heavens, to whom we must send a messenger; not a God separated from us
by some great gulf that we must bridge by some supposed atonement; a
God nearer to us than our breath; a God who hears the whisper of our
want, who understands the dawning wish or aspiration before it takes
form or shape; a God who loves us better than we love ourselves or love
those who are dearest to us; a God who knows better what we need than
we know ourselves, and is more ready to give us than fathers are to
give good gifts to their children. Is there any loss here?

In the third place, the new man that has come into modern thought. Not
the broken fragments of a perfect Adam; not a man so crippled
intellectually that, as they have been telling us for centuries, it was
impossible for him to find the truth, or to know it when he did find
it; not a being so depraved, morally, that he never desires any good,
and never loves anything which is sweet and fine; a being totally
depraved, a being who, as one passage in the Old Testament tells us, is
so corrupt his very prayer is a sin; conceived, born, in evil, and all
his thoughts tainted, and drifting towards that which is wicked. Not
this kind of a man. A man who has been on the planet hundreds of
thousands of years, who has been learning by experience, who has been
animal, who has been cruel, but who at every step has been trying to
find the light, has been becoming a little truer and better; a being
who has evolved all that is sweetest and finest in the history of the
world; who has made no end of mistakes, who has committed no end of
crimes, but who has learned through these processes, and at last has
given us some specimens of what is possible by way of development in
Abraham and Moses and Elijah and David and Isaiah, and a long line of
prophets and seers of the Old Testament time; not perfect, but
magnificent types of actual men; who has developed in other nations
such men as Gautama, the heroes and teachers of China, like Confucius;