Now it is certain that the belief of the Christian church respecting the character of God has been steadily changing, in this direction, through the Christian centuries.  Enlightened Christians have been coming to believe, more and more, in a good God; and by a good God I mean not merely a good-natured God, but a just God, a true God, a fair God, a righteous God.  The growth of this conviction has been purging theology of many crude and revolting dogmas.

It is a great deliverance which is wrought out for us when we are set free, in our religious thinking, from the bondage of unmoral conceptions, and are encouraged to believe that God is good.  It is a great blessing to have a God to worship whom we can thoroughly respect.  A tremendous strain is put upon the moral nature when men are required, by traditional influences, to pay adoration and homage to a being whose conduct, as it is represented to them, is, in some important respects, conduct which they cannot approve.  All the religions, through the imperfection of human thought, have put that burden on their worshipers.

Christianity has been struggling, through all the centuries, to free itself from unworthy conceptions of the character of its Deity, and each succeeding re-statement of its doctrines removes some stain which our dim vision and halting logic had left upon his name.

What, now, has caused these changes to take place in men’s thoughts about God?  What influences have been at work to clarify their ideas of the unknown Reality?

From three principal sources have come the streams of light by which our religious conceptions have been purified.

The first of these is the natural world round about us.  We are immersed in Nature; it touches us on every side; it addresses us through all our senses; it speaks to us every day with a thousand voices.  Nature is the great teacher of the human race.  She knows everything; she waits to impart her love to all who will receive it; she is very patient; her lessons are not forced upon unwilling pupils, but whosoever will may come and take of her treasure.  Longfellow said of the childhood of Agassiz, that—­

    “Nature, the old nurse, took
      The child upon her knee,
    Saying:  ’Here is a story-book
      Thy Father has written for thee.

    “‘Come, wander with me,’ she said,
      ’Into regions yet untrod;
    And read what is still unread
      In the manuscripts of God.’”

It is not the child Agassiz alone whom Nature thus invited; to the whole human race, in its childhood, its adolescence, its maturity, she has always been saying the same thing.  She has been seeking, through all the ages, to disclose to us all the mysteries of this marvelous universe.  We have been slow learners; it took her a great many centuries to get the simplest truths lodged in the human mind.  The cave-dweller, the savage in his teepee, were able to receive but little of what she had to give.