Article June 9, 1923 Issue

Signs of the Times

with contributions from Robert Hopkin, H. P. Marchant, William Laurence Sullivan

["A Man's Religion," from the Mercury Herald, San Jose, Calif., April 1, 1923]

God is "the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever." Of course neither He, nor immortality, nor the reality of the spiritual world, nor the laws that govern the universe and mankind are changed or affected by the ideas of man in regard to any of them. And our ideas of these things grow with our growth, and enlarge with the enlargement of our knowledge. Neither the "Great Spirit" of the savage, nor the merely superman gods of the old Greek and Roman,—no, not even the Jehovah of wrath and inexorable vengeance, the conception of the ancient Jew, nor the provincial and partial God of the modern junker Prussian—none of these expresses the idea of God entertained by the real follower of the Prince of Peace. He has grown beyond all these primitive ideas of a Supreme Being. He knows God as an all-pervading Spirit; a constant presence; the source of all power and wisdom, free from all semblance of human passions, selfishness, and injustice, and full of love and tenderness; the perfect embodiment of all spiritual strength, beauty, and sweetness. . . . Yet it is most important that we all come as near as possible to correct ideas concerning God and His attributes, the future life and things religious, because our conception of these things largely determines our ideals, and has a most powerful influence in the molding of our characters and the shaping of our lives.

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