God who is love.

Had more been heard about this, the God of religion, and less about
that other--the lawyer's God, whose main concern is the policing of his
universe--our religious perplexities would not be what they are. I do
not say they would be easier. They might be harder. But they would
lose their character as irritants and become, instead, incentives to
humane relationships, to noble living and to creative work. For there
are two kinds of religious perplexity. In the one, perplexity
overcomes religion; in the other, religion overcomes perplexity. "We
are perplexed, yet not unto despair."

_III_

_Perplexity in the Christian Religion_

Those who are wondering in what form Christianity is destined to
survive, or whether it will survive at all,[1] would be well advised to
keep in mind two significant facts, discernible enough even when the
view is limited to our own country, but obvious on a wider survey of
what is going forward in foreign lands: first, that the lay mind has
definitely passed beyond clerical control; second, that the most active
religious minds, both among the clergy and the laity, but among the
laity most of all, are learning to use their own eyes in the search for
God, instead of looking for Him through the ill-matched lenses of
Jew-Greek binoculars, and are gradually ceasing to think about Christ
and his religion in terms of the recognized "isms"--Catholicism,
Protestantism, Anglicanism, Modernism, Trinitarianism, Unitarianism, or
any other. They have passed beyond all that and are probing deeper
ground. They are judging spiritual things by spiritual.

If these things are so, and somewhat exceptional opportunities of
observing have convinced me that they are,[2] it would seem to follow
that the form in which Christianity is destined to survive (if it
survives at all) will not be the form of any of the "isms" aforesaid.
In other words, even if the battle of the "isms," as this is now
carried on by professional controversalists and mainly on clerical
ground, were to issue in the final victory of one of them over the
others--of which at present there is little prospect--this would decide
nothing as to the fortunes of Christianity in the world at large.
Thus, though we have no indication of what the surviving form of
Christianity will be, we have a pretty clear indication of what it will
not be. Beyond this it seems impossible to cast the horoscope of
Christianity at the present