associated with fine
feeling, cry that they have reached Pisgah's slope and in increasing
numbers men and women are pressing on to see if it be really the
Promised Land."

"Pisgah--the Promised Land!" Mr. McCabe in that passage sounds as if he
were half-way to "Oh! Beulah Land!" and the tambourine.

That "larger spirit," we maintain, is God; those "impulses" are the
power of God, and Mr. McCabe serves a Master he denies. He has but to
realise fully that God is not necessarily the Triune God of the Catholic
Church, and banish his intense suspicion that he may yet be lured
back to that altar he abandoned, he has but to look up from that
preoccupation, and immediately he will begin to realise the presence of
Divinity.

3. GOD IS AN EXTERNAL REALITY

It may be argued that if atheists and agnostics when they set themselves
to express the good will that is in them, do shape out God, that
if their conception of right living falls in so completely with the
conception of God's service as to be broadly identical, then indeed God,
like the ether of scientific speculation, is no more than a theory, no
more than an imaginative externalisation of man's inherent good will.
Why trouble about God then? Is not the declaration of a good disposition
a sufficient evidence of salvation? What is the difference between such
benevolent unbelievers as Professor Metchnikoff or Mr. McCabe and those
who have found God?

The difference is this, that the benevolent atheist stands alone upon
his own good will, without a reference, without a standard, trusting
to his own impulse to goodness, relying upon his own moral strength. A
certain immodesty, a certain self-righteousness, hangs like a precipice
above him; incalculable temptations open like gulfs beneath his feet. He
has not really given himself or got away from himself. He has no one to
whom he can give himself. He is still a masterless man. His exaltation
is self-centred, is priggishness, his fall is unrestrained by any
exterior obligation. His devotion is only the good will in himself, a
disposition; it is a mood that may change. At any moment it may change.
He may have pledged himself to his own pride and honour, but who will
hold him to his bargain? He has no source of strength beyond his own
amiable sentiments, his conscience speaks with an unsupported voice, and
no one watches while he sleeps. He cannot pray; he can but ejaculate. He
has no real and living link with other men