ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE 



soon as we conceive of God in terms of our human 

 nature, these baffling problems thrust themselves 

 upon us. We must seek some grounds upon which 

 we can excuse or vindicate or justify this supreme 

 man for permitting the terrible happenings which 

 darken the world. As this is not an easy task, men 

 say in their hearts, and often with their lips: "There 

 is no God." Better no God than a being who would 

 permit the sin and suffering we see daily all about 

 us, and that history reveals to us. 



The only alternative I see is to conceive of God in 

 terms of universal Nature — a nature God in whom 

 we really live and move and have our being, with 

 whom our relation is as intimate and constant as 

 that of the babe in its mother's womb, or the apple 

 upon the bough. This is the God that science and 

 reason reveal to us — the God we touch with our 

 hands, see with our eyes, hear with our ears, and 

 from whom there is no escape — a God whom we 

 serve and please by works and not by words, whose 

 worship is deeds, and whose justification is in ad- 

 justing ourselves to his laws and availing ourselves 

 of his bounty, a God who is indeed from everlasting 

 to everlasting. Of course in the light of the old theol- 

 ogy this is no God at all. It was to emancipate us 

 from the rule of this God that the old conceptions 

 of a being above and far removed from Nature were 

 formulated. Nature is carnal and unholy. Our 

 theory compels us to say to matter and the laws of 



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