less himself
because his hair is cut or his appendix removed or his leg amputated.

And take another image. . . . Who bears affection for this or that
spadeful of mud in my garden? Who cares a throb of the heart for all the
tons of chalk in Kent or all the lumps of limestone in Yorkshire? But
men love England, which is made up of such things.

And so we think of God as a synthetic reality, though he has neither
body nor material parts. And so too we may obey him and listen to
him, though we think but lightly of the men whose hands or voices he
sometimes uses. And we may think of him as having moods and aspects--as
a man has--and a consistency we call his character.

These are theorisings about God. These are statements to convey this
modern idea of God. This, we say, is the nature of the person whose will
and thoughts we serve. No one, however, who understands the religious
life seeks conversion by argument. First one must feel the need of God,
then one must form or receive an acceptable idea of God. That much is no
more than turning one's face to the east to see the coming of the sun.
One may still doubt if that direction is the east or whether the sun
will rise. The real coming of God is not that. It is a change, an
irradiation of the mind. Everything is there as it was before, only now
it is aflame. Suddenly the light fills one's eyes, and one knows that
God has risen and that doubt has fled for ever.

3. GOD IS YOUTH

The third thing to be told of the true God is that GOD IS YOUTH.

God, we hold, began and is always beginning. He looks forever into the
future.

Most of the old religions derive from a patriarchal phase. God is in
those systems the Ancient of Days. I know of no Christian attempt to
represent or symbolise God the Father which is not a bearded, aged man.
White hair, beard, bearing, wrinkles, a hundred such symptoms of senile
decay are there. These marks of senility do not astonish our modern
minds in the picture of God, only because tradition and usage have
blinded our eyes to the absurdity of a time-worn immortal. Jove too and
Wotan are figures far past the prime of their vigour. These are gods
after the ancient habit of the human mind, that turned perpetually
backward for causes and reasons and saw all things to come as no more
than the working out of Fate,--

"Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world