ately recurrent of all heresies, and sexual excitement is always
tending to leak back into religious feeling. Amongst the sex-tormented
priesthood of the Roman communion in particular, ignorant of the
extreme practices of the Essenes and of the Orphic cult and suchlike
predecessors of Christianity, there seems to be an extraordinary belief
that chastity was not invented until Christianity came, and that the
religious life is largely the propitiation of God by feats of sexual
abstinence. But a superstitious abstinence that scars and embitters
the mind, distorts the imagination, makes the body gross and keeps it
unclean, is just as offensive to God as any positive depravity.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

THE LIKENESS OF GOD

1. GOD IS COURAGE

Now having set down what those who profess the new religion regard as
the chief misconceptions of God, having put these systems of ideas aside
from our explanations, the path is cleared for the statement of what God
is. Since language springs entirely from material, spatial things, there
is always an element of metaphor in theological statement. So that I
have not called this chapter the Nature of God, but the Likeness of God.

And firstly, GOD IS COURAGE.

2. GOD IS A PERSON

And next GOD IS A PERSON.

Upon this point those who are beginning to profess modern religion are
very insistent. It is, they declare, the central article, the axis, of
their religion. God is a person who can be known as one knows a friend,
who can be served and who receives service, who partakes of our nature;
who is, like us, a being in conflict with the unknown and the limitless
and the forces of death; who values much that we value and is against
much that we are pitted against. He is our king to whom we must be
loyal; he is our captain, and to know him is to have a direction in our
lives. He feels us and knows us; he is helped and gladdened by us. He
hopes and attempts. . . . God is no abstraction nor trick of words, no
Infinite. He is as real as a bayonet thrust or an embrace.

Now this is where those who have left the old creeds and come asking
about the new realisations find their chief difficulty. They say, Show
us this person; let us hear him. (If they listen to the silences within,
presently they will hear him.) But when one argues, one finds oneself
suddenly in the net of those ancient controversies between species
and individual, between the one and the many, which arise out of the
ne