The current Christian conception of God is of a person who is also the creator and the ruler of the universe. This person has certain attributes--is omnipotent, omniscient, and somehow, in spite of all the unhappiness and squalor and cruelty in the world, all-loving. He has personal qualities--he created the universe, and all that is in it; he takes pleasure in being worshipped; is displeased when men or women neglect him, or commit crimes or sins; takes pity on the follies and sufferings of man; and was so moved by them (albeit after a very considerable period had elapsed since man had first appeared upon the scene) that he sent his son into the world as a redeemer. (For simplicity’s sake, I omit all reference to the complexities of Trinitarian doctrine, which, however important in distinguishing Christianity from other religions envisaging an omnipotent personal God, do not affect the essential point at issue.) Further, he grants petitions, reveals himself to certain chosen persons, and is enthroned in a somewhat elusive heaven, where he is (or will be after the Day of Judgment--opinions seem to differ somewhat on the subject) surrounded by the immortal souls of the elect. Now this view, or any view of God as a personal being, is becoming frankly untenable. The difficulty of understanding the functions of a personal ruler in a universe which the march of knowledge is showing us ever more clearly as self-ordered and self-ordering in every minutest detail is becoming more and more apparent. Either a personal God is a ruler without power, or he _is_ the universe. In the former case he becomes a mere fly on the wheel; in the latter we revert to a frank pantheism, in which the idea of a personal Being can no longer properly be upheld. A personal creation of the world, in any reasonable sense of that term, is now meaningless except for a hypothetical creation of the original substance of the cosmos in the first instance. Creation of earth and stars, plants, animals, and man--Darwin swept the last vestiges of that into the waste-paper basket of outworn imaginations, already piled high with the debris of earlier ages. After the psychological insight which the last half-century has given us, miracles have ceased to be miracles, and have become either delusions, or, more frequently, unusual phenomena for which a cause has not yet been found. The immutability of the fundamental laws of matter and motion, more particularly the grand generalization of the conservation of energy and the substitution by science of an orderly for a disorderly conception of nature, make it impossible to think of occasional interference by God with this world’s affairs. Accordingly the value of petitionary prayer falls to the ground. Revelation and inspiration have resolved themselves into exceptional mental states, and are no longer looked upon as a sort of telepathy between divine and human minds. If we reflect, we see that all these intellectual