But it is not alone for the reasons outlined above that I have held religion suspect. Let us concede that the God of the Negroes has been largely a pagan god and largely stripped of the divinest attributes, interceding intimately and directly for man without man’s help. They have fashioned a god to their need. But the whites also have fashioned a god to their need, and have believed in him, and have professed to follow him. He is a moral God, a God of truth and justice and love. I do not wish to carry this too far, for I have no capacity for philosophic speculation; but it seems to me that if the qualities attributed to God represent man’s acknowledged needs, and if the principles of Christianity represent the universal source of man’s social genius, then he has sacrificed the fulfillment of his basic needs (or “the good life”) to the fulfillment of desires that run counter to the purpose of living. He has not given his religion a chance to help him effect that far-going social transformation and evolution which should be religion’s end. Religion has become a disembodied sort of activity, when, to be effective, it should be a social function intimately linked up with man’s fate on earth. While there is almost no religion operating in race relations, there is plenty of God. I do not say this facetiously, nor with ironic intent; and, anyway, it has at least been implied before. There is an extensive literature on the part God has played in race relations since the fifteenth century. Principally God and the word of God have been used to perpetuate the wicked idea of human inferiority. I need not go into this farther than to point out modern man’s subtle modifications of the idea of God and the intellectual gymnastics that have made those modifications possible, even when, it seems to me, the environment has not made them necessary, and even though in the fundamental concept of the Godhead is the idea of immutability. But God has changed, and though man himself has wrought these changes, he has declared them God’s own changes and therefore factors, equations, and of a piece with the mysterious and unknowable nature of God. Indeed, God’s very supernaturalness, His mysteriousness and inscrutability (“God moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform,” _ergo_ “we cannot know God’s purpose in making the black race inferior to the white,” and we cannot “fathom the repulsion which God has given one race for another, or one people for another”) are largely modern attributions which confound the ancient knowledge and excuse modern sin. God was not always so.