ievement of such worthy ways of thinking about
God and presenting him as will make the very idea of him a help to
faith and not a stumbling-block to the faithful. In the attainment of
that purpose we need for one thing to approach the thought of God from
an angle which to popular Christianity is largely unfamiliar, although
it is not unfamiliar in the historic tradition of the Church. Too
exclusively have we clung to the mental categories and the resultant
phraseology which have grown up around the idea of God as an individual
like ourselves. The reasons for the prevalence of this individualized
conception of deity are obvious. First, as we have seen, the growth of
the idea of God in Hebrew-Christian thought moved out from a very
clearly visualized figure on a mountain-top to those expanded and
spiritualized forms which glorified the later stages of the Biblical
development; and, second, every one of us in his personal religious
experience and thought recapitulates the same process, starting as a
child with God conceived in very human terms and moving out to expanded
and sublimated forms of that childish conception. Whether, then, we
consider the source of our idea of God in the Biblical tradition or in
our own private experience, we see that it is rooted in and springs up
out of a very human conception of him, and that our characteristic
words about him, attitudes toward him, and imaginations of him, are
associated with these childlike origins. Popular Christianity,
therefore, approaches God with the regulative idea of a human
individual in its mind, and, while popular Christianity would insist
that God is much more than that, it still starts with that, and the
enterprise of stretching the conception is only relatively successful.
Even when it is successful the result must be a God who is achieved by
stretching out a man.

In this situation the only help for many is, for the time being, to
leave this endeavour to approach God by way of an expanded and
sublimated human individual and to approach God, instead, by way of the
Creative Power from which this amazing universe and all that is within
it have arisen. Man's deepest question concerns the nature of the
Creative Power from which all things and persons have come. In
creation are we dealing with the kind of power which in ordinary life
we recognize as physical, or with the kind which we recognize as
spiritual? With these two sorts of power we actually deal an