God comes we know not whence, into the conflict of life. He works in men
and through men. He is a spirit, a single spirit and a single person; he
has begun and he will never end. He is the immortal part and leader of
mankind. He has motives, he has characteristics, he has an aim. He is
by our poor scales of measurement boundless love, boundless courage,
boundless generosity. He is thought and a steadfast will. He is our
friend and brother and the light of the world. That briefly is the
belief of the modern mind with regard to God. There is no very novel
idea about this God, unless it be the idea that he had a beginning. This
is the God that men have sought and found in all ages, as God or as
the Messiah or the Saviour. The finding of him is salvation from the
purposelessness of life. The new religion has but disentangled the idea
of him from the absolutes and infinities and mysteries of the Christian
theologians; from mythological virgin births and the cosmogonies and
intellectual pretentiousness of a vanished age.
Modern religion appeals to no revelation, no authoritative teaching,
no mystery. The statement it makes is, it declares, a mere statement
of what we may all perceive and experience. We all live in the storm of
life, we all find our understandings limited by the Veiled Being; if
we seek salvation and search within for God, presently we find him. All
this is in the nature of things. If every one who perceives and states
it were to be instantly killed and blotted out, presently other people
would find their way to the same conclusions; and so on again and again.
To this all true religion, casting aside its hulls of misconception,
must ultimately come. To it indeed much religion is already coming.
Christian thought struggles towards it, with the millstones of Syrian
theology and an outrageous mythology of incarnation and resurrection
about its neck. When at last our present bench of bishops join the
early fathers of the church in heaven there will be, I fear, a note of
reproach in their greeting of the ingenious person who saddled them with
OMNIPOTENS. Still more disastrous for them has been the virgin birth,
with the terrible fascination of its detail for unpoetic minds. How rich
is the literature of authoritative Christianity with decisions upon the
continuing virginity of Mary and the virginity of Joseph--ideas that
first arose in Arabia as a Moslem gloss upon Christianity--and how
little have these peepings and 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.