as Mother Nature. We
may speculate whether it is not what the wiser among the Gnostics meant
by the Demiurge, but since the Christians destroyed all the Gnostic
books that must remain a mere curious guess. We may speculate whether
this heat and haste and wrath of life about us is the Dark God of the
Manichees, the evil spirit of the sun worshippers. But in contemporary
thought there is no conviction apparent that this Demiurge is either
good or evil; it is conceived of as both good and evil. If it gives all
the pain and conflict of life, it gives also the joy of the sunshine,
the delight and hope of youth, the pleasures. If it has elaborated a
hundred thousand sorts of parasite, it has also moulded the beautiful
limbs of man and woman; it has shaped the slug and the flower. And
in it, as part of it, taking its rewards, responding to its goads,
struggling against the final abandonment to death, do we all live,
as the beasts live, glad, angry, sorry, revengeful, hopeful, weary,
disgusted, forgetful, lustful, happy, excited, bored, in pain, mood
after mood but always fearing death, with no certainty and no coherence
within us, until we find God. And God comes to us neither out of the
stars nor out of the pride of life, but as a still small voice within.

5. GOD IS WITHIN

God comes we know not whence, into the conflict of life. He works in men
and through men. He is a spirit, a single spirit and a single person; he
has begun and he will never end. He is the immortal part and leader of
mankind. He has motives, he has characteristics, he has an aim. He is
by our poor scales of measurement boundless love, boundless courage,
boundless generosity. He is thought and a steadfast will. He is our
friend and brother and the light of the world. That briefly is the
belief of the modern mind with regard to God. There is no very novel
idea about this God, unless it be the idea that he had a beginning. This
is the God that men have sought and found in all ages, as God or as
the Messiah or the Saviour. The finding of him is salvation from the
purposelessness of life. The new religion has but disentangled the idea
of him from the absolutes and infinities and mysteries of the Christian
theologians; from mythological virgin births and the cosmogonies and
intellectual pretentiousness of a vanished age.

Modern religion appeals to no revelation, no authoritative teaching,
no mystery. The statement it makes is, it declares, a mere state