ell that is not already
familiar to the reader of William James's "Varieties of Religious
Experience." It describes an initial state of distress with the
aimlessness and cruelties of life, and particularly with the futility of
the individual life, a state of helpless self-disgust, of inability to
form any satisfactory plan of living. This is the common prelude known
to many sorts of Christian as "conviction of sin"; it is, at any rate, a
conviction of hopeless confusion. . . . Then in some way the idea of
God comes into the distressed mind, at first simply as an idea, without
substance or belief. It is read about or it is remembered; it is
expounded by some teacher or some happy convert. In the case of all
those of the new faith with whose personal experience I have any
intimacy, the idea of God has remained for some time simply as an idea
floating about in a mind still dissatisfied. God is not believed in,
but it is realised that if there were such a being he would supply the
needed consolation and direction, his continuing purpose would knit
together the scattered effort of life, his immortality would take
the sting from death. Under this realisation the idea is pursued and
elaborated. For a time there is a curious resistance to the suggestion
that God is truly a person; he is spoken of preferably by such phrases
as the Purpose in Things, as the Racial Consciousness, as the Collective
Mind.

I believe that this resistance in so many contemporary minds to the idea
of God as a person is due very largely to the enormous prejudice against
divine personality created by the absurdities of the Christian teaching
and the habitual monopoly of the Christian idea. The picture of Christ
as the Good Shepherd thrusts itself before minds unaccustomed to the
idea that they are lambs. The cross in the twilight bars the way. It is
a novelty and an enormous relief to such people to realise that one may
think of God without being committed to think of either the Father, the
Son, or the Holy Ghost, or of all of them at once. That freedom had not
seemed possible to them. They had been hypnotised and obsessed by the
idea that the Christian God is the only thinkable God. They had heard so
much about that God and so little of any other. With that release their
minds become, as it were, nascent and ready for the coming of God.

Then suddenly, in a little while, in his own time, God comes. This
cardinal experience is an undoubting, immediate s