seeing Zeus in the glories that were sacred to Juno,
was utterly consumed. The early Islamic conception of God, like the
conception of most honest, simple Christians to-day, was clearly, in
spite of the theologians, of a very exalted anthropomorphic personality
away somewhere in Heaven. The personal appearance of the Christian God
is described in The Revelation, and however much that description may be
explained away by commentators as symbolical, it is certainly taken by
most straightforward believers as a statement of concrete reality.
Now if we are going to insist upon this primary meaning of person and
individual, then certainly God as he is now conceived is not a person
and not an individual. The true God will never promenade an Eden or a
Heaven, nor sit upon a throne.

But current Christianity, modern developments of Islam, much Indian
theological thought--that, for instance, which has found such delicate
and attractive expression in the devotional poetry of Rabindranath
Tagore--has long since abandoned this anthropomorphic insistence upon
a body. From the earliest ages man's mind has found little or no
difficulty in the idea of something essential to the personality, a soul
or a spirit or both, existing apart from the body and continuing after
the destruction of the body, and being still a person and an individual.
From this it is a small step to the thought of a person existing
independently of any existing or pre-existing body. That is the idea
of theological Christianity, as distinguished from the Christianity
of simple faith. The Triune Persons--omnipresent, omniscient, and
omnipotent--exist for all time, superior to and independent of matter.
They are supremely disembodied. One became incarnate--as a wind eddy
might take up a whirl of dust. . . . Those who profess modern
religion conceive that this is an excessive abstraction of the idea
of spirituality, a disembodiment of the idea of personality beyond the
limits of the conceivable; nevertheless they accept the conception that
a person, a spiritual individual, may be without an ordinary mortal
body. . . . They declare that God is without any specific body, that he
is immaterial, that he can affect the material universe--and that means
that he can only reach our sight, our hearing, our touch--through the
bodies of those who believe in him and serve him.

His nature is of the nature of thought and will. Not only has he, in his
essence, nothing to do with mat