SINCE the beginnings of material history, humanity has been supposed to be living a life of its own, separated from God; separated, in that the Creator, having fashioned it, set it, according to the supposition, in a world of its own, to begin and mature and die by itself, through successive generations; all this with no appeal to any source save the God supposed to dwell remotely in a distant heaven, and with no assurance that His ear can be reached by any certain mode of communication, in time of need. Thus removed from the Creator, having no more than the hope of a close association with God after the final exit, by death, from the scene of this separated existence, mortal man has moved in grooves of his own, oftentime knowing no appeal to anything outside the arena of human experience. Indeed, so separated is this man from God, that he has largely lost the fashion of talking about God in his daily affairs. This erroneous belief has placed the race of Adam in the position defined by Jesus in the story of the prodigal,—a wanderer from his father's household,—an exile in a foreign land. Like a child who has strayed beyond the gates into the streets of the strangers, humanity is at the mercy of every passing evil. No safety is known till we seek and find the home shelter, and then,—no danger can reach us, for none can pass the guarded portals to find us. Our separation from the household occasions our exposure to evil, and our return to it is the only way of protection and escape.
The voice of revelation and prophecy, through the sacred writings, has remonstrated with the generations of men, admonishing them to turn from this separated sense of existence to a knowledge of that life in God which lifts thought to present individual association with God. Moses, David, and all the later prophets, urged the abandonment of sin and such obedience to the law of God as would identify man as the manifestation of God, good. Jesus declared continually his allegiance to the Father, his obedience to Him, his oneness with Him, and Paul was so clear-eyed a disciple that he rose to the knowledge that nothing could separate him from "the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." From the beginning, the voice of redemption, in its varying messages and through its various messengers, has cried out against the sense of separated being; and whatever has led or driven men nearer to the divine Source has wrought for their emancipation and salvation.
All religious teaching in line with Biblical statement has urged this unity with God, in heart and life as the way of salvation. Yet not all religious teaching has been able to point the way so clearly as to overcome, in the life of its adherent, the sense of separation from God. On the contrary, mankind has gone on living and dying in a world so disfigured by sin, disaster, and sorrow that it would seem at times almost abandoned by the only power which is able to rescue and save. Much of this belief in separation from God is due to the fact that many phases of religious teaching have fostered a personal sense of God and a personal sense of man. This personal God has been depicted as vastly greater than man. But an outlined picture of God, entertained in thought, naturally develops a sense of separation; carries with it the thought of location and distance; puts God "there," and man "here" and necessarily keeps the personally outlined man distinctly apart from the personally outlined God. Two such persons must be separated from each other, by the very reason of their separately outlined embodiments. Men existing as separate embodiments apart from God, naturally indicate a God remote from the children of men.
