s you do, in the
light of gospel, the word of God."

He was moved to write an article on the human idea of God, ancient and
modern. It contained these paragraphs:

The difference in importance, between the God of the Bible and the
God of the present day, cannot be described, it can only be vaguely
and inadequately figured to the mind . . . . If you make figures
to represent the earth and moon, and allow a space of one inch
between them, to represent the four hundred thousand miles of
distance which lies between the two bodies, the map will have to be
eleven miles long in order to bring in the nearest fixed star.
--[His figures were far too small. A map drawn on the scale of
400,000 miles to the inch would need to be 1,100 miles long to take
in both the earth and the nearest fixed star. On such a map the
earth would be one-fiftieth of an inch in diameter--the size of a
small grain of sand.]--So one cannot put the modern heavens on a
map, nor the modern God; but the Bible God and the Bible heavens can
be set down on a slate and yet not be discommoded . . . .

The difference between that universe and the modern one revealed by
science is as the difference between a dust-flecked ray in a barn
and the sublime arch of the Milky Way in the skies. Its God was
strictly proportioned to its dimensions. His sole solicitude was
about a handful of truculent nomads. He worried and fretted over
them in a peculiarly and distractingly human way. One day he coaxed
and petted them beyond their due, the next he harried and lashed
them beyond their deserts. He sulked, he cursed, he raged, he
grieved, according to his mood and the circumstances, but all to no
purpose; his efforts were all vain, he could not govern them. When
the fury was on him he was blind to all reason--he not only
slaughtered the offender, but even his harmless little children and
dumb cattle....

To trust the God of the Bible is to trust an irascible, vindictive,
fierce and ever fickle and changeful master; to trust the true God
is to trust a Being who has uttered no promises, but whose
beneficent, exact, and changeless ordering of the machinery of his
colossal universe is proof that he is at least steadfast to his
purposes; whose unwritten laws, so far as they affect man, being
equal and impartial, show that he is just and fair; thes