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 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. . . .