5. GOD IS WITHIN


God comes we know not whence, into the conflict of life. He works in men
and through men. He is a spirit, a single spirit and a single person; he
has begun and he will never end. He is the immortal part and leader of
mankind. He has motives, he has characteristics, he has an aim. He is
by our poor scales of measurement boundless love, boundless courage,
boundless generosity. He is thought and a steadfast will. He is our
friend and brother and the light of the world. That briefly is the
belief of the modern mind with regard to God. There is no very novel
idea about this God, unless it be the idea that he had a beginning. This
is the God that men have sought and found in all ages, as God or as
the Messiah or the Saviour. The finding of him is salvation from the
purposelessness of life. The new religion has but disentangled the idea
of him from the absolutes and infinities and mysteries of the Christian
theologians; from mythological virgin births and the cosmogonies and
intellectual pretentiousness of a vanished age.

Modern religion appeals to no revelation, no authoritative teaching,
no mystery. The statement it makes is, it declares, a mere statement
of what we may all perceive and experience. We all live in the storm of
life, we all find our understandings limited by the Veiled Being; if
we seek salvation and search within for God, presently we find him. All
this is in the nature of things. If every one who perceives and states
it were to be instantly killed and blotted out, presently other people
would find their way to the same conclusions; and so on again and again.
To this all true religion, casting aside its hulls of misconception,