must ultimately come. To it indeed much religion is already coming.
Christian thought struggles towards it, with the millstones of Syrian
theology and an outrageous mythology of incarnation and resurrection
about its neck. When at last our present bench of bishops join the
early fathers of the church in heaven there will be, I fear, a note of
reproach in their greeting of the ingenious person who saddled them with
OMNIPOTENS. Still more disastrous for them has been the virgin birth,
with the terrible fascination of its detail for unpoetic minds. How rich
is the literature of authoritative Christianity with decisions upon the
continuing virginity of Mary and the virginity of Joseph--ideas that
first arose in Arabia as a Moslem gloss upon Christianity--and how
little have these peepings and pryings to do with the needs of the heart
and the finding of God!

Within the last few years there have been a score or so of such volumes
as that recently compiled by Dr. Foakes Jackson, entitled "The Faith and
the War," a volume in which the curious reader may contemplate deans and
canons, divines and church dignitaries, men intelligent and enquiring
and religiously disposed, all lying like overladen camels, panting
under this load of obsolete theological responsibility, groaning great
articles, outside the needle's eye that leads to God.



6. THE COMING OF GOD


Modern religion bases its knowledge of God and its account of God
entirely upon experience. It has encountered God. It does not argue
about God; it relates. It relates without any of those wrappings of awe