God, who is Love, the Father of Love, is the son of love in us. There
are men of a facile and external habit of mind, slaves of reason, that
reason which externalizes us, who think it a shrewd comment to say that
so far from God having made man in His image and likeness, it is rather
man who has made his gods or his God in his own image and likeness,[41]
and so superficial are they that they do not pause to consider that if
the second of these propositions be true, as in fact it is, it is owing
to the fact that the first is not less true. God and man, in effect,
mutually create one another; God creates or reveals Himself in man and
man creates himself in God. God is His own maker, _Deus ipse se facit_,
said Lactantius (_Divinarum Institutionum_, ii., 8), and we may say that
He is making Himself continually both in man and by man. And if each of
us, impelled by his love, by his hunger for divinity, creates for
himself an image of God according to his own desire, and if according to
His desire God creates Himself for each of us, then there is a
collective, social, human God, the resultant of all the human
imaginations that imagine Him. For God is and reveals Himself in
collectivity. And God is the richest and most personal of human
conceptions.
The Master of divinity has bidden us be perfect as our Father who is in
heaven is perfect (Matt. v. 48), and in the sphere of thought and
feeling our perfection consists in the zeal with which we endeavour to
equate our imagination with the total imagination of the humanity of
which in God we form a part.
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