352 PRESENT-DAY RATIONALISM 



tianity. Like most of the other Christian dogmas, it 

 has been borrowed from earlier religions." ^ 



" ' God the Father,' the omnipotent creator of heaven 

 and earth — this untenable myth was ref ited long ago by 

 scientific cosmogony, astronomy and geology." ^ 



" In the higher and more abstract forms of religion 

 [than anthropomorphic ideas], this idea of bodily ap- 

 pearances [as in the old Egyptian cult, in animals] is 

 entirely abandoned, and God is adored as a * pure spirit ' 

 without a body. ' God is a spirit, and they who worship 

 him must worship him in spirit and in truth.' Never- 

 theless, the psychic activity of this 'pure spirit' remains 

 just the same as that of the anthropomorphic God. In 

 reality, even this immaterial spirit is not conceived to be 

 incorporeal, but merely invisible, gaseous. We thus 

 arrive at the paradoxical conception of God as a gaseous 

 vertebrate y ^ 



In reply to the sentiments expressed in these quota- 

 tions, I would observe that the various conceptions of God 

 or of gods, seem always to have been in accordance with 

 the intellectual stages of man. It is man, in fact, who 

 conceives of his God in his own image. Thus the 

 immoralities of the deities of ancient Greece reflected 

 those of the Greeks themselves. 



Man cannot possibly conceive of the nature of a 

 Spiritual Being not appreciable by the senses. He must 

 be anthropomorphically expressed ; but as man rises in 

 the scale of knowledge and of ideas of morality, so does 

 his idea of God become more and more refined. But 

 through many stages, morality, as we understand it, was 

 not necessarily associated with a divine nature at all. 

 Religion consisted solely of ceremony. 



^ The Riddle of the Universe, p. 285. '^ Ibiil., p. 284. 



^Ibid., p. 295. 



