And now, let us turn to man's conceptions of God, and see how they have changed. And, in doing this, friends, let us seek for the kernel of truth which underlies even mistaken beliefs; for, man is so constituted that no error can hold him long in bondage save by the truth that that error conceals. Just as you may have the husk, the shell, and the kernel within it, so in every error that dominates mankind there is a kernel of truth that gives it its nutritive power. Only when you recognise the kernel of truth will you be able to convince a man of the husk of error. Now, looking back to early times in our race, we find what is called Polytheism; and that you practically find everywhere. You find it very very strongly in the first half of the Hebrew _Old Testament_, as is called the Hebrew part of the Christian Bible. If you read that, what is the God that you find? Clearly, a God of limited power, a God of limited knowledge, what in the talk, the jargon, of the day is called a "tribal God". In the early story told by the Hebrews, the conception of God is very limited. You find Him "walking in the garden in the cool of the day," and calling out to the man he had created: "Adam, where art thou?" You find him a little later--when men have multiplied and begun to build a tower which in their ignorance they think will reach up to heaven--saying; "Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech." For "now nothing," he said, "will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do". And so, we read, that "the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded," and he confused the speech of the builders, so that they were scattered abroad and could not build their tower. And the Babel of Tongues is a phrase in English, because it was the Tower of Babel from which all the languages on earth originated! You find him again with his chosen people, the children of Abraham, leading them into the land he gives them; and then you come across the remarkable statement that "the Lord was with Judah," one of the tribes, and he drove out all "the inhabitants of the mountain, but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron". You see at once that you are in the realm of a very limited kind of tribal God. Of course, I know that in the days when the Bible was regarded as verbally inspired, as God's Word, they said these statements were an accommodation to the ignorance of man; but that is only the desperate effort of the believer in verbal inspiration to infuse the knowledge of later days into the form of ancient fables. You and I recognise at once that where thoughtful Christians are concerned, these are to them old ideas, that you have here the local God, the tribal God, and that the God of the Hebrews of the early days does not claim to be the only God, but only the chief