That some trust and confidence is indispensable in the complex feeling with which a community approaches its gods, for the purpose of appeasing their wrath--still more, for beseeching favours from them--seems indisputable. But we must not exaggerate it. Wherever there are gods at all, they are regarded by the community as beings who can be approached: so much confidence, at least, is placed in them by the community that believes in them. Even if they are offended and wrathful, the community is confident that they can be appeased: the community places so much trust in them. Indeed its trust goes even further: it is sure that they do not take offence without reasonable grounds. If they display wrath against the community and send calamity upon it, it is, and in the opinion of the community, can only be, because some member of the community has done that which he should not have done. The gods may be, on occasion, wrathful; but they are just. They are from the beginning moral beings--according to such standard of morality as the community possesses--and it is breaches of the tribe's customary morality that their wrath is directed against. They are, from the beginning, and for long afterwards in the history of religion, strict to mark what is amiss, and, in that sense, they are jealous gods. And this aspect of the Godhead it is which fills the larger part of the field of religious consciousness, not only in the case of peoples who have failed to recognise the unity of the Godhead, but even in the case of a people like the Jews, who did recognise it. The other aspect of the Godhead, as the God, not merely of mercy and forgiveness, but of love, was an aspect fully revealed in Christianity alone, of all the religions in the world. But the love God displays to all his children, to the prodigal son as well as to others, is not a mere attribute assigned to Him. It is not a mere quality with which one religion may invest Him, and of which another religion, with equal right, may divest Him. The idea of God does not consist merely of attributes and qualities, so that, if you strip off all the attributes and qualities, nothing is left, and the idea is shown to be without content, meaning or reality.