religion, we have as complete a picture of the
relations between our ancestors and their chiefs as if we had seen them
with our own eyes." [2]

Our anthropomorphism, however, reaches its most dangerous form in our
inward imaginations of God's character. How the pot has called the
kettle black! Man has read his vanities into God, until he has
supposed that singing anthems to God's praise might flatter him as it
would flatter us. Man has read his cruelties into God, and what in
moments of vindictiveness and wrath we would like to do our enemies we
have supposed Eternal God would do to his. Man has read his religious
partisanship into God; he who holds Orion and the Pleiades in his
leash, the Almighty and Everlasting God, before whom in the beginning
the morning stars sang together, has been conceived as though he were a
Baptist or a Methodist, a Presbyterian or an Anglican. Man has read
his racial pride into God; nations have thought themselves his chosen
people above all his other children because they seemed so to
themselves. The centuries are sick with a god made in man's image, and
all the time the real God has been saying, "Thou thoughtest that I was
altogether such a one as thyself."

The unhappy prevalence of this mental idolatry is one of the chief
causes for the loss of religious faith among the younger generation.
They have grown up in our homes and churches with their imaginations
dwelling on a God made in man's image, and now through education they
have moved out into a universe so much too big for that little god of
theirs either to have made in the first place or to handle now that
they find it hard to believe in him. Astronomers tell us that there
are a hundred million luminous stars in our sky, and dark stars in
unknown multitudes; that these stars range from a million to ten
million miles in diameter; that some of them are so vast that were they
brought as close to us as our sun is they would fill the entire
horizon; and that these systems are scattered through the stellar
spaces at distances so incredible that, were some hardy discoverer to
seek our planet in the midst of them, it would be like looking for a
needle lost somewhere on the western prairies. The consequence is
inevitable: a vast progressive universe plus an inadequate God means
that in many minds faith in God goes to pieces.

III

One of the profoundest needs of the Church, therefore, in this new and
growing world, is the ach