er spirit, he never had seen and he never would see. She was
the realest force in his life, but she was invisible. When they talked
together they signalled to each other out of the unseen where they
dwelt. They both were as invisible as God. Moreover, while his mother
was only a human, personal spirit, there was a kind of omnipresence in
her so far as he was concerned, and he loved her and she loved him
everywhere, though he never had seen her and never could. If spiritual
life even in its human form can take on such meanings, we need not
think of God as an expanded individual in order to love him, be loved
by him, and company with him as an unseen friend. Let a man once begin
with God as the universal spiritual Presence and then go on to see the
divine quality of that Presence revealed in Christ, and there is no
limit to the deepening and heightening of his estimation of God's
character, except the limits of his own moral imagination.

IV

With many minds the difficulty of achieving an idea of God adequate for
our new universe will not be met by any such intellectual shift of
emphasis as we have suggested. Not anthropomorphic theology so much as
ecclesiasticism is the major burden on their thinking about deity. Two
conceptions of the Church are in conflict to-day in modern
Protestantism, and one of the most crucial problems of America's
religious life in this next generation is the decision as to which of
these two ideas of the Church shall triumph. We may call one the
exclusive and the other the inclusive conception of the Church. The
exclusive conception of the Church lies along lines like these: that we
are the true Church; that we have the true doctrines and the true
practices as no other Church possesses them; that we are constituted as
a Church just because we have these uniquely true opinions and
practices; that all we in the Church agree about these opinions and
that when we joined the Church we gave allegiance to them; that nobody
has any business to belong to our Church unless he agrees with us; that
if there are people outside the Church who disagree, they ought to be
kept outside and if there are people in the Church who come to
disagree, they ought to be put outside. That is the exclusive idea of
the Church, and there are many who need no further description of it
for they were brought up in it and all their youthful religious life
was surrounded by its rigid sectarianism.

Over against thi