As the Rationalist looks abroad over the contending armies of faith and of reason, he gradually recognises the fact that his new religion, if it is to serve as a bond of union, must stand on stable ground, apart from the warring hosts. Round the idea of God rages the hottest din of the battle. The old, popular, and traditional belief is wounded to the death, and is slowly breathing out its life. The philosophical subtleties of the metaphysician are beyond the grasp of folk busied chiefly with common work. The new school of Theists, believers in a "spiritual personal God," stands on a slippery incline, whereon is no firm foothold. It simply spreads over the abysses of thought a sentimental veil of poetical imaginings, and bows down before a beatified and celestial man, whose image it has sculptured out of the thought-marble of its sublimest aspirations. If the idea of God be thus warred over, thus changing, thus uncertain, it is plain that the new religion cannot find its foundation on this shifting and disputed ground. While theologians are wrangling about God, plain men are looking wistfully over the shattered idols to find the ideal to which they can cling. The new religion, then, studying the varying phases of the God-idea, seizes on its one permanent element, its idealised resemblance to man, its embodiment of the highest humanity; and, grasping this thought, it turns to men and says, "In loving God you are only loving your own highest selves; in conforming yourselves to the Divine image you are only conforming yourselves to your own highest ideals; the unknown God whom you ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you; in serving your family, your neighbours, your country, you serve this unknown God; this God is Humanity, the race to which you belong; this is the veiled God whom all generations have worshipped in heaven, while he trod the world around them in every human form; this is the only God, the God who is manifest in the flesh: "-- "There is no God, O son, If thou be none." The first great constructive effort of the new religion is thus to transform the idea of God, and to turn all men's aspirations, all men's hopes, all men's labours, into this channel of devotion to humanity, that so the practical outcome of the new motive power may be a steady flow of loving and energetic work for man, work that begins in the family, and spreads, in ever-widening circles, over the whole race.