A principal fault has been the method used in arriving at the thought of God.  Men began with what was termed “Natural Religion.”  They studied the universe and inferred the sort of Deity who made and ruled it.  It was intricately and wisely designed; its God must be omniscient.  It was vast; He must be omnipotent.  It displayed the same orderliness everywhere; He must be omnipresent.  In epochs when men emphasized the beneficence of nature—­its beauty, its usefulness, its wisdom—­they concluded that its Creator was good.  In an epoch, like the latter part of the Nineteenth Century, they drew a very different conclusion.  Charles Darwin wrote, “What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature.”

Christians never stopped with the view of God drawn from “Natural Religion.”  They made this their basis, and then added to it the God of “Revealed Religion,” contained in the Bible.  They selected all the texts that spoke of God, drawing them from Leviticus and Ecclesiastes as confidently as from the gospels and St. Paul, and constructed a Biblical doctrine of God, which they added to the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent Being of their inferences from Nature.  The God and Father of Jesus was thus combined with various, often much lower thoughts of Deity in the Bible, and then further obscured by the Deity of the current views of physical and human nature.  It is not surprising that few Christians possessed a truly Christian view of God.

Loyalty to Jesus compels us to begin with Him.  If He is the Way, we are not justified in taking half a dozen other roads, and using Him as one path among many.  We ask ourselves what was the highest inspiration of Jesus, what was the Being to whom He responded with His obedient trust and with whom He communed.  We are eager not to fashion an image of Divinity for ourselves, which is idolatry as truly when our minds grave it in thought as when our hands shape it in stone; but to receive God’s disclosure of Himself with a whole-hearted response, and interpret, as faithfully as we can, the impression He makes upon us.  “God,” writes Tyndal, the martyr translator of our English New Testament, “is not man’s imagination, but that only which He saith of Himself.”  Our highest inspirations come to us from Jesus, and He is, therefore, God’s Self-unveiling to us, God’s “Frankness,” His Word made flesh.

Responding to God through Jesus, Christians discover: 

First, that God is their Christlike Father, and that He is love as Jesus experienced His love and Himself was love.