The herald., 1896-01-20

verse. The creation of worlds aud their
inhabitants is the product of his divine art.
No 'man has seen God at any time" saws
Christ. No man comprehends God. We
know him in part. We feel him according
to our limited faculties. The education of
our faculties largely determines our con-
ceptions of God, Men are materialists,
panthests, atheists. polytheists, tritheists,
dualists, mouotheists or anthropomor-
phists, according to their education. The
God of the savage is very different from
the God of the civilized man. A mans
thought is smaller than he is. If SO, then
his thought of God must be infinitely in
adequate. We apprehend God; we cannot
comprehend him. The writers of the Bible
do not agree in their conception of God.
God in the first chapters of Genesis is in
the plural number in the original Hebrew: /:
but Moses and Christ emphasize his unity.
The gods opposed the intellectual develop
ment of Eve; but the author of Proverbs
urges every one to get wisdom, the
principal thing. God could not find
Adam, who was hidden among the
trees in the garden; and yet in Proverbs it
is stated that Gods eyes are in every place.
Moses, Samuel, Elijah, murdered men in
the name of their God; but it is written
'thou shalt not kill" David sinned, and
God destroyed the lives of many Jews for
David's sin; yet Ezekiel says 1.-THE soul that
sinneth, it shall die.'' The Jews believed
that God was in the temple especially, and
Christ teaches that men can worship God
just as we'll anywhere else. There is a
wonderful difference between the God of
some parts of the Old Testament and the
God of Christ. We might give the child's
question another answer: "Man has made
God in human likeness" Men are the
creators of God. Man was made in the
likeness of the Gods. and now man makes
the Gods in his OVID likeness. The Cath
olic God of the dark ages was terrible
monster. The God of Calvin, Edwards
and Wesley was made in the image of very
bad men. Nay, he is more immoral than
the Bible devil. The five great poets of
our Whittier. Lowell, Longfellow,
Bryant, Holmes-worshipped a God infin-
itely superior in every respect TO the God
OF Luther, Henry VIII and the modern
scarecrow God of the revivalist. The hui
man mind needs a resting place. The
atheist is hopeless and has no refuge but
annihilation. The refuge of the Catholic
is his church. The protestant has his
refuge in the Bible. The Christian takes
God for his refuge and uses the church
and the Bible to enable him to wor-
ship God in public and to serve his
fellow-men. Christ's creed. which he gave
to the lawyer, is sufficient to guide us TO
the God of justice and love. Christ is a
refuge from the ceremonial and ritual bur-
dens of some churches, and from the
doubts and fears of anti-Cbristianity. He
says: "Come unto me and will give you
rest" The child was Christ's model dis
ciple and saint. He said, ''of such is the
kingdom of heaven.' He did not say the
child had inherited Adams sins, and that
it was totally depraved. and that it needed
to consider itself sinner, and that it
must be converted. He did say that we
must have the child's spirit. trust and I'M
selfishness to qualify us for heaven. the
kingdom of God upon the earth. If we
tell child about eternal hell, an angry
God and about murder as necessary to
make God love us. the child will regard
God with horror; but if we tell it that God
loves all his children, that he rewards
every one according to his works, that
Christ came to tell us how good our Father
in heaven is, and that all of Gods children
will yet enter the eternal home, after the
stains and wounds of sin shall have been
washed out, and that the blessed spirit OF
Christ is now inspiring true men and
women to save the world to purity, honesty
and victory, the child will rejoice. The re-
ligion which terrifies a child, whose nature
has not been deformed and corrupted by
false teaching, is not Christ's religion, for
he said that child is an example to old
disciples.