Yet that the idea of God may remain in power and not as a “passionless impersonality,” it must be less interpreted by the teachings of Moses and more by the teachings of Christ.  Human tempers and passions must be eliminated from our Divine Ideal.  He must not be made an angry and jealous God as men count these.  He must not be thought of as a vindictive personality, never so well pleased as when scaring His children into panic.  In the thought of the Church He will be an all-pervasive Spirit whose nature is unfolded by the universe He has made.  In that universe He will be felt to be immanent as the power of development, order, and destiny.  All ages show Him to be “the power which makes for righteousness.”  The commandments are not only His because they are found in the Bible, but because they are perceived to be necessary laws of conduct proceeding from such a Being as we know God to be for such beings as we know men to be.  Thus we perceive them to be the Divinely authorized bond of society and the guarantee and obligation of the Divine Ideal of humanity.  All nature and all history are scrutinized for traces of the Supreme.  These being found to coincide with the Christian Revelation of Him, men will read with new reverence those wonderful books which make up the Book, and which beyond all others anticipate the latest results of scientific inquiry and natural ethical canon.

[Sidenote:  Advantage of Newer View.]

Out of this will come such a sense of the Divine Presence as the Church and the individual Christian have not hitherto known.  Moral distance from God will be the only distance.  “In Him we live and move and have our being” comes to full interpretation through this thought of God.  Humanity is immersed in Him.

[Sidenote:  Transcendent.]

[Sidenote:  Huxley Against Hume.]

But this immanent God is also seen to be transcendent.  He is in nature and far beyond it.  Vast as nature is, it is limited.  God is the unlimited.  Within this region of transcendence is room for all His gracious activities as distinguished from His natural activities; room for marvel and miracle if He will and we need.  When Huxley abandons Hume’s a priori argument against miracles it is not worth while for others to use it.  Fewer doubt the existence of a God, I believe, than at any time since men sought to prove that He does not exist.  The Fatherly in God is proved both by His work in nature and by those works of grace which the student of nature alone can not see.  God is a spirit.  The human spirit refined, purified, sees Him in proportion to its purification.

[Sidenote:  Modern Christology.]

[Sidenote:  Former Limitations.]

[Sidenote:  Ritual Statement.]

[Sidenote:  Aim of Christianity.]

[Sidenote:  Likeness to God.]