Christ in You
Chapter 4
VOLTAIRE IS CREDITED with saying that if there were no God, men would invent one. The human characteristics of the gods of all religions betray their man-made origin. Not discerning the real character of God, man has thought of Him as acting as man would if he were God. The result is a God who is angry every day, regrets that He made man, drowns the whole human family, and condemns the wicked to the eternal fire of hell if they fail to ask His forgiveness. This God of many of the religions of the day is of such frightful mien that we find it difficult to accept Him as the loving Father that Jesus taught Him to be.
Robert Ingersoll paraphrased "An honest man is the noblest work of God" to "An honest God is the noblest work of man." He was not so far wrong. All inventions are first pictured in the mind of the inventor. So we form a mental picture of everything we conceive, and our conception of God is no exception. We do not see persons and things as we think we see them. What we see is our own conception of them.
We are forced by intuition, logic, and manifest evidence to the conclusion that the Creator of the universe in which we live was and is wise and good. This being true, we cannot accept descriptions of
