disembodiment of the idea of personality beyond the limits of the
conceivable; nevertheless they accept the conception that a person,
a spiritual individual, may be without an ordinary mortal body… .
They declare that God is without any specific body, that he is
immaterial, that he can affect the material universe—and that means
that he can only reach our sight, our hearing, our touch—through
the bodies of those who believe in him and serve him.
His nature is of the nature of thought and will. Not only has he,
in his essence, nothing to do with matter, but nothing to do with
space. He is not of matter nor of space. He comes into them.
Since the period when all the great theologies that prevail to-day
were developed, there have been great changes in the ideas of men
towards the dimensions of time and space. We owe to Kant the
release from the rule of these ideas as essential ideas. Our modern
psychology is alive to the possibility of Being that has no
extension in space at all, even as our speculative geometry can
entertain the possibility of dimensions—fourth, fifth, Nth
dimensions—outside the three-dimensional universe of our
experience. And God being non-spatial is not thereby banished to an
infinite remoteness, but brought nearer to us; he is everywhere
immediately at hand, even as a fourth dimension would be everywhere
immediately at hand. He is a Being of the minds and in the minds of
men. He is in immediate contact with all who apprehend him… .
But modern religion declares that though he does not exist in matter
or space, he exists in time just as a current of thought may do;
that he changes and becomes more even as a man’s purpose gathers
itself together; that somewhere in the dawning of mankind he had a
beginning, an awakening, and that as mankind grows he grows. With
our eyes he looks out upon the universe he invades; with our hands,
he lays hands upon it. All our truth, all our intentions and
achievements, he gathers to himself. He is the undying human
memory, the increasing human will.
But this, you may object, is no more than saying that God is the
collective mind and purpose of the human race. You may declare that
this is no God, but merely the sum of mankind. But those who
believe in the new ideas very steadfastly deny that. God is, they
say, not an aggregate but a synthesis. He is not merely the best of
all of us, but a Being in himself, composed of that but more than
that, as a temple is more than a gathering of stones, or a regiment
is more than an accumulation of men. They point out that a man is
made up of a great multitude of cells, each equivalent to a
unicellular organism. Not one of those cells is he, nor is he
simply just the addition of all of them. He is more than all of
them. You can take away these and these and these, and he still
remains. And he can detach part of himself and treat it as if it
were not himself, just as a man may beat his breast or, as Cranmer
the martyr did, thrust his hand into the flames. A man is none the
less himself because his hair is cut or his appendix removed or his
leg amputated.
And take another image… . Who bears affection for this or that
spadeful of mud in my garden? Who cares a throb of the heart for
all the tons of chalk in Kent or all the lumps of limestone in
Yorkshire? But men love England, which is made up of such things.
And so we think of God as a synthetic reality, though he has neither
body nor material parts. And so too we may obey him and listen to
him, though we think but lightly of the men whose hands or voices he
sometimes uses. And we may think of him as having moods and
aspects—as a man has—and a consistency we call his character.
These are theorisings about God. These are statements to convey
this modern idea of God. This, we say, is the nature of the person
whose will and thoughts we serve. No one, however, who understands
the religious life seeks conversion by argument. First one must
feel the need of God, then one must form or receive an acceptable
idea of God. That much is no more than turning one’s face to the
east to see the coming of the sun. One may still doubt if that
direction is the east or whether the sun will rise. The real coming
of God is not that. It is a change, an irradiation of the mind.
Everything is there as it was before, only now it is aflame.
Suddenly the light fills one’s eyes, and one knows that God has
risen and that doubt has fled for ever.
3. GOD IS YOUTH
The third thing to be told of the true God is that GOD IS YOUTH.
God, we hold, began and is always beginning. He looks forever into
the future.
Most of the old religions derive from a patriarchal phase. God is
in those systems the Ancient of Days. I know of no Christian
attempt to represent or symbolise God the Father which is not a
bearded, aged man. White hair, beard, bearing, wrinkles, a hundred
such symptoms of senile decay are there. These marks of senility do
not astonish our modern minds in the picture of God, only because
tradition and usage have blinded our eyes to the absurdity of a
time-worn immortal. Jove too and Wotan are figures far past the
prime of their vigour. These are gods after the ancient habit of
the human mind, that turned perpetually backward for causes and
reasons and saw all things to come as no more than the working out
of Fate,—
“Of Man’s first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe.”
But the God of this new age, we repeat, looks not to our past but
our future, and if a figure may represent him it must be the figure
of a beautiful youth, already brave and wise, but hardly come to his
strength. He should stand lightly on his feet in the morning time,
eager to go forward, as though he had but newly arisen to a day that
was still but a promise; he should bear a sword, that clean,
discriminating weapon, his eyes should be as bright as swords; his
lips should fall apart with eagerness for the great adventure before
him, and he should be in very fresh and golden harness, reflecting
the rising sun. Death should still hang like mists and cloud banks
and shadows in the valleys of the wide landscape about him. There
should be dew upon the threads of gossamer and little leaves and
blades of the turf at his feet… .
4. WHEN WE SAY GOD IS LOVE
One of the sayings about God that have grown at the same time most
trite and most sacred, is that God is Love. This is a saying that
deserves careful examination. Love is a word very loosely used;
there are people who will say they love new potatoes; there are a
multitude of loves of different colours and values. There is the
love of a mother for her child, there is the love of brothers, there
is the love of youth and maiden, and the love of husband and wife,
there is illicit love and the love one bears one’s home or one’s
country, there are dog-lovers and the loves of the Olympians, and
love which is a passion of jealousy. Love is frequently a mere
blend of appetite and preference; it may be almost pure greed; it
may have scarcely any devotion nor be a whit self-forgetful nor
generous. It is possible so to phrase things that the furtive
craving of a man for another man’s wife may be made out to be a
light from God. Yet about all the better sorts of love, the sorts
of love that people will call “true love,” there is something of
that same exaltation out of the narrow self that is the essential
quality of the knowledge of God.
Only while the exaltation of the love passion comes and goes, the
exaltation of religious passion comes to remain. Lovers are the
windows by which we may look out of the prison of self, but God is
the open door by which we freely go. And God never dies, nor
disappoints, nor betrays.
The love of a woman and a man has usually, and particularly in its
earlier phases of excitement, far too much desire, far too much
possessiveness and exclusiveness, far too much distrust or forced
trust, and far too great a kindred with jealousy to be like the love