CHAP. XIII.] CONSEQUENCES. 381 



may, by her good aspirations and volitions, be repeatedly 

 performing mental acts compared with \vhich the discovery 

 by Newton of the law of gravitation is as nothing. 



Again, in free-will and morality, we have that which 

 cannot be the result of mere brute inheritance. Conceptions 

 of time and space may be plausibly represented as structural 

 results of a practically infinite brute ancestry which has 

 been submitted to conditions of time and space, but at any 

 rate such ancestry was never submitted to conditions of 

 moral responsibility. Thus the recognition of the human 

 will renders absurd the conception that man can have 

 developed from a brute. 



III. We come now to the last and supremely important of 

 the many consequences resulting from recent contro 

 versies we mean the vividness with which they force 

 on the many a recognition of the awful, the unapproachable 

 majesty of God under the foolish term of &quot; the Unknowable.&quot; 

 Of course there is nothing said upon this subject by Mr. 

 Spencer, or any other writer, which has not been said scores 

 of times by mediaeval and other theologians. It is somewhat 

 amusing to read Mr. Spencer s objection to the term &quot;per 

 sonality,&quot; as applied to God, because &quot; inadequate and Mow, 

 rather than above, the unspeakable reality &quot; as if every tyro 

 in theology did not know, as has been shown, that the 

 common teaching of the Church is that not even &quot; being &quot; 

 can be predicated univocally of God and of any creature, and 

 as if the term liyperliypostasis was not a familiar one to 

 denote the absolute personality as distinguished from every 

 dependent one. Yet it is none the less true that grossly 

 inadequate and absurdly anthropomorphic conceptions of 

 God are widely spread, and that the incautious and inac 

 curate language of popular pious writers is likely to spread 

 further and deeper such grossness and absurdity. Of course, 

 after all, the difference between our highest attainable con 

 ception of God and that of the rudest boor is as nothino- 

 compared with the difference between that highest concep 

 tion and the Divine reality. Nevertheless, quoad nos, it is a 



