ciation. And the starry heavens were not understood, and hence using the name star did not awaken any very grand thoughts. And civilization, as men experienced it in early ages was comparatively barren, hence the name civilization could mean only a very little. Not until time had elapsed, and all these things had grown to be understood by men to be great, could the names by which they were known contain any great wealth of meaning. But as the ages went on, and human experience widened and deepened, and science and art grew, and homes became better, and civilization advanced, and men found out that the stars were not sparks of fire but great worlds, all the words that stood for these things grew and grew in significance until they became at last the great words which we find them to-day.

Exactly the same is true with the name "God." Now it is a most significant name. But at first it was comparatively insignificant. Its meaning was meager and poor. But it has grown with man's knowledge of the universe, with man's power of thought, with man's moral advance, until it has become the great and peerless name it is. And it will grow to have larger and nobler meaning still in future ages as mankind advance.

A man of some eminence once said to me, "People ask me if I believe in God. I answer them, Yes, I do, and No, I do not. No, I do not, if you mean the God of the revivalist and the Calvinist. Yes, I do, if you mean the God of reason and intelligence and the Sermon on the Mount." Many persons are branded atheists who are only atheists as regards certain low conceptions of God. They deny that any God exists with such or such attributes, of cruelty or brutality or limitation. But in view of enlightened, philosophic, reasonable, noble conceptions of Deity, they do not deny the divine existence. It is a curious fact that almost all classes of believers in God have been called atheists by classes whose conception of God has been different, and especially that almost all religious reformers and men who have held up before their fellows ideas of Deity more lofty and pure than those com

monly prevalent in their time, have had to bear the reproach of atheism. Refusing to represent the Deity in the same manner in which he had been commonly represented, they were declared not to believe in God at all. The heathen nations around about used to call the ancient Jews atheists, because they did not believe in any God that could be represented by any image or material object. And in the early days of Christianity the Greeks and Romans heaped the reproach of atheism upon the Christians, because they would not accept or acknowledge the gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome.

In the same way in our modern times, any scientific theory that arises, which interferes with the traditional or commonly received views of God, is likely to be declared at once by religious people to be atheistical, even if really its effect is not to weaken the evidence of God's existence at all, but instead to give men nobler conceptions of Deity. Well-known examples of this appear in the doctrines of geology and evolution. Fifty years ago, when the science of geology sprung into being, and then later, only twenty years or so ago, when Darwinism came forward prominently to notice, a great cry was raised, "The new doctrine is atheistical; it leaves no room for belief in God." But the truth was, it only disturbed narrow views of God to give men broader, irrational views to give more rational.

Let me state with some definiteness what kind of a God can no longer be believed in, since Copernicus and Galileo, and Lyell, and Kant, and Emerson, and especially Darwin have lived and written.

First. It is impossible for a world into which our modern science has come, ever again to believe in any such gods and goddesses as those of the ancient classical nations. The Greek mythology has in it elements of great beauty and fascination. The world will never get tired of reading about it, and of using it as material for poetry and art. But it can never again be conceived of as anything else than a world of the imagination. Con

sidered as actual existences, "great Pan is dead," the dryads are gone from the streams, the fauns from the wood, the nymphs from the sea, Apollo from the sun, Jupiter from Olympus. All these live in poetry, and always will; but not in fact. Men believe in them as creatures of the fancy, but not as realities, and never can again unless civilization shall go backward.

Secondly. Quite as impossible is it for a world of growing intelligence ever again to believe in the anthropomorphic Jehovah of the ancient Jews. The Jehovah of the earlier Judaism was a tribal God, caring for one little handful of the people of the world, and not for the rest. So narrow a conception of God as that is inadmissible any longer. The Jewish Jehovah is represented in certain parts of the Old Testament as walking in a certain garden at the cool of the day; as having to come down from heaven to earth in order to see what was going on among men; as getting weary and resting; as partaking of a repast with one of the patriarchs; as making the sun stand still to allow a half savage chieftain and his band to make a little more thorough slaughter of a hostile band; as creating the world in six days; as drowning it with a universal flood, because it was so wicked, and starting again to populate it from one family some 4000 years, or not much more than that, ago. It is easy for any intelligent and unprejudiced mind to see that a conception of God which accepts all these legends as facts, is almost as much outgrown in a scientific, freely thinking age like ours, as is that condition and stage of mental development, which accepted the Greek mythology as real.

