infant and suckling,"
and it ends with a Father whose will it is that not "one of these
little ones should perish;" it begins with God's people standing afar
off from his lightnings and praying that he might not speak to them
lest they die and it ends with men going into their inner chambers and,
having shut the door, praying to their Father who is in secret. Here
is no pool; here is a river, the streams whereof make glad the city of
God.

Consider as well the course of the idea of God after the close of the
New Testament canon. The Biblical conception of God in terms of
righteous and compassionate personal will went out into a world of
thought where Greek metaphysics was largely in control. There God was
conceived in terms of substance, as the ontological basis and ground of
all existence--immutable, inscrutable, unqualified pure being. These
two ideas, God as personal will, and God as metaphysical substance,
never perfectly coalescing, flowed together. In minds like St.
Augustine's one finds them both. God as pure being and God as gracious
and righteous personal will--St. Augustine accepted both ideas but
never harmonized them. Down through Christian history one can see
these two conceptions complementing each other, each balancing the
other's eccentricities. The Greek idea runs out toward pantheism in
Spinoza and Hegel. The Biblical idea runs out toward deism in Duns
Scotus and Calvin. In the eighteenth century an extreme form of deism
held the field and God, as personal will, was conceived as the Creator,
who in a dim and distant past had made all things. In the nineteenth
century the thought of God swung back to terms of immanence, and God,
who had been crowded out of his world, came flooding in as the abiding
life of all of it.

As one contemplates a line of development like this, he must be aware
that, while change is there, it is not aimless, discontinuous, chaotic
change. The riverbed in which this stream of thought flows is stable
and secure; the whole development is controlled by man's abiding
spiritual need of God and God's unceasing search for man. One feels
about it as he might about man's varying, developing methods of telling
the time of day. Men began by noting roughly the position of the sun
or the length of shadows; they went on to make sun-dials, then
water-clocks, then sand-glasses; then weight-driven clocks were
blunderingly tried and, later, watches, used first as toys, so little