were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears,
his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental
collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of
thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave;
that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the
inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined
to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole
temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the
debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond
dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects
them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths,
only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's
habitation henceforth be safely built." [1] Such is the outlook on
human life of a frank and thoroughgoing irreligion, and there is
nothing exhilarating about it. All progress possible in such a setting
is a good deal like a horse-race staged in a theatre, where the horses
do indeed run furiously, but where we all know well that they are not
getting anywhere. There is a moving floor beneath them, and it is only
the shifting of the scenery that makes them seem to go. Is human
history like that? Is progress an illusion? Is it all going to end as
Bertrand Russell says? Those who believe in the living God are certain
of the contrary, for stability amid change is the gift of a
progressive, religious faith.

II

It must be evident, however, to any one acquainted with popular ideas
of God that if in a progressive world we thus are to maintain a vital
confidence in the spiritual nature of creative reality and so rejoice
in the guidance of the Spirit amid change, we must win through in our
thinking to a very much greater conception of God than that to which
popular Christianity has been accustomed. Few passages in Scripture
better deserve a preacher's attention than God's accusation against his
people in the 50th Psalm: "Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a
one as thyself." The universal applicability of this charge is evident
to any one who knows the history of man's religious thought. If in the
beginning God did make man in his own image, man has been busy ever
since making God in his image, and the deplorable consequences are
everywhere to be seen. From idolaters, who bow down before wooden
images of the divine i