RATIONALISM AND THE IDEA 

 OF GOD 



NO one who has read Flaubert's Tentation de 

 St. Antoine will be likely to forget that 

 amazing procession of Gods, hundreds 

 upon hundreds, in every diversity of form, defiling 

 past the visionary Saint to topple over into the abyss 

 of nothingness and be for ever destroyed — the doomed 

 and outworn divinities of man's childhood and adol- 

 escence, put away as he came to maturity. * Man 

 created God in his own image,' wrote the irrepressible 

 pen of Voltaire j 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 

 form, endowed this and that God with different 

 qualities. But there is another part which he has 

 not created, which he can only perceive, mould, clothe. 

 The raw material of Divinity and its elemental 



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