322 MAN AND GOD. 



theism is that it stopped in the middle of this 

 process. The tribal God of the Hebrews was 

 indeed exalted into the absolute Creator of all 

 things, but, either from lack of philosophy, or from 

 the intensity of their conception of personality, they 

 yet illogically retained the attributes of personality, 

 goodness, wisdom, consciousness, etc. Hence there 

 was from the first an irreconcilable conflict between 

 the discordant elements of personality and of pan- 

 theism, which could be palliated by various exped- 

 ients, but never transcended, and which has been 

 passed on from Judaism to Christianity and Mo- 

 hammedanism. 



And while, with the aid of a personal Devil and 

 a personal Redeemer, the personal element in our 

 monotheism has received more popular emphasis, 

 the more philosophic theologians have shown a 

 constant tendency to lapse into pantheism. And 

 so religious philosophy has varied through all 

 shades of opinion, from Pantheism and the confines 

 of Atheism to those of Dualism and Manichaeism, 

 without ever arriving at consistency. Nor was it 

 possible to arrive at consistency without sacrificing 

 elements which seemed indispensable. To have 

 renounced the pantheistic side of monotheism would 

 have been to defy, not so much philosophy — which 

 at that time at least was largely dualistic, and 

 subsequently accepted its doctrine of the Infinite 

 largely from religion — but the popular prejudice 

 which regarded infinity as the ideal of magnitude 

 {cp. ch. ix. § 2), and could not distinguish between 

 creation out of Aristotle's *' formless matter " and 

 creation out of nothing. To have abandoned the 

 personal elements would have been still more fatal. 

 It was by finiteness and limitation that God was 



