about the God of the Bible!' And this is the second experience.
Now here, at the beginning of things, is the point, we say, where to apply correction to our current theology, if we are to bring the religion of the Bible home to the masses. It is of no use beginning lower down, and amending this or that ramification, such as the Atonement, or the Real Presence, or Eternal Punishment, when the root from which all springs is unsound. Those whom it most concerns us to teach will never interest themselves at all in our amended religion, so long as the whole thing appears to them unsupported and in the air.
Yet that original conception of God, on which all our religion is and must be grounded, has been very little examined, and very few of the controversies which arise in religion go near it. Religious people say solemnly, as if we doubted it, that 'he that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of them that seek him;'[1] and that 'a man who preaches that Jesus Christ is not God is virtually out of the pale of Christian communion.' We entirely agree with them; but we want to know what they mean by God. Now on this matter the state of their thoughts is, to say the truth, extremely vague; but what they really do at bottom mean by God is, in general: the best one knows. And this is the soundest definition they will ever attain; yet scientifically it is not a satisfying definition, for clearly the best one knows differs for everybody. So they have to be more precise; and when they collect themselves a little, they find that they mean by God a magnified and non-natural man. But this, again, they can hardly say in so many words. Therefore at last, when they
