most impressive imagery familiar to them. The highest idea
they had of man, purified and expanded to the utmost, would be
their idea of God; and the grandest and happiest conditions of
existence within their observation, enhanced by the removal of
every limiting ill, would form their notion of heaven. Both would
be outward, definite, local, and, as it were, tangible. Royal
courts with their pomp of power and luxury; priestly temples, with
their exclusive sanctity, their awe inspiring secrets, their
processions and anthems, would inevitably furnish the prevailing
casts and colors to the dogmas and the scenery of early religion.
For what were the most vivid of all the experiences men had among
their fellows on earth? Why, the exhibitions of the sultan with
his gorgeous ceremonial state, and of the high priest with the
dread sacrifice and homage he paid amidst clouds of incense and
rolling waves of song; the admission of the favored, in glittering
robes, to share the privileges; the exclusion of the profane and
vulgar in squalid misery and outer darkness. Consequently, except
by a miracle, these sights could not fail largely to constitute
the scenic elements for the popular belief concerning God and
heaven. What should men reflect over into the unknown to portray
their ideals there, if not the most coveted ingredients and the
most impressive forms of the known? The great thing, then,
inevitably, would be supposed to be to gain the personal favor of
the supreme Sovereign by some artifice, some flattery, some
fortunate compliance with his arbitrary caprice, and to get into
the charmed enclosure of his abode by some special grace some
authoritative passport or magic art.

But as soon as science and philosophy, and a spiritual experience
rectifying its own errors by reflective criticism, have created a
more competent theology it discredits all these raw schemes. It
teaches that God, being the eternal omnipresent power and mystery
which foreran, underlies, pervades and includes all things, cannot
justly be figured as a man, locally here or there, and not
elsewhere. He can be justly thought of only as the almighty
Creator of the universe, intelligible in the order of his works
and ways, but inscrutable in his essence, absent nowhere, present
everywhere in general, and specially revealed anywhere whenever a
fit experience in the soul awakens a special consciousness of him.
This conception of God the only one any longer defensib