D. Directly the believer is fairly confronted with
the plain questions of the case, the vague identifications that are
still carelessly made with one or all of the persons of the Trinity
dissolve away. He will admit that his God is neither all-wise, nor
all-powerful, nor omnipresent; that he is neither the maker of heaven
nor earth, and that he has little to identify him with that hereditary
God of the Jews who became the "Father" in the Christian system. On the
other hand he will assert that his God is a god of salvation, that he is
a spirit, a person, a strongly marked and knowable personality, loving,
inspiring, and lovable, who exists or strives to exist in every human
soul. He will be much less certain in his denials that his God has a
close resemblance to the Pauline (as distinguished from the Trinitarian)
"Christ." . . .

The modern religious man will almost certainly profess a kind of
universalism; he will assert that whensoever men have called upon any
God and have found fellowship and comfort and courage and that sense
of God within them, that inner light which is the quintessence of the
religious experience, it was the True God that answered them. For the
True God is a generous God, not a jealous God; the very antithesis of
that bickering monopolist who "will have none other gods but Me"; and
when a human heart cries out--to what name it matters not--for a larger
spirit and a stronger help than the visible things of life can give,
straightway the nameless Helper is with it and the God of Man answers to
the call. The True God has no scorn nor hate for those who have accepted
the many-handed symbols of the Hindu or the lacquered idols of China.
Where there is faith, where there is need, there is the True God ready
to clasp the hands that stretch out seeking for him into the darkness
behind the ivory and gold.

The fact that God is FINITE is one upon which those who think clearly
among the new believers are very insistent. He is, above everything
else, a personality, and to be a personality is to have characteristics,
to be limited by characteristics; he is a Being, not us but dealing
with us and through us, he has an aim and that means he has a past and
future; he is within time and not outside it. And they point out that
this is really what everyone who prays sincerely to God or gets help
from God, feels and believes. Our practice with God is better than our
theory. None of us really pray to that fantastic, u