WHEN a man conceives within his own mind an image of God with the intent to worship it, he does not, in worshipping it, really worship a God who is alive; he does not worship a God who made him and all mankind. That which he worships is only an image of God which he himself has created.

Let any man think of this fact for a little moment and he will see that it is true.

Suppose, for an instance, that, instead of an idea of God, you form in your mind an idea, say, of Cromwell, or of Washington, or of Napoleon, or of Lincoln. Is it not perfectly clear that that image is not the real living Cromwell, Washington, Napoleon, Lincoln, but only a mental picture of one of those men? You may cause that image–that mental picture–to seem to move and to speak and to assume different aspects; you may cause it apparently to will and to act, but it is not the real hero-man who so moves and speaks, wills and acts. It is only an imaginary speech and action of an imagined hero.

The real man is exactly a different thing. He is of real flesh and blood, and his speech and action depend upon his own volition and not upon your imagination. You may, if you choose, decorate the image in your mind with the laurel wreath of hero-worship, and you may cause the most noble and exalted thoughts to seem to pass through the imagined hero’s mind. But it is not the living man whom you crown, nor do those thoughts really pass through the brain of the living man. That which you crown is only your own idea–your own created image of the man; and the thoughts which seem to pass through his mind are, in reality, only your own thoughts which you cause to pass through your own mind.

So it is exactly with the worship of God.

For let the mind form ever so exalted an image of God, that image is, after all, only the creation of the mind; it is only a dead thing, and not the living fact.

When a man prays to such an image of God, he prays not to the actual living Heavenly Father who created him, but to an image of God which he himself has created.

For that image of God is no more really alive than the imagined hero is really a living man.

And as it is in the case of an imagined hero, so it is with that image of God. For let that image seem to move and to act ever so gigantically, it is, after all, only an idea in your own mind–a thing thinner and more unsubstantial than the thinnest ether–a thought without any real potency or any real life.

The actual and living God is exactly and perfectly different from such an ideal image. He is infinite, the idea in the mind is definite; He is omnipotent, the idea in the mind is impotent to create so much as a single grain of dust; He is omniscient, the idea in the mind knows nothing and thinks nothing excepting such knowledges and thoughts that the man’s imagination is pleased to place within its empty skull. He, the Ancient of Days, exists forever and forever; the idea in the mind continues to live only so long as we kneel to pray, and it vanishes instantly we arise from our knees and go about our earthly business. He is the fountain-head of all human intelligence, and has Himself created the rationality of man; that idea of Him–it crumbles and dissolves away before a five-minute argument with any clever sceptic or agnostic who chooses to assault it with the hard, round stones of reasoning and of fact. He, the Heavenly Father, is the fountain of all life; that idea of Him–what power has it to give life to anything? Can it–such an ethereal nothing, the creation of the mind itself–lift up the soul into a resurrection of life when the body of flesh shall grow cold and die? Can it illuminate that black and empty abyss of death with any radiance of life? What power has it to turn aside those floods of doubt which, now and then, bursting their bonds, sweep down upon and overflow the soul, drowning out even the faint little spark of hope which we all so carefully cherish. That image, like the image of the man-hero, is dead and impotent excepting as the man’s own imagination makes it living and potential. Pray to your imaginary God in such times of black terror, and see how little that empty image can help and aid you. It is as powerless to save you from that flood of doubt as the African’s fetich of wood is impotent to save him from the deluge of water that bursts upon and overflows the world about him. When that black and awful torrent–the fear of annihilation–sweeps down upon the man, it, the image, is torn away from his grasp like a dead fragment of wood and is swept away and gone, leaving him to struggle alone and unaided in the overwhelming flood.

And yet man continues to worship this dead, self-created image. He says that God has this imagined attribute and that imagined attribute; that He thinks and feels thus and so, and does this and the other thing, now being angry and now pleased. But, after all, these things belong only to the image in the mind. What God really thinks and feels and intends is beyond the understanding of the man whom He has created.

Why does man worship an image instead of the reality? It is easy to see why he does so. He worships that image, because in worshipping it he worships himself, it being a part of himself. He loves that image because he himself has made it, and because he loves all the things of his own creation. He is willing to do the supposed mandates of that self-created fetich (provided they are not too difficult of performance), because those mandates spring fundamentally from his own imagination, and because he likes to do as he himself wills to do.

Just so we worship, not the real Christ, but an imagined Christ that is not alive.

Christ entered into the city upon Palm Sunday.

This is the way we love to imagine that vast and tremendous fact–the final entrance of divinely human truth into the citadel of life.

