bereavements, and the shock that comes with the first consciousness of the decay of our natural powers, the sufferings of the incurably diseased, the horrors endured by the victims of war and pestilence, and the long catalogue of ills due to the ignorance and the neglect, the oppression and the despair, of mankind would not cut the nerve of manly endeavor half so frequently as they now do, if eternity, instead of time, were taken as our point of view.

The apathy often apparent in the Christian church concerning "the life everlasting" is not due so much to historical criticism of the ground of its belief, or the lack of scientific proof of its position, as to the low ideal that is generally taken of what that life is. When we think of it as we have a right to think of it, not simply as a condition of freedom from the cares and sorrows and turmoils of the world, a state of merely passive contemplation, but one where all healthful and normal capacities will be utilized, where whatever of intellectual and emotional and moral power we possess will be completely and joyfully employed, we will impart a dignity and significance to the present life that cannot fail to be the source of untold inspiration to manly effort, and a perpetual foundation of mental serenity and peace.

CHAPTER XI.

THE PRESENT-DAY CONCEPTION OF GOD.

JOHN FISKE, in his little book on The Idea of God, writing of the different conceptions of the Deity that have prevailed at various times in the course of history, gives us in some detail his own first conception of him. "I imagined," he says, a narrow office just over the zenith, with a tall standing desk running lengthwise, upon which lay several open ledgers bound in coarse leather. There was no roof over this office, and the walls rose scarcely five feet from the floor, so that a person standing at the desk could look out over the whole world. There were two persons at the desk, and one of them, a tall slender man, of aquiline features, wearing spectacles, with a pen in his hand and one behind his ear-was God. The other, whose appearance I do not distinctly recall, was an attendant angel. Both were diligently watching the deeds of men and recording them in the ledgers."

Something like this childish conception of God dominates the thinking of all undeveloped people, and even the early Christians were much affected by it. For they could not help being immensely influenced by the form of government with which they came in daily contact. Almost without exception they came to regard God as a great celestial monarch. In the Roman system, with which alone they were familiar, the Emperor was the mysterious source of all authority

and power. He ruled by arbitrary fiats. These he first made known to his immediate subordinates, and they in turn proclaimed them to their lieutenants, whose mission it was to communicate them to the people at large and see to it that they were implicitly obeyed.

When the Roman empire went to pieces its place was taken in almost every particular by the Roman Church, the officials of the former being supplanted by the officials of the latter; at the same time the leaders of the church took upon themselves even more extended powers. Long before the beginning of the Middle Ages the ecclesiastical system had reached such a degree of development and had secured such a strong hold upon the people that practically no one thought of approaching God except through a long line of church officials reaching from the curate up to the Pope.

In the early part of the fifth century Augustine came into prominence in the church, and his superior abilities almost at once placed him in the foremost rank as the mouthpiece of the system. Hence it is to him that we are to look for the medieval conception of God and the ideas of man and the world that are connected with it. Augustine's two great books, The Confessions and The City of God, are the chief sources of our knowledge of his views. The former was written about 400 and the second completed in 426. From the study of these books we find that Augustine thought of God as a great Imperial Czar, who after an infinitely long period of inaction determined to create a world. This he did some four thousand years before the Christian era, and made it out of nothing in six natural days.

He first created the angels. They are the "light" referred to in the Scriptures as God's first act. Some of them immediately rebelled against him and set up a rival kingdom under their leader Satan. Then he created the material universe, and when it was finished everything in it was essentially just as it is at present. Adam, the first man, he made out of the dust of the earth, and endowed him with every conceivable perfection both of mind and body. But Adam sinned and God cast him out of the garden in which he had placed him, and left him to care for himself.

Before doing it, however, God cursed the ground, and caused it to bring forth thorns and thistles, so that Adam should be compelled to earn his bread by hard labor until the time came for him to return to the dust out of which he had been formed. Voluntarily depraved and justly condemned for disobeying the commands of his Maker, Adam begot depraved and condemned children. For, as Augustine argues, we were all in him, when "all of us" consisted of him alone; and as his nature was stained by sin, God gave him and all his posterity over to corruption and death, just as any earthly potentate would do in case a subject rebelled against him and refused to conform his conduct to the behests of his lord.

But God was not to have his purpose in creating a world thus summarily brought to naught. He determined to institute a system of grace by which he could withdraw a portion of the human race from the general ruin; and to do this he sent his Son into the world to pay the needed ransom. As man had had nothing to do with effecting this reconciliation, the selection of those who were to be benefited by it rested solely with God. There thus arose alongside of the earthly state of man

the state or city of God. Those in the latter were to reign eternally with God, while those in the former were to suffer eternal punishment with the Devil.

Augustine combats with vigor those who hold that God would be acting unjustly to punish all men forever regardless of their efforts to love and serve him. On the contrary he maintains that God is perfectly justified in conferring his "irresistible grace" upon those he chooses without reference to their present conduct, as monuments of his mercy, while he leaves the majority to eternal damnation as the monuments of his justice.

The church, says Augustine, prays for all men, but if she knew with certainty who the persons are that are predestined by God "to go into the eternal fire with the Devil" she would no more pray for them than for the Devil.

Although this conception of God as a Celestial Czar advocated by Augustine was generally accepted by the recognized leaders of the church during the Middle Ages, yet Anselm, the famous Archbishop of Canterbury, some six centuries after the time of Augustine, did much to strengthen it by his book entitled, Cur Deus Homo? or Why did God Become Man?

In this book he assumes practically all of Augustine's positions, but objects to the view held before his time by such leaders as Origen, Ambrosius, Leo the Great, and many others, that God sent his Son into the world as a ransom to the Devil. His own view was that incarnation follows of necessity, if God adopts a method of salvation at all. For sin against God is an offence of infinite degree and demands an infinite satisfaction.

In spite of his goodness God cannot pardon sin without compounding his honor. He must, therefore,