However it came about, and whatever the significance of the fact, man is religious. We are worshiping beings. But it is a commonplace of reflective thought that we do not all worship the same God. It is a far cry from the crude, instinctive, inarticulate worship of the savage, to the reverent, deliberate, awe-inspiring self-dedication of the developed man. Mankind does not all worship the same God. Development is here, as everywhere, the law of God's world. And so the central inquiry of every religious study must be: How did the worshiper conceive his God ? What God did he worship ? For whether he names his God Jove, or Jehovah, or Jesus, we appeal from the name which the worshiper gives to his deity, and we ask what his conception of his deity was while he prayed. Everything in his religion will be relative to that conception. For names are quite as apt to conceal our convictions as to reveal them. This principle is apparent when applied to religious history in general. The savage man has a savage God; the cruel man has a cruel God; the effeminate man has an effeminate God; while the good man everywhere lifts up holy hands to a God who rewards goodness. Pursuing our inquiry further, we may make the same generalization within the limits of Christian thinking. Christendom does not all worship the same God. We do not all hold the same conception of God and of his relation to his universe. The conviction of God is native to our thinking. But the form of our conviction varies with age, education, character, and all that enters into the personal equation. We are developing persons. The units of our thought are for the most part fluid and not fixed. Intelligence is a marvelously complex and ceaselessly unfolding fact, not a selfidentical quantity. From boyhood to manhood we outgrow the old, and put on the new. "When I was a child I thought, spoke, and understood as a child; but when I became a man I put away 428