THEOLOGY AND THE WAR 43 



performance or omission of acts of worship, and by the 

 importunities of individual worshippers. But the very fact 

 that we can conceive such an order of things only makes us 

 more confident that it does not exist. Nor is there any one 

 who really and sincerely maintains that it does. Jesus frankly 

 admitted that the rain falls alike on the just and the unjust, 

 and that the eighteen upon whom the tower of Siloam fell 

 were no worse than their neighbours. The plea of popular 

 theology, that the ways of God are past our finding out, 

 merely gives up the case. Of what use is it to tell us that if 

 we were gods ourselves we would see the absolute justice and 

 beneficence of all that God does or permits to be done ; but 

 that, being purblind mortals, we cannot recognize the perfect 

 beauty of the design which he is working out upon the loom 

 of time, with our life-threads for the warp and woof? Of 

 what use to us is a beauty which we cannot recognize, and 

 which seems to us cruel and insensate ugliness? If it be 

 said that one day our vision will be unsealed, and, from some 

 celestial centre of perspective, we shall view the arabesque in 

 all its glory, the answer is that, if the designer of the pattern 

 could not execute it save through the medium of gigantic 

 horrors like the present war, he had much better have let it 

 alone. Such an episode in the history of our race is totally 

 incompatible with the rule of any being who is at once 

 benevolent and omnipotent as we understand the words ; and 

 to use them in some sense which we admittedly cannot under- 

 stand is simply to talk nonsense. 



It may be said, with some justice, that I am merely 

 applying a very obvious analysis to the anthropomorphism 

 inseparable from every conception of God as a moral agent. 

 The moment we depart from pure pantheism, and attribute 

 to God personality and will, we inevitably create him in our 

 own image ; and any criticism applied to a power so con- 

 ceived is vitiated by the fact that the object criticized is not, 

 and cannot be, the thing itself, but only a symbol of it, on an 

 enormously reduced scale, suited to the limits of our human 

 faculties. Nay, the phrase I have just used, "an enormously 

 reduced scale," is itself tainted with anthropomorphism ; for 

 it implies that there is actually some definite relation between 

 our conception and the thing conceived, like the relation 

 between a map of the world and the world itself; whereas in 

 all probability there is no more resemblance between any 

 man's idea of God and the actual power that sustains the 

 universe than there is between the algebraical symbol x and 



