"Oh, no, no, I have been beyond that for twenty-five years! God, if He means anything, means the infinite, while a person means the limited. Now, who ever heard of such a childish thing as a limited infinite? No, pig-iron, as much as anything, is God."
I replied, "With all your intelligence, you haven't the remotest idea of what constitutes personality. You are not aware that by personality we mean a certain type of experience, and not a substance. Personality is realized only as the experience of self-knowledge is achieved. You are not as yet much of a personality, you are hardly more than a candidate for the office, but by making a good campaign you may get elected. You are not very personal because you are not very self-knowing, and if you should drop the plummet into the depths of your experience to sound yourself, by that very act you would acquire new depth, and would need to try again to fathom yourself. So at best, you are only becoming personal. None but the Infinite Experience can know itself perfectly, and therefore, God alone is completely personal."
My friend had no idea either of God's personality or his own, and his philosophical conception of nature was only a little less crude.
It was a long step in the right direction when I came to realize that I had never seen my mother, with whom I lived for so many happy years. Yet there was one thing that I felt sure I knew—absolutely, as I knew nothing else—and that was my mother. Not her face, not her voice, not her attitudes nor her actions, though all these I knew too and loved. But back of all these there was a real mother, of whom these were only manifestations. And this real mother, that I knew as I knew nothing else, was silent, and invisible. And then I found that I knew myself too—hardly as well as I knew my mother, but in the same way, and I knew myself also to be invisible and silent. My spirit, or personality, is as invisible and silent as God. I have no more seen myself than I have seen Him. Neither has my naked soul ever made a sound. All the words that my soul desires expressed are produced by a sort of animated phonograph which we call the mouth. At the wish of my invisible self the physical organs of speech set the air vibrating, but my self-conscious Will is eternally silent. There is much to be said about the relation of Personalities to their instruments, but this must be left until a little later. It will avoid confusion if we try to take but one step at a time.
Great scholars may think that such ideas as I have endeavored to illustrate are too simple to require statement, nevertheless the recognition of these simple facts concerning my mother and myself unlocked my prison door. It revolutionized everything within me, and without me. During the thirty years of my active ministry, it has been the moulding thought of my life. Once realizing that God was a "Loving Intelligent Will," I no longer thought of Him as sitting on a throne, or showing His face through parted clouds. This conception of spirit gave to everything new shape and color. It was the idea around which a new heaven and a new earth took form. The rest of this book must further explain what it then meant, and still means, to me. As the result of a better conception of spirit, my world was relieved of intolerable intellectual burdens. Simply to get the idea, however, is not enough; one must follow it out logically to see where it will lead him.
To the question, "What is God?" I once more answer that He is a Loving Intelligent Will. And, apart from His instruments, He is silent and invisible, here and everywhere, now and always.
2. Who is God?
First, allow me to say that He is not the Father of our bodies, though He is the Creator of them. God created trees, but He is not the Father of trees. Fatherhood, in addition to creation, implies likeness so close that father and child classify as members of the same family. Our bodies were not made in the image of God.
While passing through my Sunday school where a college woman was giving some supplementary work, I heard her teaching the young people that we were made in the image of God because we had two legs instead of four, and stood on end. "Why in the name of conscience," I thought, "do we permit anyone in our churches to retain such detrimental and absurd ideas?" This woman was what the young men and women called a "crackerjack" in her college line. So I was amazed at her crude conceptions, until I realized that she had never heard an exposition of the primitive story in Genesis. I also remembered that I had heard it preached from a pulpit, that man was in the image of God because he had a face, and walked upright instead of going on all fours. Those churches that believe man has no spirit except his breath are necessarily confined to this monstrous idea; while many in our regular churches are in a maze of tangled thoughts.
According to Scriptures, God is the Father of spirits. The "Loving Intelligent Will" is the Father of other loving intelligent wills. This makes every created spirit a God-child, or a child of God. These terms must be interchangeable, unless we are playing at "make-believe," when we say that a spirit is a child of God. Were not all spirits members of the God family, it would be useless to teach them about God; for, being of a different order, they would not understand. It is impossible to teach a horse the things of a man, because he has not the spirit of a man. I believe in an anthropomorphic God, simply because I believe in a Theomorphic man. God must be in man's image, because man is in God's image. But it is not the animal man in whose image God is.