Article April 13, 1912 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from H. C. Robbins, G. A. Johnston Ross

[Christian Register.]

It is curious to note in how many ways God has been sought. Show us the Father and that sufficeth us, was a very rational appeal to the disciples. When you come to sift matters all down, that is about the sum total of rational religious desire—show us God; and it certainly is irrational to expect people to develop a warm religious emotion, involving affection for the Supreme Being, provided they have never seen Him, and so far as they can find out He is invisible. It is no escape from the difficulty when we are told that after this life we shall go into the presence of God, and both see and enjoy Him forever. This involves an anthropomorphic conception that a thinking man soon outgrows. Any such sort of future existence would make God a being somewhat like ourselves, whose presence could be measured by some kind of senses.

If such be God today, why is He not, in some degree at least, visible at the present time to us His children? That God is angry, and has hid Himself from us, because of our misdemeanors or of those of our ancestors, is a childish method of avoiding an honest difficulty, much like burying our heads in the sand. It not only does not solve the problem, but complicates it. It takes from us any possible conception of a desirable Father, and leaves us in possession of an invisible Maker, from whom is taken all lovable and honorable traits of character. We are still ordered to love this Being, by loving whom we are consciously degraded. In other words, we are ordered to be beings of a grade far nobler than the one that we worship. If we dare face the difficulty at all, we find that we have lost our God altogether, and have found a sulky creator, who will not show Himself to us, even when He orders us to love and obey Him. The theology that works itself out into this schedule of hatred, rewarded by compulsory love, has no other basis than the imagination of those who could find no other relief for the desire, in some way to see God. [Universalist Leader.]

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