gifts. Divine favor is sought
rather by aspiration after and the practice of a better life.
The mighty but capricious deity gives place to the God of
unfailing charity and love. One earns God's mercies by walking
in the ways of the Lord. "Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they shall see God.... Blessed are they which do hunger
and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled."
In both Christianity and Judaism, God's grace and mercies
go always to the pure in heart, and the righteous in spirit.
"What doth the Lord require of thee," proclaims Micah, "but
to do justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy
God?"

THE DIVINE AS THE HUMAN IDEAL. There has been in certain
latter-day philosophies, a tendency to interpret the divine as
the objectification of human ideals. That is, according to this
theory, men have found in their imagined divinities the
fulfillment of ideals that they could never have realized on earth.
Men, says this theory, long to be immortal, so they imagine
gods who are. Finite man has infinite desires. In God is
infinite fulfillment through eternity. No men are all good;
some desire to be. Such fulfillment they find in the divine.
Our conception of God is an index of our own ideals. When
men were savages, their divinity was a jealous monster. In
the refinement and spiritualization of the human imagination,
divinity becomes all-beautiful and all-benevolent as well as
the wielder of infinite power. John Stuart Mill gives possibly
the clearest expression to this attitude which is, if not in the
strictest sense religious, at least deeply spiritual:

Religion and poetry address themselves, at least in one of their
aspects, to the same part of the human constitution; they both
supply the same want, that of ideal conceptions grander and more
beautiful than we see realized in the prose of human life. Religion,
as distinguished from poetry, is the product of the craving to know
whether these imaginative conceptions have realities, answering to
them in some other world than ours. The mind, in this state, eagerly
catches at any rumors respecting other worlds, especially when
delivered by persons whom it deems wiser than itself. To the poetry of
the supernatural, comes to be thus added a positive belief and expectation,
which unpoetical minds can share with the poetical. Belief
in a God or gods, and in a life after death, becomes the canvas which
every mind, according to its capacity, covers wi