[E INFINITE r 



brought near to the rehgious consciousness ; it was 

 the personaHty of God which suppHed the real 

 motive force of the rehorious emotions. For where- 

 as many reHgions have failed because they did not 

 render God human enough, the success of our own 

 fis an eloquent example that no religion can> ever 

 make God too human. Accordingly, it was felt that 

 if the personality of God were lost, all. would be 

 [lost, nothing would be left that would be: able or 

 [desirable to explain the world. And so it was 

 felt to be better to assert the personality of God 

 ;as an irrational and incomprehensible dogma of 

 faith than to annihilate religion in the abyss of 

 [pantheism. And we may trace in this the work- 

 ing also of the feeling that the personality of God 

 embodied a truth which could not as yet be stated 

 in set terms, the working of the faitb which pre- 

 serves the truth until it grows great and prevails. 

 Thus the contradictions of monotheism in the past 

 have preserved the doctrine of the divine person- 

 ality, which would otherwise have been merged in 

 pantheism, have preserved a truth which the earliest 

 stage in the development of religious consciousness 

 instinctively grasped, but which the spiral of the 

 line of progress subsequently obscured. 



But the merits of monotheism in the past are no 

 reason why we should for ever acquiesce in its 

 failure to find a solution : it is neither prudent nor 

 reasonable to regard the contradiction as final. And 

 least of all is it feasible in a crisis like the present. 

 The incomprehensible has passed from the lan- 

 guage of religion to that of irreligion, and by a 

 Nemesis not wholly undeserved, theology is now 

 being devoured by a phantom of its own creation — 

 the Unknowable. The traditional monotheism has 



