t of which we are
constructed, and it has nothing to correspond with it in the source
from which we sprang. Nevertheless, the new naturalism exalts this
spiritual life within us, calls it our crown and glory, bids us
cultivate and diffuse it, says about it nearly everything a Christian
says except that it is a revelation of eternal reality. Moreover, it
is difficult to differentiate from this outspoken group of professed
naturalists another group of humanists who do retain the idea of God,
but merely as the sum total of man's idealistic life. "God," says one
exponent, "is the farthest outreach of our human ideals." That is to
say, our spiritual lives created God, not God our spiritual lives.
God, as one enthusiastic devotee of this new cult has put it, is a sort
of Uncle Sam, the pooling of the idealistic imaginations of multitudes.
Of course he does not exist, yet in a sense he is real; he is the
projection of our loyalties, affections, hopes.

It should go without saying that this idea of God has about as much
intellectual validity as belief in Santa Claus and is even more
sentimental, in that it is a deliberate attempt to disguise in pleasant
and familiar terms a fundamentally materialistic interpretation of
reality. The vital failure of this spiritualized naturalism, however,
lies in the inability of its Uncle Sam to meet the deepest needs on
account of which men at their best have been religious. This deified
projection of our ideals we made up ourselves and so we cannot really
pray to him; he does not objectively exist and so has no unifying
meaning which puts purposefulness into creation and hope ahead of it;
he does not care for any one or anything and so we may not trust him;
and neither in sin can he forgive, cleanse, restore, empower, nor in
sorrow comfort and sustain. A god who functions so poorly is not much
of a god. Once more, therefore, one wonders why in a generation when,
not less, but more, because of all our scientific mastery the souls of
men are starved and tired, the Church is not captured by a new sense of
mission. It is precisely in a day when the active and pugnacious
energies of men are most involved in the conquest of the world that the
spirit becomes most worn for lack of sustenance. To be assured of the
nearness and reality and availability of the spiritual world is a
matter of life and death to multitudes of folk to-day. There could
hardly be a more alluring time in which to mak