on me my poor little human happiness will be wrecked like a skiff in a
cyclone." This is not an exaggeration. It is the secret mental attitude
of perhaps ninety percent of those Caucasians who believe in a God of
any kind. Their root-conviction is that if God would only let them alone
they would get along well enough; but as a terrible avenging spirit,
like the Fury or the Nemesis of the ancients, he is always tracking them
down. The aversion from God so noticeable in the mind of to-day is, I
venture to think, chiefly inspired by the instinct to get away from, or
to hide from, the pursuit of this Avenger.



VI


And in a measure this impulse to flight can be understood. I can
understand that common-sense men should be cold toward the Caucasian
God, and that they should even renounce and denounce him. I will go so
far as to say that I can more easily understand the atheist than I can
many of my own friends who pathetically try to love and adore their
capricious un-Christlike Deity. To my certain knowledge many of them are
doing it against their own natural and better instincts, because they
dare not forsake the tradition in which they have been dyed. "I try to
love God and I can't," has been said to me many a time by conscientious
people who felt that the fault must lie in themselves. There was no
fault in themselves. If their God could have been loved they would have
loved him.