294 
which, the word personality is the best expression, or we 
must implicitly deny them. We must either speak of God 
as “ He ” or we must speak of Him as “ It,” that is, in 
spite of all Mr. Arnold may say to the contrary, we must 
either give the impression to those to whom we speak of 
Him, that God is a Person, or that God is a thing; that He 
is something higher than ourselves, to which we instinctively 
look up, or that it is something of an inferior order of being 
to ourselves, on which we as instinctively look down. For 
complain as we may of the notion of limitation attached to 
the word personality, it at least serves to bring before us 
the higher and nobler qualities of our humanity. Personality 
implies the idea of a Free Agent, who acts, not from blind 
necessity, but by the counsel of His own will, which in God's 
case operates, we believe, in accordance with the dictates of 
Eternal Reason. And when we apply the term to God, we 
mean also to say that He is capable of those moral attri- 
butes of love, pity, care, guardianship, providence, which are 
infinitely higher than the mere mechanical action of an 
impersonal power. Tell me that my idea of a Personal God 
is anthropopathic, and I reply that we can only approach to 
the idea of God by contemplating the noblest attributes of 
the noblest being we know.* Tell me that God is infinite, 
and that He, therefore, is incapable of being conceived by 
man, and I reply that space, too, is infinite, but that this 
does not prevent me from knowing that it is peopled with 
stars and star dust, and that the part of it within my ken 
is capable of being conceived, and is governed by the simplest 
and most intelligible of laws. Tell me that the God of our 
Thirty-nine Articles binds me to regard God as “without 
passions,” and I reply that the attitude towards His creatures 
implied by any one of the words I have just used, is possible 
without the emotions which in us finite beings are usually 
supposed to attend it, and that the emotions of our finite 
humanity presuppose something in the Infinite to correspond 
to them. 
29. And, lastly, I would observe that God is repre- 
sented to us throughout Scripture as our Father, as one to 
Whom prayer can be addressed, and Who will condescend 
* Forgetting that superstition supposes a real and undeniable desire in 
human nature, the spirit of Deism casts away from it all notions of God’s 
anger, judgments, or punishments, as representations arising only from the 
limited nature of the human understanding. — Ncander, Church History, v ol. i. 
Introduction. 
