Editorial August 13, 1904 Issue

The Right Thought of God

The significance of the relation of our concept of Deity to our spiritual life was forcibly expressed by Emerson in his famous "divinity address" when he said, "The doctrine of the divine nature being forgotten, a sickness infests and dwarfs the constitution."

To entertain the least error is to court disability, but to cherish a false sense of God is to yield our thought to the influence of an all-pervasive blight, and hazard the shipwreck of all faith. The realization of this fact gives special interest to the comments of the religious press respecting the late Slocum and Norge disasters, for they go to show that while many have entirely given up the traditional thought of the divine relation to these dreadful events, others still cling to a view which would do credit to the vigorous old-time declarations of God's responsibility for evil, and His utilization thereof.

Long ago John Wesley said, "Calvin's God is my devil." Nevertheless a religious periodical which stands for his views, in referring to the first meeting of the tearful remnant of St. Mark's congregation, speaks of the fitness of their use of a hymn which attributes our afflictive experiences to God's "unerring "God hath done it and He only can explain." This seems to be the final word respecting these things, with unnumbered earnest Christian preachers as well as laymen, and the larger influence of such a thought may explain the fact that, in this twentieth century, books and periodicals are being issued, whose avowed object is to "emancipate men" from what is termed "the degrading belief in a God" who can institute an order of things that results in the unspeakable torture of innocent infancy and helpless age, and who, as instanced in these late horrors remains indifferent to their piteous and agonizing cry. One such anti-Christian journal before us dwells upon the teaching of some religionists regarding these events, and speaks with undisguised contempt of the worship of God of the type disclosed.

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