Le Bon Dieu

God has become to many of us an easy-going, good-natured, indulgent parent who can be coaxed and wheedled and cajoled by his children, and who can deny them nothing--le bon Dieu of the Frenchman.

We have become "familiar" with God; we are on "easy terms" with Him; we speak to Him and about Him as we would to and about our next-door neighbor. We scarcely know what it means to worship God acceptably "with reverence and godly awe." And with our shallow and emasculated ideas of God we get a shallowness and superficiality and flippancy in our religious life.
--John Daniel Jones