116 THE RECONCILIATION. 



ideas must be abandoned as futile imaginations, may realize 

 to us more fully than any other course, the greatness of 

 that which we strive to grasp. Such efforts and fail- 

 ures may serve to maintain in our minds a due 

 sense of the incommensurable difference between the Con- 

 ditioned and the Unconditioned. By continually seeking 

 to know and being continually thrown back with a deepened 

 conviction of the impossibility of knowing, we may keep 

 alive the consciousness that it is alike our highest wisdom 

 and our highest duty to regard that through which all things 

 exist as The Unknowable. 



§ 32. An immense majority will refuse with more or 

 less of indignation, a belief seeming to them so shadowy and 

 indefinite. Having always embodied the Ultimate Cause so 

 far as was needful to its mental realization, they must neces- 

 sarily resent the substitution of an Ultimate Cause which 

 cannot be mentally realized at all. " You offer us," they 

 say, " an unthinkable abstraction in place of a Being to- 

 wards whom we may entertain definite feelings. Though 

 we are told that the Absolute is real, yet since we are not al- 

 lowed to conceive it, it might as well be a pure negation. In- 

 stead of a Power which we can regard as having some sym- 

 pathy with us, you would have us contemplate a Power to 

 which no emotion whatever can be ascribed. And so we are 

 to be deprived of the very substance of our faith." 



This kind of protest of necessity accompanies every 

 change from a lower creed to a higher. The belief in a com- 

 munity of nature between himself and the object of his 

 worship, has always been to man a satisfactory one ; and he 

 has always accepted with reluctance those successively less 

 concrete conceptions which have been forced upon him. 

 Doubtless, in all times and places, it has consoled the barba- 

 rian to think of his deities as so exactly like himself in na- 

 ture, that they could be bribed by offerings of food ; and the 

 assurance that deities could not be so propitiated, must have 



