IT is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles that Paul was once questioned by the Athenians concerning "certain strange things" which they had heard that he preached. "Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars' hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, To the unknown God. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you." After apostolic times, the healing works of the early Christians were gradually replaced by preaching uncorroborated by those signs which Christ Jesus said should follow obedience to him, and during the succeeding centuries, which have been characterized by many phases of darkness, questioning, hope, wonder, human learning and progress, and the endless uncovering of ignorance before unsuspected, men have yearned to know the again "unknown God."
Philosophy, seeking to answer the vital demand, has built up many systems and offered them to the questioning world. But the figure of pantheistic deity failed to respond when men besought his mercy. The God of mysticism gave not sanity, health, wholeness; but a strange, uncertain ecstasy that led all too often to self-indulgence, immorality, insanity. So, too, the God which philosophy called spirit, was found rather to be disembodied materiality, the very essence of matter. Geology, physics, biology found nothing tangible, except it might be a God of matter, atomic force, working through evolution, the "survival of the fittest,"—beginning in non-intelligent, inorganic forms of matter, never yet found, too infinitesimal to be found; ending—how? This matter-God was merciless, unjust, and today the very materialists say, "We cannot discover matter; what we believed to be matter is beyond our apprehension; we cannot find the starting-point between nothingness and life!" Hypnotism and mortal mindpower proposed gods of the personal self or ego, and these gods led their worshipers to direct, intentional self deception; harmless, it was argued, because it seemed to injure no one, and because the object seemed desirable. But the dishonest practice opened an easy way to unprincipled selfish domination over others, to cruelty, crime; to agony, if even human nobility witnessed to the falsehood; led to doubt, at last, not only of these gods, but of one's own existence.
Widely as these systems differed in honesty of purpose, the very best could not satisfy; few even contented their adherents; most of them were frankly admitted to be of little or no practical help in the problems of every day. It was chiefly as intellectual exercises that they held one's interest, as speculations concerning that which, though it was termed reality, truth, self-existent being, was nevertheless utterly apart from reality in the conscious experience of the student. However absorbing they might seem, however convincing in words, these theories concerned themselves with themselves rather than with the salvation of man; in the actions of their supporters they were generally unacknowledged. Can that be a theory imbued with life, a living God, a savior to mankind, which is not in some way "manifest in the flesh," wrought out to the relief and elevation of human existence?
