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REMARKS ON THE FOREGOING PAPER ; 
By The Reverend Canon Saumarez Smitu, D.D., Principal of St. Aidan’s 
College, Birkenhead. 
The Honorary Secretary has kindly given me an opportunity of making 
some comments_upon Mr. Collins’s paper, as I was unable to be present at 
its discussion. 
The time at my disposal will prevent me from saying much, but I am glad 
to express my sense of the value of Mr. Collins’s line of thought, and to 
make a few remarks upon one or two of the points suggested for reflective 
argument. I quite agree with the main contentions of the paper, which is 
an interesting, thoughtful, and useful one. Mr. Collins argues that religions 
are not, when historically viewed, a development from ignorance so much as 
a degradation from knowledge; and this argument is equivalent to the 
statement, that an “original revelation” is a more probable 'theory“and 
more correspondent to facts than the theory of mere “natural evolution.” 
The spiritual concept of God was rather an original datwm than a result of 
philosophising effort. The moral idea, z.¢., the consciousness of responsibility, 
is never absent from the earliest religious utterances : and the prevalence of 
sacrificial observances points to a common origin. 
Let me begin by referring to the way in which “anthropomorphism” is 
often used in malam partem, as a term intended to condemn the views of 
those to whom it is applied. Mr. Collins has rightly reminded us that some 
“anthropomorphic” language about God is indispensable. The idea of God 
must be expressed in terms of human existence for human beings, however 
far the actuality of God’s being may transcend the symbolic range of human 
language. And we can certainly use terms about God’s eyes, hands, feet, 
&¢c., without being “anthropomorphites,” who think of God as having the 
shape and form of a man. (“The heaven is my throne, and earth is my 
footstool,” is an anthropomorphic expression, yet the idea is not degrading, 
but sublime.) 
And it should be remembered that the most abstract idea of God is not the 
truest idea. The Duke of Argyll, in his important and very interesting 
book on The Unity of Nature, has some admirable remarks bearing upon’ 
this point. He shows that “anthropomorphism” (which he would prefer 
to call ‘ anthropopsychism”) is a phrase used opprobriously to condemn the 
conception which regards the being of God as to some extent analogous to 
man’s reason, intelligence, and will. But this conception, so far from being 
absurd, is necessary and rational. We cannot describe the processes of 
nature without using “anthropopsychic” langnage. Darwin and Tyndall 
have used it ; and “those who struggle hardest to avoid the language of 
anthropopsychism in the interpretation of nature are compelled to use the 
analogies of our own mental impressions as the only possible exponents of 
