as the vicarious penitence of the one sensitive Conscience which creates
a new moral world, or as the unveiling of the suffering heart of God,
who bears His children's sins, as Jesus bore His brethren's
transgressions on the cross. They were insisting that the Bible was
throughout the Word of God, and that the commands to slaughter Israel's
enemies attributed to Him, and the prayers for vengeance uttered by
vindictive psalmists, were true revelations of His mind; and
Humanitarianism refused to worship in the heavens a character less good
than it was trying to produce in men on earth. These men of sensitive
conscience did for our generation what the Greek philosophers of the
Fifth Century B.C. did for theirs--they made the thought of God moral:
"God is never in any way unrighteous--He is perfect righteousness; and
he of us who is the most righteous is most like Him" (Plato, _Theæt_.
176c).

From this movement of thought our chief gains have been:

(1) A view of God as good as the best of men; and that means a God as
good as Jesus of Nazareth. Older theologians talked much of God's
decrees; we speak oftener of His character.

(2) The emphasis upon the humanity of Jesus and of our ability and duty
to become like Him. Spurred by Romanticism's interest in imaginatively
reconstructing history, many _Lives of Christ_ have been written; and it
is no exaggeration to say that Jesus is far better known and understood
at present than He has been since the days of the evangelists.

A third quarry is the _Physical Sciences_. As its blocks were taken out
most Christians were convinced that they could never be employed for the
temple of faith. They seemed fitted to express the creed of materialism,