delight and hope of youth, the pleasures.  If it has elaborated a hundred thousand sorts of parasite, it has also moulded the beautiful limbs of man and woman; it has shaped the slug and the flower.  And in it, as part of it, taking its rewards, responding to its goads, struggling against the final abandonment to death, do we all live, as the beasts live, glad, angry, sorry, revengeful, hopeful, weary, disgusted, forgetful, lustful, happy, excited, bored, in pain, mood after mood but always fearing death, with no certainty and no coherence within us, until we find God.  And God comes to us neither out of the stars nor out of the pride of life, but as a still small voice within.

5.  God is within

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!