THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO DALLAS ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO 3 1 X 6 8 5 PREFACE "If you do not ask me, I know." Of no question of intimate human concern is this more true than of the idea of God. Since our earliest childhood we have been familiar with the word "God": we were taught it at our mother's knee; we have uttered it in the Lord's prayer; it is the background of all we learned in the Sunday-school; it is the atmosphere of our religious reading and our church life; it is the inspiration and support of our Christian experience. We have never stopped to define what the idea means to us, but have taken it for granted as we take the air, friendship, education, and democracy. We have shrunk from exact definition, since we preferred to leave it in the region of feeling; in its very vagueness lies much of its power to quicken reverence and awe and to appeal to simple trust; even if in this way God is removed far from us, he is yet brought near. In avoiding definition we have hoped to escape the aridness of an abstract notion of God and the bitterness of controversy over a logical concept which has only a remote and equivocal bearing on religious experience. Moreover, there is the feeling that to drag this sentiment out from its reticent retreat and turn on it the cold light of reason, force it to give an account of itself and to justify its existence on pain of rejecting it, is nothing less than the unpardonable sin. On the other hand, in response to a legitimate demand of the human mind, the idea of God has been made a sub |