eds and organized in churches
and invested with the august sanction of authority, and mediated through
old, old processes of religious development.

_Christianity Historically Organized Around the Conception of a
Transcendent God and a Fallen Humanity_

For in its historic development religion has naturally taken distinctly
divergent forms, conditioned by race, environment, the action and
reaction of massed experience and by the temper and insight of a few
supremely great religious leaders. But centrally, the whole development
of any religion has been controlled by its conception of God and, in the
main, three different conceptions of God give colour and character to
the outstanding historic religions. Pantheistic religions have thought
of God as just the whole of all that is; they widen the universe to the
measure of the Divine, or narrow the Divine to the operations of the
universe. Pantheism saturates its whole vague content with a mystical
quality of thought, and colours what it sees with its own emotions. The
religions of the Divine Immanence conceive God as pervading and
sustaining all that is and revealing Himself thereby, though not
necessarily confined therein. The religions of the Divine Transcendence
have believed in a God who is apart from all that is, who neither begins
nor ends in His universe, and from whom we are profoundly separated not
only by our littlenesses but by our sin.

All this is a bare statement of what is almost infinitely richer as it
has been felt and proclaimed by the devout and we shall see as we go on
how the newer religious movements take also their colour and character
from a new emphasis upon the nature of God, or else a return to
understandings of Him and feelings about Him which have been lost out in
the development of Christianity.

Historically Christian theology, particularly in the West, has centered
around the conception of a Transcendent God. As far as doctrine goes
Christianity took over a great inheritance from the Jew, for arrestingly
enough the Jew, though he belongs to the East, had never anything in
common with Eastern Pantheism. On the contrary we find his prophets and
lawgivers battling with all their force against such aspects of
Pantheism as they found about them. The God of the Old Testament is
always immeasurably above those who worshipped Him in righteousness and
power; He is their God and they are His chosen people, but there is
never any identification of