of the holy mount, when we have by long thought
realised the truth, and by living the life which is alone worthy of
such a conception, "I the imperfect adore my own Perfect". We seek to
pray, we would fain worship. Then look no more into the skies; there
is nought but vapour there and the silent worlds that shine eternally.
Look not in the churches and the temples, for they are made by men's
hands, empty of the Divine Presence as a mausoleum is of life. Let us
look into ourselves for the true Shekinah, the true manifestation of
the Divine, nay, the truly Divine is there. The Good in man, that is
God; that alone is worthy of our adoration and our love.

I do not think it can be questioned that this is a noble conception of
man and God and their mutual relations, and as far as one can judge of
the trend of modern thought, it would appear that only on some such
grounds is the intelligence of the age prepared to recognise theism as
a possible belief. The conception of the Deity as a Being anterior to
creation in existence, eternally dissevered from it in being, an
external object, so to speak, of admiration, reverence and fear, seems
incomprehensible to the modern mind. It certainly did to the whole
idealist school of Germany, to such thinkers as Hegel, Schelling and
Fichte, to deeply religious spirits like Coleridge and Wordsworth, to
Emerson in America, and Carlyle in England. The "immeasurable
clergyman" [2] view of the Deity, seated somewhere in the skies, and
listening all day and night to the Hallelujah Chorus, is now wholly and
absolutely impossible outside little Bethel and Bibliolatry.

But the truth must be confessed that in refusing to acknowledge what
one may call an outside deity, an "absentee god," who pays periodical
visits to his creation and acts only at the instant request of prayer,
we are reverting to religious ideals that had their home in the land of
the Indus and the Ganges, a thousand years before Christianity was
heard of. It is the knowledge of this fact that fills one with
stupefaction when we think of Exeter Hall and the type of Christian
missioner who goes out to assail the venerable beliefs of Hindooism,
when our cultivated men, our Emersons, Coleridges, Carlyles and
Wordsworths, are positively reverting to the ideals of ancient India.
The doctrine of the Over-soul, essentially shared in by all men; the
belief that man is not in name, but in reality, not through the
vicarious interc