with Reason, and the Reason
which is revealed in Nature is only another name for God. It is the
immanent God, the Eternal Reason, who has been patiently disclosing
himself to us in the world round about us, and thus cleansing our minds
from the crude and superstitious conceptions with which in our ignorance
and fear we had invested him.

The second of the sources from which the influences have come for the
purification of religion is humanity itself.

We are told, in the Book of Genesis, that man is made in the image of
God; and the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God, on which the entire
teaching of Jesus rests, is but a stronger statement of the same truth.
It is true that we find human nature, as yet, for the most part, in
very crude conditions; its divine qualities are not clearly seen. It
does not yet appear what we shall be. But we have learned, in our
evolutionary studies, that no living thing ought to be judged in the
earlier stages of its development; we must wait to see the perfected
type before we can make up our minds about it. The eaglet just hatched
does not give us the right idea of the eagle, nor does the infant in his
swaddling clothes reveal to us the man. So it is with species and races;
if they are undergoing a process of development, we must wait for the
later stages of the process before we judge. The apple is not the crab,
but the Northern Spy; the horse is not the mustang, but the Percheron or
the German roadster. In estimating any living thing, you take into
consideration its possibilities of development; the ideal to which it
may attain must always be in sight.

In the same way when we think of man, we do not take the Patagonian as
the type, but the best specimens of European or American manhood.

If, then, we are taught to believe that man is a child of God, we should
be compelled to believe that it is the most perfectly developed man who
most resembles God. We have some conception of the ideal man. Our
conceptions are not always correct, but they are constantly improved, as
we strive to realize them. And in the ideal man we see reflected the
character of God. We are sure that a perfect humanity would give us the
best revelation we could have of divinity. If we could see a perfect
man, we could learn from him more about God than from any other source.

Most of us believe that a perfect Man appeared in this world nineteen
hundred years ago; and the best that we know about God we have learned