We love to think of Him as a white-robed, majestic figure crowned with glory, with smooth hair and shining face–mild, benignant, exalted. We love to picture to ourselves how young men and maidens and little children ran before His coming and spread their garments or fragrant branches of trees in His triumphal way, shouting with multitudinous cadence, “Hosannah in the highest!” How splendid it is to think thus of the King of Glory coming into His city of holiness. Thus imagined, it is a grand and beautiful picture, and we wonder how those scribes and pharisees, those priests and Levites, blinded with their own wickedness, should not have seen the splendor of it all–should have denied and crucified One who came thus gloriously into their city.

But in so depicting that divine coming we bow in submission, not to the living fact, but to a picture of that fact which we ourselves have created in the imagination. That is how we would have liked to see the Messiah of Jehovah-God come into His glory. That is how we would have arranged it if we had had the shaping of events, and we can bow before that image easily enough. But, alas! for us it is not the way in which He really comes. For God does not shape His events as we would have them shaped; He shapes them exactly different.

Read for yourself the truth as it stands written in the Divine Word of Jehovah-God, and then ask your own heart whether you would not have rejected Him as the scribes and pharisees of that day rejected Him.

For in the actuality of fact there could have been and there was no such glory of coming. That which the intelligent, thoughtful men of that day saw was, apparently, a common man, a journeyman carpenter, travel-stained, weary, footsore, riding upon a shaggy little ass, surrounded by a knot of rough fishermen and followed by a turbulent multitude gathered from the highways and the byways. For He had chosen for His associates, not the good and the virtuous, the reputable and the law-abiding citizen; He had chosen the harlot, the publican, the sinner, the outcast. For He proclaimed with His own lips that He was the Saviour of the sinners and not of the righteous. Read for yourself of the multitude that followed Him! How they stripped the clothes from their backs to throw in His path; how they rent and tore the branches from the trees, mutilating and dismembering God’s created, shady things, they knew not why. That mob believed that He was coming to overthrow existing law and order, so that the rich and the powerful might be cast down, and that they, the poor and the destitute, might be set up in their stead. They believed (for He had demonstrated it to them) that He possessed a supernatural power to perform miracles, and that He could and would use that power to overturn existing order. For did He Himself not say with His own very lips that He could overturn the Temple of the Lord and could build it up again in three days. Such was the ignorant mob that shouted and raved when He entered the city riding on an ass. They expected to see something supernatural done, and, when He showed no miracles, they presently, in a day or two, turned against Him like wild beasts and gave Him over to mortal agony and death. Such as that was the crowd that really followed Him, and it was not beautiful and exalted.

There the story stands written in the Book of Books–a Gospel so divine that every single word–yea, every jot and tittle written within it–is holy. There it stands terrible and stern for us scribes and pharisees of intelligent respectability to read. We cannot accept it in its reality; for even now we would deny it as we, scribes and pharisees, priests and Levites, did of old. For, alas! we cannot accept Him in His reality.

We pharisees of old preferred to see their Messiah come according to their idea of order and of righteousness, and when He did not come thus, we could not acknowledge Him. We of to-day build up a beautiful picture of Him, but, in reality, we would deny and revile the living fact as we did before. It could not be otherwise, for God has made us as we are.

You of to-day ought not to blame us because we were afraid when we beheld that Christ of publicans and sinners bursting into our Temple, and, with fury in His voice and in His aspect, thrash those who sat there upon business doing no harm. What wonder when we heard Him say He could tear down our beautiful Temple (the fruit of so much reverential labor) and build it up again in three days–what wonder that we should have been afraid lest the mob, taking Him at His word, should rend and tear down all our sacred things with an insane fury. What wonder that Bishop Caiaphas, seeing all the terrors of violence that threatened the peace of the community, should have said: “It is better that this one Man should perish rather than all of us should die.”

We scribes and pharisees–we are the bulwarks of law and order and of existing religion. Let Christ come to-day and we would crucify Him–if the law allowed us to do so–just as we scribes and pharisees did nineteen hundred years ago. For is it not better, indeed, that one man should die rather than that all existing order should be overturned, and that law and religion should perish?

Go ye down, scribes and pharisees, into the secret, hidden places of your city where the immortal and living image of God lies with its face in the dust of humility. There alone you will find the living Christ, and if you, finding Him in His rags and poverty, can truly take Him by the hand and lift Him up, then will He also raise you up into a life that shall be everlasting. For there is no other God of humanity than that poor and lowly image–no, not in heaven or on the earth or in the abyss beneath the earth.

For out of the dust of misery and of sin He lifts the lowly up and makes him new so that in a life hereafter he shall shine with a glory that is of God’s creating, and not of man’s.

He who has ears to hear let him hear, let him hear; only God be merciful to us poor hypocrites and sinners, who deny His living presence. Happy, indeed, is it for us that His mercy is infinite and endures forever, else we would perish in our own pride of lawfulness and virtue, and be forever lost to any hope of salvation.