The Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick has written an essay, called “How Shall We Think of God?”, which illustrates [p022] the difficulty. He begins by saying that “believing in God without considering how one shall picture him is deplorably unsatisfactory.” Yet the old ways of picturing him are no longer credible. We cannot think of him as seated upon a throne, while around him are angels playing on harps and singing hymns. “God as a king on high—our fathers, living under monarchy, rejoiced in that image and found it meaningful. His throne, his crown, his scepter, his seraphic retinue, his laws, rewards, and punishments—how dominant that picture was and how persistent is the continuance of it in our hymns and prayers! It was always partly poetry, but it had a prose background: there really had been at first a celestial land above the clouds where God reigned and where his throne was in the heavens.” Having said that this picture is antiquated, Dr. Fosdick goes on to state that “the religious man must have imaginations of God, if God is to be real to him.” He must “picture his dealing with the Divine in terms of personal relationship.” But how? “The place where man vitally finds God ... is within his own experience of goodness, truth, and beauty, and the truest images of God are therefore to be found in man’s spiritual life.” I should be the last to deny that a man may, if he chooses, think of God as the source of all that seems to him worthy in human experience. But certainly this is not the God of the ancient faith. This is not God the Father, the Lawgiver, the Judge. This is a highly sophisticated idea of God, employed by a modern man who would like to say, but cannot say with certainty, that there exists a personal God to whom men must accommodate themselves. [p023] 2. _An Indefinite God_ It may be that clear and unambiguous statements are not now possible in our intellectual climate. But at least we should not forget that the religions which have dominated human history have been founded on what the faithful felt were undeniable facts. These facts were mysterious only in the sense that they were uncommon, like an eclipse of the sun, but not in the sense that they were beyond human experience. No doubt there are passages in the Scriptures written by highly cultivated men in which the Divine nature is called mysterious and unknowable. But these passages are not the rock upon which the popular churches are founded. No one, I think, has truly observed the religious life of simple people without understanding how plain, how literal, how natural they take their supernatural personages to be.