over
what I have said this morning, as to whether there is anything else
lost.

Is there anything of value taken away? Let me run over now in parallel
fashion another catalogue to place opposite this one, so that we may
see as to what has been our loss and as to whether there has been any
gain.

In the place of the little, petty universe of Hebrew dream, what have
we now? This magnificent revelation of the Copernican students; a
universe infinite in its reach and in its grandeur; a universe fit at
last to be the home of an infinite God; a universe grand enough to
clothe him and express him, to manifest and reveal him; a universe
boundless; a universe that has grown through the ages and is growing
still, and is to unfold more and more of the divine beauty and glory
forevermore. Is there any loss in this exchange?

Now as to God. I have pictured to you, in very bald outline, some of
the conceptions of God that have been held in the past. What is our God
to-day? The heart, the life, the soul, of this infinite universe;
justice that means justice; power that means power; love that surpasses
all our imagination of love; a God who is eternal goodness; who from
the beginning has folded his child man to his heart, whispering all of
truth that he could understand, breathing into him all of life that he
could contain, inspiring him with all love and tenderness that he could
appreciate or employ, and so, in this way, leading him and guiding him
through the ages, year by year and century by century, still to
something better and finer and higher; a God, not off somewhere in the
heavens, to whom we must send a messenger; not a God separated from us
by some great gulf that we must bridge by some supposed atonement; a
God nearer to us than our breath; a God who hears the whisper of our
want, who understands the dawning wish or aspiration before it takes
form or shape; a God who loves us better than we love ourselves or love
those who are dearest to us; a God who knows better what we need than
we know ourselves, and is more ready to give us than fathers are to
give good gifts to their children. Is there any loss here?

In the third place, the new man that has come into modern thought. Not
the broken fragments of a perfect Adam; not a man so crippled
intellectually that, as they have been telling us for centuries, it was
impossible for him to find the truth, or to know it when he did find
it; not a being so depraved, morally, that