RATIONALISM AND IDEA OF GOD 217 



from other religions envisaging an omnipotent personal 

 God, do not affect the essential point at issue.) 

 Further, he grants petitions, reveals himself to certain 

 chosen persons, and is enthroned in a somewhat 

 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 showing 

 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 

 upheld. A personal creation of the world, in any 

 reasonable 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 

 insight which the last half-century has given us, 

 miracles have ceased to be miracles, and have become 



