It is with these things in mind that those who profess the new faith are becoming so markedly anxious to distinguish God from the Trinitarian’s deity.  At present if anyone who has left the Christian communion declares himself a believer in God, priest and parson swell with self-complacency.  There is no reason why they should do so.  That many of us have gone from them and found God is no concern of theirs.  It is not that we who went out into the wilderness which we thought to be a desert, away from their creeds and dogmas, have turned back and are returning.  It is that we have gone on still further, and are beyond that desolation.  Never more shall we return to those who gather under the cross.  By faith we disbelieved and denied.  By faith we said of that stuffed scarecrow of divinity, that incoherent accumulation of antique theological notions, the Nicene deity, “This is certainly no God.”  And by faith we have found God. . . .

3.  The infinite being is not god

There has always been a demand upon the theological teacher that he should supply a cosmogony.  It has always been an effective propagandist thing to say:  “Our God made the whole universe.  Don’t you think that it would be wise to abandon your deity, who did not, as you admit, do anything of the sort?”

The attentive reader of the lives of the Saints will find that this style of argument did in the past bring many tribes and nations into the Christian fold.  It was second only to the claim of magic advantages, demonstrated by a free use of miracles.  Only one great religious system, the Buddhist, seems to have resisted the temptation to secure for its divinity the honour and title of Creator.  Modern religion is like Buddhism in that respect.  It offers no theory whatever about the origin of the universe.  It does not reach behind the appearances of space and time.  It sees only a featureless presumption in that playing with superlatives which has entertained so many minds from Plotinus to the Hegelians with the delusion that such negative terms as the Absolute or the Unconditioned, can assert anything at all.  At the back of all known things there is an impenetrable curtain; the ultimate of existence is a Veiled Being, which seems to know nothing of life or death or good or ill.  Of that Being, whether it is simple or complex or divine, we know nothing; to us it is no more than the limit of understanding, the unknown beyond.  It may be of practically limitless intricacy and possibility.  The new religion does not pretend that the God of its life is that Being, or that he has any relation of control or association with that Being.  It does not even assert that God knows all or much more than we do about that ultimate Being.

For us life is a matter of our personalities in space and time.  Human analysis probing with philosophy and science towards the Veiled Being reveals nothing of God, reveals space and time only as necessary forms of consciousness, glimpses a dance of atoms, of whirls in the ether.  Some day in the endless future there may be a knowledge, an understanding of relationship, a power and courage that will pierce into those black wrappings.  To that it may be our God, the Captain of Mankind will take us.