
a strange and beautiful love that men tell of that will spring up on

battlefields between sorely wounded men, and often they are men who
have fought together, so that they will do almost incredibly brave

and tender things for one another, though but recently they have
been trying to kill each other. There is often a pure exaltation of

feeling between those who stand side by side manfully in any great
stress. These are the forms of love that perhaps come nearest to

what we mean when we speak of the love of God.
That is man's love of God, but there is also something else; there

is the love God bears for man in the individual believer. Now this
is not an indulgent, instinctive, and sacrificing love like the love

of a woman for her baby. It is the love of the captain for his men;
God must love his followers as a great captain loves his men, who

are so foolish, so helpless in themselves, so confiding, and yet
whose faith alone makes him possible. It is an austere love. The

spirit of God will not hesitate to send us to torment and bodily
death. . . .