hands clasped and her head bowed on her breast, without feeling a
sense of God.

Do we carry about with us the thought of God wherever we go? If not,
we have missed the greatest part of life. Do we have a conviction
of god's abiding presence wherever we are? There is nothing more
needed in this generation than a larger and more Scriptural idea
of God. A great American writer has told us that when he was a
boy the conception of God which he got from books and sermons was
that of a wise and very strict lawyer. I remember well the awful
conception of God which I had when a boy. I was given an illustrated
edition of Watts' hymns, in which God was represented as a great
piercing eye in the midst of a great black thunder cloud. The
idea which that picture gave to my young imagination was that of
God as a great detective, playing the spy upon my actions, as the
hymn says:

"Writing now the story of what little children do."

That was a very mistaken and harmful idea which it has taken me
years to obliterate. We think of God as "up there," or as one who
made the world six thousand years ago and then retired. We must
learn that He is not confined either to time or space. God is
not to be thought of as merely back there in time, or up there in
space. If not, where is He? "The word is nigh thee, even in thy
mouth." The Kingdom of God is within you, and God Himself is among
men. When are we to exchange the terrible, far-away, absentee God
of our childhood for the everywhere present God of the Bible? Too
many of the old Christian writers seem to have conceived of God
as not much more than the greatest man--a kind of divine emperor.