ON THE DEVELOPED CONCEPTION OF GOD. 857 



notion, and may refuse it for a time ; but in the end she 

 will accept it. And there are evident proofs, notwith- 

 standing a tacit agreement to ignore the fact and an unwill- 

 ingness to acknowledge it, that even the most dogmatic 

 Churches can, with time, slowly change and accommodate 

 their theological conceptions. Development is possible 

 even within the oldest and most dogmatic Christian 

 Church, notwithstanding the very narrow range allowed 

 for it by the dogma of infallibility. The advance of 

 knowledge and the wider vision of truth can still infuse 

 fresh life into the old religious doctrines ; they can still 

 " wake a soul under the ribs of death," to which, of them- 

 selves, petrified scholastic propositions and metaphysical 

 dogmas respecting God so surely tend. And there is no 

 manner of doubt that the imperative necessity is being 

 felt and silently accepted by all theologies desirous of 

 preserving a continued life, of reshaping their conceptions 

 of the Creator, His ways and works, more in accordance 

 with the great revelation vouchsafed to men through the 

 scientific discoveries of the past three hundred years. 



In particular, this conception of God will not suit the 

 theology that insists on ascribing to Him the attributes, 

 -at once metaphysical and specially human, of personality 

 and consciousness ; the former being the precise one that 

 it is so difficult to get any clear conception of even in 

 ourselves, and both, especially consciousness, being, as 

 Fichte and other philosophers have irrefutably demon- 

 strated, inapplicable and directly contradictory to the 

 notion of an Absolute Being. For consciousness and 

 personality, whatever else they imply, clearly imply the 

 notion of limits and conditions, neither of which can, 

 without contradiction, be applied to an absolute and 

 unconditioned Being ; to a transcendent, tremendous, and 

 universal Power, the chief fact in our knowledge of 



