430 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



function of creation, taken literally, is unessential to this 

 moral perfection of God, but that it is in hopeless con- 

 tradiction with it ; and that the obscurely felt fact of this 

 contradiction, a feeling growing ever more clear as the 

 Christian consciousness grows more sure of itself, is at the 

 bottom of all that restlessness in the region of Christian 

 theology which we all know so well, and which is the char- 

 acteristic fact in the later Christian world. 



To remove the name of God from the clarified and puri- 

 fied conception of the eternal Ideal Type would be to do 

 violence, inexcusable affront, to the deepest and truest ele- 

 ment in the historic religious consciousness. I feel the 

 strongest assurance that ray new interpretation of the name 

 of God is the genuine fulfilment of the highest and pro- 

 foundest prescience in the historic religious life. What 

 offends us in the Spinozistic or other monistic appropria- 

 tions of the name "God" is the evident absence from their 

 Absolute of all the essential moral qualities. In /hese it is 

 that true Deity Ues, and all God's metaphysical attributes 

 must be keyed up to them ; not one of these " natural " 

 attributes dare be construed in any way that conflicts with 

 the eternal moral essence. If they have been so construed 

 historically (as indeed they have), genuine theology requires 

 that the conception of God shall be reheved of these errors, 

 in order that God's nature may stand revealed as it is in 

 its own reality. 



