n human form, to ourselves, praying to a
magnified man throned somewhere in the skies, man has persistently run
God into his own mold. To be sure, this tendency of man to think of
God as altogether such a one as ourselves is nothing to be surprised
at. Even when we deal with our human fellows, we read ourselves into
our understandings of them. A contemporary observer tells us that
whenever a portrait of Gladstone appeared in French papers he was made
to look like a Frenchman, and that when he was represented in Japanese
papers his countenance had an unmistakably Japanese cast.

If this habitual tendency to read ourselves into other people is
evident even when we deal with human personalities, whom we can know
well, how can it be absent from man's thought of the eternal? A man
needs only to go out on a starry night with the revelations of modern
astronomy in his mind and to consider the one who made all this and
whose power sustains it, to see how utterly beyond our adequate
comprehension he must be. As men in old tales used to take diffused
superhumans, the genii, and by magic word bring them down into a
stoppered bottle where they could be held in manageable form, so man
has taken the vastness of God and run it into a human symbol.

This persistent anthropomorphism is revealed in our religious
ceremonies. Within Christianity itself are systems of priestcraft
where the individual believer has no glad, free access to his Father's
presence, but where his approach must be mediated by a priestly ritual,
his forgiveness assured by a priestly declaration, his salvation sealed
by a priestly sacrament. This idea that God must be approached by
stated ceremonies came directly from thinking of God in terms of a
human monarch. No common man could walk carelessly into the presence
of an old-time king. There were proprieties to be observed. There
were courtiers who knew the proper approach to royalty, through whom
the common folk would better send petitions up and from whom they would
better look for favour. So God was pictured as a human monarch with
his throne, his scepter, his ministering attendants. Here on earth the
priests were those courtiers who knew the effectual way of reaching
him, by whom we would best send up our prayers, through whom we would
best look for our salvation. Nordau is not exaggerating when he says:
"When we have studied the sacrificial rites, the incantations, prayers,
hymns, and ceremonies of