and theologies is so hard to explain that not much of it gets over to
the masses of those willing to subscribe to it. I refer only to the
impression on the mind of the man in the street; and to the man in the
street God, as he understands Him, is neither a very friendly nor a very
comprehensible element in life. Instead of mitigating fear He adds to
it, not in the Biblical sense of "fearing God," but in that of sheer
animal distrust.



VII


While turning these things over in my mind I got some help from two of
the words most currently in Christian use. I had long known that the
English equivalents of the Latin equivalents of the terms the New
Testament writers used gave but a distorted idea of the original sense;
but I had let that knowledge lie fallow.

The first of these words was Repentance. In these syllables there is
almost no hint of the idea which fell from the evangelistic pen, while
the word has been soaked in emotional and sentimental associations it
was never intended to be mixed with. The _Metanoia_; which painted a
sober, reflective turning of the mind, had been so overcharged with the
dramatic that sober, reflective people could hardly use the expression
any more. Repentance had come to have so strong a gloss of the
hysterical as to be almost discredited by men of common sense. It was a
relief, therefore, to remember that it implied no more than a turning to
God by a process of thought; and that a process of thought would
find Him.