ideas of God.

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 thr