Is there any loss in this exchange?
Now as to God. I have pictured to you, in very bald outline, some of
the conceptions of God that have been held in the past. What is our God
to-day? The heart, the life, the soul, of this infinite universe;
justice that means justice; power that means power; love that surpasses
all our imagination of love; a God who is eternal goodness; who from
the beginning has folded his child man to his heart, whispering all of
truth that he could understand, breathing into him all of life that he
could contain, inspiring him with all love and tenderness that he could
appreciate or employ, and so, in this way, leading him and guiding him
through the ages, year by year and century by century, still to
something better and finer and higher; a God, not off somewhere in the
heavens, to whom we must send a messenger; not a God separated from us
by some great gulf that we must bridge by some supposed atonement; a
God nearer to us than our breath; a God who hears the whisper of our
want, who understands the dawning wish or aspiration before it takes
form or shape; a God who loves us better than we love ourselves or love
those who are dearest to us; a God who knows better what we need than
we know ourselves, and is more ready to give us than fathers are to
give good gifts to their children. Is there any loss here?
In the third place, the new man that has come into modern thought. Not
the broken fragments of a perfect Adam; not a man so crippled
intellectually that, as they have been telling us for centuries, it was
impossible for him to find the truth, or to know it when he did find
it; not a being so depraved, morally, that he never desires any good,
and never loves anything which is sweet and fine; a being totally
depraved, a being who, as one passage in the Old Testament tells us, is
so corrupt his very prayer is a sin; conceived, born, in evil, and all
his thoughts tainted, and drifting towards that which is wicked.
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