Some men make themselves God,

 Some men make themselves God, without knowing what they are doing. The deity they appeal to is really their deeper, higher self. When they feel God’s approval, it is really their own self-praise. When God reproaches them, it is their own self-rebuke. When they go apart from the world to hold communion with Him, it really is an entrance into their own self-consciousness. To other men some good fellow-man, more or less consciously and completely enlarged into an ideal of humanity, answers the same purpose, and is in reality their God. To still others, a vague presence of a high purpose and tendency felt in everything—Tennyson’s “one increasing purpose,” and Arnold’s “something not ourselves which makes for righteousness.” This fulfils the end and makes the substitute for God. But none of these supply the place of a true Personality outside ourselves, yet infinitely near to us.1 [Note: Phillips Brooks

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