was the
substance of "First and Last Things." In this present book there is no
further attack on philosophical or metaphysical questions. Here we
work at a less fundamental level and deal with religious feeling and
religious ideas. But just as the writer was inclined to attribute a
whole world of disputation and inexactitudes to confused thinking about
the exact value of classes and terms, so here he is disposed to think
that interminable controversies and conflicts arise out of a confusion
of intention due to a double meaning of the word "God"; that the word
"God" conveys not one idea or set of ideas, but several essentially
different ideas, incompatible one with another, and falling mainly into
one or other of two divergent groups; and that people slip carelessly
from one to the other of these groups of ideas and so get into
ultimately inextricable confusions.

The writer believes that the centuries of fluid religious thought that
preceded the violent ultimate crystallisation of Nicaea, was essentially
a struggle--obscured, of course, by many complexities--to reconcile and
get into a relationship these two separate main series of God-ideas.

Putting the leading idea of this book very roughly, these two
antagonistic typical conceptions of God may be best contrasted by
speaking of one of them as God-as-Nature or the Creator, and of the
other as God-as-Christ or the Redeemer. One is the great Outward God;
the other is the Inmost God. The first idea was perhaps developed most
highly and completely in the God of Spinoza. It is a conception of God
tending to pantheism, to an idea of a comprehensive God as ruling
with justice rather than affection, to a conception of aloofness and
awestriking worshipfulness. The second idea, which is opposed to this
idea of an absolute God, is the God of the human heart. The writer would
suggest that the great outline of the theological struggles of that
phase of civilisation and world unity which produced Christianity, was a
persistent but unsuccessful attempt to get these two different ideas
of God into one focus. It was an attempt to make the God of Nature
accessible and the God of the Heart invincible, to bring the former into
a conception of love and to vest the latter with the beauty of stars and
flowers and the dignity of inexorable justice. There could be no finer
metaphor for such a correlation than Fatherhood and Sonship. But the
trouble is that it seems impossible to most people