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.

6.  The coming of god

Modern religion bases its knowledge of God and its account of God entirely upon experience.  It has encountered God.  It does not argue about God; it relates.  It relates without any of those wrappings of awe and reverence that fold so necessarily about imposture, it relates as one tells of a friend and his assistance, of a happy adventure, of a beautiful thing found and picked up by the wayside.

So far as its psychological phases go the new account of personal salvation tallies very closely with the account of “conversion” as it is given by other religions.  It has little to tell that is not already familiar to the reader of William James’s “Varieties of Religious Experience.”  It describes an initial state of distress with the aimlessness and cruelties of life, and particularly with the futility of the individual life, a state of helpless self-disgust, of inability to form any satisfactory plan of living.  This is the common prelude known to many sorts of Christian as “conviction of sin”; it is, at any rate, a conviction of hopeless confusion. . . .  Then in some way the idea of God comes into the distressed mind, at first simply as an idea, without substance or belief.  It is read about or it is remembered; it is expounded by some teacher or some happy convert.  In the case of all those of the new faith with whose personal experience I have any intimacy, the idea of God has remained for some time simply as an idea floating about in a mind still dissatisfied.  God is not believed in, but it is realised that if there were such a being he would supply the needed consolation and direction, his continuing purpose would knit together the scattered effort of life, his immortality would take the sting from death.  Under this realisation the idea is pursued and elaborated.  For a time there is a curious resistance to the suggestion that God is truly a person; he is spoken of preferably by such phrases as the Purpose in Things, as the Racial Consciousness, as the Collective Mind.

I believe that this resistance in so many contemporary minds to the idea of God as a person is due very largely to the enormous prejudice against divine personality created by the absurdities of the Christian teaching and the habitual monopoly of the Christian idea.  The picture of Christ as the Good Shepherd thrusts itself before minds unaccustomed to the idea that they are lambs.  The cross in the twilight bars