RATIONALISM AND THE IDEA 

 OF GOD 



"Du gleichst dem Geist, den du begreifst." 



— Goethe. 



"Nowadays, matters of national defence, of politics, of religion, 

 are still too important for Knowledge, and remain subjects for 

 certitude; that is to say, in them we still prefer the comfort of 

 instinctive belief because we have not learnt adequately to value 

 the capacity to foretell." — W. Trotter. 



NO one who has read Flaubert's Tentation de 

 St. Antoine will be likely to forget that amaz- 

 ing procession of Gods, hundreds upon hun- 

 dreds, in every diversity of form, defiling past the vi- 

 sionary Saint to topple over into the abyss of noth- 

 ingness and be for ever destroyed — the doomed and 

 outworn divinities of man's childhood and adoles- 

 cence, put away as he came to maturity. "Man 

 created God in his own image," wrote the irrepres- 

 sible pen of Voltaire; and if it is not always true that 

 Gods have been in his own image, but also in the 

 image of animals and monsters, of embodied fears 

 and hopes, it is indubitable that man has created 

 God after God, only to throw them on the scrap- 

 heap as he outgrows them, like a child rejecting his 

 old toys for new. 



Indubitable — in a sense; indubitable that he has 

 given each of them their peculiar and characteristic 



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