THE CONFLICT OF THE FINITE AND INFINITE. 313 



that produced the chronic deblHty of faith, and the 

 real obstacle to the practical supremacy of religion. 



§ 3. In pursuance of our practice of starting 

 from the apparently simple and intelligible, but 

 really so confused, conceptions of ordinary thought, 

 we shall examine first the religious conception of 

 God. In the course of that examination it will soon 

 appear that it is a self-contradictory jumble of 

 inconsistent elements, of which those which are 

 practically the most important imply the finiteness 

 of the Deity, and tend in the direction of the 

 doctrine we have propounded, while the others, 

 •which are theoretically more prominent, but might 

 be with great advantage dispensed with in practical 

 religion, would, if carried out consistently, result in 

 philosophic atheism. 



And not only is the combination of human and 

 infinite elements in the conception of God an out- 

 rage upon the human reason, but it leads to no less 

 outrageous consequences from the point of view of 

 human feeling. For by ascribing unlimited power 

 to God, it makes God the author of all evil, and 

 imprisons us in a Hell to escape from which would 

 be rebellion against omnipotence. To be brief, the 

 attribute of Infinity contradicts and neutralizes all 

 the other attributes of God, and makes it impossible 

 to ascribe to the Deity either personality, or con- 

 sciousness, or power, or intelligence, or wisdom, or 

 goodness, or purpose or object in creating the world ; 

 an infinite Deity does not effect a single one of the 

 functions which the religious consciousness demands 

 of its God. 



It is easy to show that every one of the religious 

 attributes must be excluded from an infinite Deity. 

 Thus an infinite God can have neither personality 