Thirdly. The growing intelligence and enlarging humanity of our modern world make it impossible longer to believe in the Calvinistic God of 200 years ago. The God of Calvinism creates the first man and woman of the race innocent, but inexperienced as children; puts them in a Garden, hangs the everlasting weal or ruin of not only themselves but all their posterity upon their ability to resist the temptation to eat delicious fruit which was

placed before them, when the temptation was allowed to be urged by all the wiles of the devil himself. Then, because these. two utterly inexperienced children (for they were no better than children), who did not know good from evil, yielded to the temptation and ate the fruit, this same Calvinistic God doomed to a hell of unutterable and eternal torments, the whole race of men except such a chosen few as he had from all eternity elected and foreordained to be saved. This, in bare exact language, is the God of the Calvinist—has been everywhere ever since Calvinism came into existence, and is still wherever real Calvinism continues to hold sway.

But a single moment's thought is enough to show that such a God cannot endure the light of a thoughtful, rational, humane age like ours. As ferocious beasts of the forests which prowl about in the darkness betake themselves to their lairs when the morning comes, so this conception of a cruel and brutal deity, tends to shrink away and hide itself before the rising sun of our great age of science and philanthropy and free thought.

Finally, our new and higher conception rejects altogether a localized or limited God, or a God removed outside or separated from the universe.

The idea that has been largely entertained in the past, and the idea held by many still is, that God somehow has a body like a man's; that he is in one place; that he isn't here in this room and everywhere that a flower blossoms, or a bird sings, or a heart throbs, but that he is up in some far away heaven, sitting on a throne there, as an earthly king sits on a visible thone, and from that far away throne rules the world, much as the British queen is supposed to rule her distant Indian Empire from her seat in London. I say the idea of God that has been popularly entertained in the past, and that may still perhaps be called the common one, is about that. God is localized; he somehow has a body more or less like a man's; he is outside and separate from the world. But all this, science, and philosophy, and our modern

thought are more and more clearly and emphatically declaring cannot be. Such conceptions are crude and childish and inadequate, and must pass away. And their staying here, when they ought to be gone, is what, more than almost anything else, tends to produce atheism to-day, among our thinking classes. The intelligent student of modern science cannot possibly any longer believe in such a God. So long, therefore, as religion has no other kind of God than this to present, what wonder if many men find themselves in a place where they see nothing else to say only that they do not believe in God at all?

And now, having tried to make clear what kind of a God cannot longer be believed in, since Copernicus and Newton and Kant and Darwin have lived and written, let me in the time that still remains try to trace, at least in a general way, some of the more important characteristics of the God who can and will be believed in-that is, the new and higher conception of Deity which must take the place of the old gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome, the tribal Jehovah of the early Jews, the inhuman God of the modern Calvinist, and every form of limited or localized Deity of popular belief.

new.

In undertaking to do this let me say first of all, that, though I call it the new conception, yet really it is only in a very limited sense I read to you as my text that lofty utterance of Jesus, "God is a Spirit [or God is Spirit] and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." This is exactly the conception of God which I mean by the new conception. I call it new, not because it has in our day first come into existence, but because our modern science has given it a new meaning and enlargement and emphasis, and is driving every other conception of the Deity out of the field except this. Really the conception is not new, but old as Jesus and far older. contemporary with Jesus, utters it as clearly as his master: "In him (God)," says Paul, "we live and move and have our being." And the writer of the 139th Psalm, living some hun

Paul who was partly