THE DIVINE AS THE HUMAN IDEAL. There has been in certain latter-day philosophies, a tendency to interpret the divine as the objectification of human ideals. That is, according to this theory, men have found in their imagined divinities the fulfillment of ideals that they could never have realized on earth. Men, says this theory, long to be immortal, so they imagine gods who are. Finite man has infinite desires. In God is infinite fulfillment through eternity. No men are all good; some desire to be. Such fulfillment they find in the divine. Our conception of God is an index of our own ideals. When men were savages, their divinity was a jealous monster. In the refinement and spiritualization of the human imagination, divinity becomes all-beautiful and all-benevolent as well as the wielder of infinite power. John Stuart Mill gives possibly the clearest expression to this attitude which is, if not in the strictest sense religious, at least deeply spiritual: Religion and poetry address themselves, at least in one of their aspects, to the same part of the human constitution; they both supply the same want, that of ideal conceptions grander and more beautiful than we see realized in the prose of human life. Religion, as distinguished from poetry, is the product of the craving to know whether these imaginative conceptions have realities, answering to them in some other world than ours. The mind, in this state, eagerly catches at any rumors respecting other worlds, especially when delivered by persons whom it deems wiser than itself. To the poetry of the supernatural, comes to be thus added a positive belief and expectation, which unpoetical minds can share with the poetical. Belief in a God or gods, and in a life after death, becomes the canvas which every mind, according to its capacity, covers with such ideal pictures as it can either invent or copy. In that other life each hopes to find the good which he has failed to find on earth, or the better which is suggested to him by the good which on earth he has partially seen and known. More especially this belief supplies the finer minds with material for conceptions of beings more awful than they _can_ have known on earth, and more excellent than they probably _have_ known.[1] [Footnote 1: Mill: _Three Essays on Religion_ (Henry Holt & Co.), pp. 103-04.]