onal He may be. He is to
be thought of by us, in lack of nobler imagination, as personal. Israel
thus grew into the conception of the Infinite Power, manifest in the order
of nature and in the order of conscience as conscious Power; One in whose
image man was made, the Father of the mystic "I"; whose nature is the law
of creation, whose purpose is its plan, whose will is its exhaustless
energy.

This is the secret which has kept the religions inspired by the Bible from
lapsing, as other religions have done, into lifelessness.

Egypt was the land of a religion which had won a high conception of the
Divine unity; a religion which was scientific in its forms of thought, and
earnestly moral in its spirit; but which failed to keep distinct in mind
the order of nature from the Being on whom it reposes, and thus sank into
the dreamy pantheism of its cultured classes, and the poetic polytheisms
of its people. Of this lapse, Renouf writes:

All gods were in fact but names of the One who resided in them all. But
this God is no other than Nature. Both individuals and entire nations
may long continue to hold this view, without drawing the inevitable
conclusion, that if there is no other God than this, the world is
really without a God. But the fate of a religion which involves such a
conclusion, and with that conclusion the loss of faith in immortality,
and even in the distinction of Right and Wrong, except so far as they
are connected with ritual prescriptions, is inevitably sealed.[62]

Neither Judaism, nor Mohammedanism, nor Christianity, the religions fed
directly or indirectly from the Bible, have run, or can well run into this
fatal error. The Divine Being who is mirrored in the Bible is the
Conscious Intelligence to whom alone of right belongs that ineffable
name--GOD. This is the thought and this is the word which hold the spell
of the Bible power over the human soul. Nowhere else is the sense of God
so alive, nowhere else does it so thrill the whole being of man. It was
this living God whom these holy men of old were seeking; not simply the
august ideals of the soul, but the Eternal Being who casts them as his
shadows upon man:

Unto Thee lift I up mine eyes,
O Thou that dwellest in the heavens.

* * * * *

My soul truly waiteth still upon God,
For of Him cometh my salvation.

* * * * *

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