Whoever embarks on the task of religious inquiry, which is tantamount to inquiry into the meaning of his life--a question he would have no interest in asking unless he were fundamentally a religious being,--whoever embarks on this task will find the ground encumbered with a multitude of preconceptions which warp the mind at every point and render independent judgment extremely difficult. Unless the inquirer keeps a watch upon himself his mind will run in a groove from the outset. And when he has followed his groove as far as it goes and found _nothing_ at the end of it, he will conclude that religion has broken down. But in nine cases out of ten he will perceive, if he reflects on what has happened, that the groove which has led to this result was cut by minds not primarily interested in religion but bent on protecting some quite alien interest, possibly a vested interest, institutional or political, to which religion had proved itself serviceable. The most obstinate of these misconceptions, and the deepest of the grooves in which they run, are those connected with the term "God." There is no worldly interest which has not been anxious to secure God for an ally. In all ages the attempt has been made to domesticate the idea of God to the secular purposes of individuals and of groups. If we examine the current forms of the idea we may observe the marks of this domesticating process at many points. For example, the idea of God as the sovereign potentate, governing the universe under a system of iron law, the legislator of nature and the taskmaster of the soul, the rewarder of them that obey and the punisher of them that disobey, is plainly an idea borrowed from politics, the form of the idea most convenient to those who need God as an ally in the maintenance of law and order as they conceive them. This does not prove the idea untrue to reality; it may conceivably be used as a strong argument to the contrary. At the same time it puts us on our guard, warning us to look out for other forms of "domestication" which may be less in accord with essential truth than the one I have just mentioned. Certainly it is extremely difficult to find any form of the idea of God which has retained a purely spiritual or religious character throughout the entire course of its history. Between the conception of Deity implied in the teachings of Jesus and the conception as it appears in "God save the King" the distance is immense; and few theologians I imagine would be so hardy or so patriotic as to affirm that the latter conception is nearer to the Divine Reality.