oved that universal belief to be false! In
the discussion of witchcraft, it has been shown that a delusion may be
as widespread as a truth. During the tenth and eleventh centuries, the
Spanish Moors had recognized the sphericity of the earth and were
teaching geography from globes in their common schools. Rome, during the
same ages, was asserting in all its absurdity the flatness of the earth.
It was not until almost five hundred years later that Rome was forced to
see its absurdity and then only when the enlightened world mocked at its
error.

In this twentieth century, certain enlightened men are teaching the
absurdity and harmfulness of a belief in a deity. Must it take five
hundred years for all mankind to come to a similar conclusion? May it
not well be that in a few centuries our posterity will view belief in a
deity in the same light that we in this age view the Church's insistence
that the earth was flat?

The God idea has been one of the most divisive and anti-social notions
cherished by mankind. In fact it has been asserted that the idea of God
has been the enemy of man. It has driven multitudes of men and women
into the unnatural asceticisms and wasted lives of the convent and
abbey. It has taxed the economic resources of every nation. Every
church, no matter of what creed, is a pathetic monument of God-ridden
humanity which has been built by the pennies sweated by the poor, and
wrested from them by fraudulent promises of reward, appeals to fear, and
the pathetic human tendency to sacrifice.

The theologians have in their arguments resorted to philosophy. The
consequence of this transference of the idea of God to the sphere of
philosophy is the curious position that the god in which people believe
is not the god whose existence is made the product of an experimental
argument, and the god of the argument is not the god of belief.

"It is a nice question," remarks Walter Lippmann, "whether the use of
God's name is not misleading when it is applied by modernists to ideas
so remote from the God men have worshipped. Plainly the modernist
churchman does not believe in the God of Genesis who walked in the
garden in the cool of the evening and called for Adam and his wife who
had hidden themselves behind a tree; nor in the God of Exodus who
appeared to Moses and Aaron and seventy of the Elders of Israel,
standing with his feet upon a paved walk as if it were a sapphire stone;
nor even in the God of the fifty-thir