were enormously outnumbered by the ignorant and
the authority passed wholly into their hands. It was inevitable that
misunderstanding should follow. The gross materialization of the early
teaching, the superstition, the bigotry and the persecution of the
Middle Ages was a perfectly natural result. That perverted,
materialistic view has come down to us, and even now gives trend to the
religious thought of Western civilization. Of that degradation of the
early teaching the Encyclopedia Britannica says:

The conception of God as wholly external to man, a purely
mechanical theory of creation, is throughout Christendom
regarded as false to the teaching of the New Testament as
also to Christian experience.

It is, indeed, false to the teaching of the Christ but if it is so
regarded "throughout Christendom" it is only on the part of its
scholars; most certainly not by the masses of the people. The popular
conception is undeniably that the relationship between God and man is
identical with that between an inventor and an animated machine. It is
an absolutely anthropomorphic view of the Supreme Being and thinks of
God as being apart from man in precisely the same sense that a father is
apart from his son. It may be an exalted, idealized conception of the
relationship of father and son but it is nevertheless just that
relationship, and along that line runs practically all the teaching and
preaching of those who speak officially in modern religious
interpretation. Emerson sought to counteract that popular misconception
but he was regarded as a heretic by all but an infinitesimal portion of
the church.

The idea of the immanence of God is as different from the popular
conception as noontide is different from midnight. It is so radically
different that one who accepts that ancient belief must put aside his
old ideas of what man is and raise him in dignity and potential power to
a level that will, at first, seem actually startling; for it means, in
its uttermost significance that God and man are but two phases of the
one eternal life and consciousness that constitute our universe! The
idea of the immanence of God is that He _is_ the universe; that the
solar system is an emanation of the Supreme Being as clouds are an
emanation of the sea, and that the relationship between God and man is
not merely that of father and son but also that of ocean and raindrop.
This conception makes man _a part of_ God, having p