Page:You Gentiles (1924) by Maurice Samuel 1895-1972.djvu/71

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Gods

in our feelings towards him, is an experience which you are too proud to share. Most of our prayers are helpless repetitions of our helplessness, the stammerings of a child overwhelmed, overmastered, by contemplation of the supreme Unity. You cannot pray thus: at no time, even in the presence of the gods, do you lose your self-possession, your dignity. You too pray, but your prayers, compared with ours, are requests. Your offers of service to Christ the God are the offers of a vassal to a powerful superior. Our prayers, too, beg something, but requests of ours are folded in an abasement, a humility which would be revolting to you.

Hence it is that you have never, in these many centuries of Christianity, produced utterances like those of the prophets, of Job and of David. Your inspirations come from other sources, not from the one source. Your gods are essentially gods of the world, not of the universe. The universal aspect of divinity, its attributes of infinity and eternity, its

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