l8 MODERN DIFFICULTIES 



posed to acquiesce in mystery are being led by their 

 efforts to solve the problem of personality into what 

 in reality is an anti-theistic position. The combined 

 influence of pantheistic idealism and agnosticism causes 

 many to regard the conception of divine personaHty as 

 hopelessly and misleadingly anthropomorphic. Some 

 are trying to substitute the supra-personal for the 

 personal, which is as if we should substitute the supra- 

 highest for the highest. No term is adequate to de- 

 scribe the Supreme Being; but no sound thinker either 

 forgets this or conceives of God as limited by the finite 

 connotations of the terms by which His attributes are 

 symbolized. To call God personal is to insist that He 

 is not inferior to His creatures, and to deny that He is 

 personal is to nullify the validity of all religious and 

 moral truths and principles. And right here lies the 

 real fallacy of every form of pantheistic immanation- 

 ism. No view of things which either disregards, ex- 

 plains away, or nullifies the facts of religious and moral 

 experience can be accepted as either adequate or true. 

 The proposition that God is personal, and other in 

 being than His creatures, is the fundamental postulate 

 of all religion and morality. That God is immanent 

 we must believe, but every form of assertion of this 

 truth which fails to leave room for an insistence upon 

 His transcendence and personal control of all things 

 is anti-Christian in its logic.^ 



1 On pantheism, see Flint, Anti-theistic Theories, Lees. IX, X; 

 Fraser, Philos. of Theism, pp. 76-103; Liddon, Some Elements of 

 Religion, pp. 59-66; Christlieb, Modern Doubt, pp. 161-190. Cf. the 

 author's Being and Attributes of God, ch. ix. § 5. 



