It has to be confessed that this dualism and lack of intimacy has
always operated as a drag and handicap on Christian thought. Orthodox
theology has had to wage a steady fight within the schools against the
various forms of pantheistic heresy which the mystical experiences
of religious persons, on the one hand, and the formal or aesthetic
superiorities of monism to dualism, on the other, kept producing. God
as intimate soul and reason of the universe has always seemed to some
people a more worthy conception than God as external creator. So
conceived, he appeared to unify the world more perfectly, he made
it less finite and mechanical, and in comparison with such a God an
external creator seemed more like the product of a childish fancy. I
have been told by Hindoos that the great obstacle to the spread
of Christianity in their country is the puerility of our dogma
of creation. It has not sweep and infinity enough to meet the
requirements of even the illiterate natives of India.

Assuredly most members of this audience are ready to side with
Hinduism in this matter. Those of us who are sexagenarians have
witnessed in our own persons one of those gradual mutations of
intellectual climate, due to innumerable influences, that make the
thought of a past generation seem as foreign to its successor as if
it were the expression of a different race of men. The theological
machinery that spoke so livingly to our ancestors, with its finite age
of the world, its creation out of nothing, its juridical morality and
eschatology, its relish for rewards and punishments, its treatment of
God as an external contriver, an 'intelligent and moral governor,'
sounds as odd to most of us as if it were some outlandish savage
religion. The vaster vistas which scientific evolutionism has opened,
and the rising tide of social democratic ideals, have changed the type
of our imagination, and the older monarchical theism is obsolete or