Page:The Science of Religion (1925).djvu/17

Personal, Merciful, or anything, but these conceptions are not sufficiently compelling to make us try to know God. We may as well do without Him. He may be Infinite, Omnipresent, and so forth, but we have no immediate and practical use for those conceptions in our busy, rushing lives. We fall back on those conceptions only when we seek to justify, in philosophical and poetical writings, in art or in warmed-up, idealistic talks, the finite craving for something beyond; when we, with all our vaunted knowledge, are at a loss to explain some of the most common phenomena of the universe; or when we get stranded in the vicissitudes of the world. “We pray to the Ever-Merciful when we get stuck,” as the Eastern maxim has it. Except for all this, we seem to get along all right in our work-a-day world without Him. These conceptions appear to be the safety-valves of our pent-up human thought. They explain Him, but do not make us seek Him. They