206 The Awakening of Personality [CH. 



failure; in the Garden came that choice again, when the 

 bitter cup was already at His lips. And we cannot 

 doubt that daily and hourly conflicts were His lot, as 

 Man, throughout His life on earth. 



So much for facts. But can we avoid the belief that, 

 in an immanent God Who is Love, the suffering of evo- 

 lution, the constant misdirection of progress, must en- 

 tail a constant renewal of the will to endure, and that 

 things must not be set temporarily right, eternally 

 wrong, by a fiat of creative Power? Can Love see and 

 share suffering, weigh immediate loss against ultimate 

 gain, and yet not renew decisions constantly? 



One cannot say too strongly how fatal any idea that 

 raises a real barrier between the nature and experience 

 of men and God must be to any solution of the Christian 

 problems. Unless men are able to become like God alto- 

 gether, they cannot be perfectly united with Him ; unless 

 God meant to make this possible, there is no conceivable 

 purpose in the Incarnation; unless personality means 

 altogether the same for God as for man, divine Person- 

 ality has no real meaning for us; it becomes merely a 

 term to cover ignorance. Unless our experience of pro- 

 cess is one with God's, our hope of immortality becomes 

 dim to vanishing; and, further, the hope of finding 

 meaning in the Universe becomes illusory. 



While this matter is before our minds it may be well 

 to deal with an allied point. A quotation from Platt's 

 Immanence and Christian Thought will perhaps make 

 the matter at issue clear. "It is evident that when He 

 creates free spirits and preserves their personality 

 sacred as the finite likeness of His own, neither coercing 

 nor ignoring it, God limits Himself in a way He does not 

 when He creates and directs without let or hindrance 

 the physical universe. Here finiteness in a true sense is 

 assumed by God 1 ." Such a statement taken by itself 



1 Platt, Immanence and Christian Thought, p. 243. The criticism 



