RATIONALISM AND THE IDEA OF GOD 217 



issue.) Further, he grants petitions, reveals himself 

 to certain chosen persons, and is enthroned in a some- 

 what elusive heaven, where he is (or will be after the 

 Day of Judgment — opinions seem to differ somewhat 

 on the subject) surrounded by the immortal souls of 

 the elect. 



Now this view, or any view of God as a personal 

 being, is becoming frankly untenable. The difficulty 

 of understanding the functions of a personal ruler 

 in a universe which the march of knowledge is show- 

 ing us ever more clearly as self-ordered and self- 

 ordering in every minutest detail is becoming more 

 and more apparent. Either a personal God is a ruler 

 without power, or he is the universe. In the former 

 case he becomes a mere fly on the wheel ; in the latter 

 we revert to a frank pantheism, in which the idea 

 of a personal Being can no longer properly be up- 

 held. A personal creation of the world, in any rea- 

 sonable sense of that term, is now meaningless except 

 for a hypothetical creation of the original substance 

 of the cosmos in the first instance. Creation of earth 

 and stars, plants, animals, and man — Darwin swept 

 the last vestiges of that into the waste-paper basket 

 of outworn imaginations, already piled high with the 

 debris of earlier ages. After the psychological in- 

 sight which the last half-century has given us, mir- 

 acles have ceased to be miracles, and have become 

 either delusions, or, more frequently, unusual phe- 

 nomena for which a cause has not yet been found. 

 The immutability of the fundamental laws of matter 



