. Take, for instance, the
phrases, "The fatherhood of God" and "The brotherhood of man." They have
been so often upon our lips as to become trite; their real meaning has
disappeared. It is easy to repeat the words, and to be satisfied with
the repetition, and nevertheless remain wholly insensible to their
profound import, and under no compulsion whatsoever to obey their
sublime command. We assent to the formula: but it does not become a
determining factor in our purposes and plans. There is perhaps no age in
the history of the world which has so emphasized the idea of the
brotherhood of man as our own, and never in all history has there been
such a denial of this idea as by the present European war. If the
brotherhood of man had been the living, dominant idea of our
civilization, could this present tragedy of the nations have occurred?
If the world had believed profoundly in the idea of God, would we now be
daily reading of the ghastly scenes where human life is no longer
sacred, where love gives place to hate, where the constructive forces of
the world are superseded by the destructive, and all the passions of
man's brute inheritance are given full play and scope?

Second--In the teachings of Christ there was a remarkable expansion of
the idea of God. Instead of the tribal God worshipped as the God of
Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, He substituted the idea of God, as the
God of all peoples and all races, the God of the Jew and Gentile, of the
Greek and barbarian, of the bond and the free. It was the great apostle
of the Gentiles who at the centre of Greek civilization announced this
fundamental conception of Christianity to the old world:

God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on
all the face of the earth.

This was the sublime idea of the God of a united humanity. The God of
the tribe had given place to the God of the whole world. That conception
was very foreign to the popular religious notions current at the time
of Christ, and it seems still further away from our ideas of the present
day. It is a very narrow and circumscribed view of God to regard Him as
concerned merely for our little insular affairs, to regard Him simply as
a God of the individual or of the home, or even one's nation. He
transcends all these limitations of particular interests and particular
needs. He is not merely our God but the God of all mankind. The children
of Israel called Him the God of battle, the God of h