A Personal God | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, Cal. · May 13, 1875

A Personal God.

THERE are many people who hold what are called liberal views of religion, who can no longer pray. They have nobody to pray to since they have drifted away from all belief in the personality of God. Nobody can pray to a law of nature, or a force of nature, or to all the laws and forces of the universe together, if these laws and forces are to him impersonal. They do not hear, they cannot pity; they move on inexorably, and have neither knowledge nor love. If a man who has lost the sense of the personality of God tries to pray, the utterance is all on one side. There can be no response, no communion. Such prayer is a speech made at nothing; and so far an unreality and a pretence, that such praying is scarcely ever done in secret. The men who do not believe in the personality of God, and who yet conform to the custom of prayer, necessarily do their praying in public, where they can be heard by their fellow men.