they want, is, of
course, finite, a person much like themselves, with thoughts and
feelings limited and mutable in the process of time.... And for
their purpose, what is not this is really nothing. (_Appearance and
Reality_; p. 532).

And it is really what people mean by God that is decisive. It is not at
all a question of what they might be made to mean, or what they ought to
mean. It is wholly a matter of what they _do_ mean. And to say that what
people intend to affirm in an expression of belief is not true, is to
say that the belief itself is false. If the God I believe in is a
delusion, then my God ceases to exist. True, I may if I think it worth
while acquire another one, but that will not revive the first. It is
what people believe that is the important question, not what some
ingenious speculator may succeed in making the belief stand for.

Honestly to be of service to theism the God established must be a
person. To be intelligible, having regard to the historical developments
of religion, the God proved must be a person. The relation demanded by
religion between man and God must be of a personal character. No man can
love a pure abstraction; he might as reasonably fall in love with a
triangle or profess devotion to the equator. The God of religion must be
a person, and it is precisely that, as a controlling force of the
universe, in which modern thought finds it more and more difficult to
believe, and which modern science decisively rejects. And in rejecting
this the death blow is given to those religious ideas, which however
disguised find their origin in the fear-stricken ignorance of the
primitive savage.

CHAPTER II.

THE ORIGIN OF THE IDEA OF GOD.

The alleged universality of the belief in God is only inferentially an
argument for its truth. The inference is that if men have everywhere
developed a particular belief, this general agreement could only have
been reached as a consequence of a general experience. A universal
effect implies a universal cause. So put the argument seems impressive.
As a matter of fact the statement is one long tissue of fallacies and
unwarranted assumptions.

In the first place, even admitting the universal pressure of certain
facts, it by no means follows that the theistic interpretation of those
facts is the only one admissible. There is no exception to the fact that
men have everywhere come to the conclusion that the earth was flat, and
yet