are rational. Or starting from the existence of the world and the facts of human nature, I can argue up to it.

My course, in the first five chapters, has been to shew from the constitution of man and his nature that such a dogma is essential to him. In the sequel I shall argue from the Incarnation to its logical consequences.

But before proceeding with my argument, I wish to say a few words which may remove some of the difficulties besetting the conciliation of the rational idea of God, and the sentimental Ideal.

According to the hypothesis Christ harmonizes both; that is, in Him both are true.

The rational conception of God is that He is; nothing more. To give Him an attribute is to make Him a relative God.

The sentimental conception of God is that He is the perfection of relations; the tendency of sentimentalism is to deny that He is absolute.

Both are true and both are false; both are true in their positive assertions, both are false in their negations.

Before the world was, God was the Absolute, inconceivable save as being. We cannot attribute to Him any quality, for qualities are inconceivable apart from matter.

Properly speaking, the name of God is not to be given. to the Absolute before creation; the Absolute is the only philosophical name admissible, and that is unsatisfactory, for it is negative; but the idea of God before matter was must be incomprehensible by material beings.

This transcendent principle, superior to the world and to all thought, is the fixed, immanent, immutable Being, force in vacuum, unrealized, unrevealed.

By love, the Absolute calls the world into being, and becomes God, that is-let me be clearly understood--He is

at once absolute and relative, and as relative He is God, and clothes Himself in attributes. Towards creation He is good, wise, just; nay, the perfection of goodness, wisdom and justice, the Ideal of the heart.

The creation is the first step, the Incarnation is the second. The first leads necessarily to the second; it is the passage from relations simple to relations perfect; it is the bringing within the range of man's vision the Divine Personality. I know that the question has been ventilated, whether personality implies limitation, and therefore makes it impossible for the Deity to be a person. It has been asserted that to precise the idea of I-myself is to distinguish one's self from others; and that, as nothing can exist outside of God, God cannot distinguish Himself from other things, and therefore He cannot be personal.

But to this I answer, that our ideas of personality are purely relative. Human thought can only attain God in His relations to the world, and the limits of our knowledge are not the boundaries of reality.

If one wishes to make the personality of God an express philosophical proposition, without abandoning the idea of personality being necessarily relative, one may say that God constituted Himself a person by the act of creation. Those who deny the divine personality probably deny

creation.

God is not a person in the human sense, which is exclusive of other personalities. He is immutable, all-inclusive, absolutely free, intelligent and loving, that is, He is personal, because the world exists, and by its existence He becomes relative.

Thus, the proposition that every personality is limited and relative does not exclude the Divine personality. But this thesis, taken in itself, is very contestable; it reposes

H

on a confusion of the idea of universality, infinity and absolutism, and on an abuse of the facts of conscience.

Man, it is quite true, only recognizes himself as a person by excluding other persons; but it does not follow that this relation is essential to personality. One might say with the same right that personality implies conscience of a body, which is true in the same sense.

There is therefore no rational motive for contesting the Divine personality.

CHAPTER VIII

THE DOGMA OF MEDIATION

"Versteh! Unendliches und Endliches, das dir scheint

So unvereinbar, ist durch Eines doch vereint." —RUCKERT.

The advantage of the Hegelian trichotomy-dread of Hegelianism-unreasonable-Hegel's method destined to reconcile philosophy to religionThe finite and the infinite supposed to be irreconcileable-The Incarnation consequently rejected as absurd-The true idea of the infinite-of space and time-The ideas of space and time inapplicable to Godrelative only-The Word the equation between the Infinite and the finite-He is the Mediator as well.

THE

HE Hegelian method has this paramount advantage, that it complements all other philosophical systems. If we establish the reality of the phenomenal, material and finite world, we establish at the same time its opposite, the super-phenomenal, immaterial and infinite, and also the link, man, touching simultaneously the material and the immaterial. If we start from man, his vague consciousness of the supernatural and his vivid apprehension of the natural point him out to be the axis of two moments, leaning unduly to the latter, may be, but nevertheless conscious of the former, and thus establishing the reality of the Boundless and the Bounded.

1 "Understand; infinite and finite, what appears to thee
So irreconcileable, are yet reconciled through One."

If we start from the Absolute, we have at once the opposite, the phenomenal world, and its conciliating, doublefaced moment, man.

Hegelianism has created unnecessary alarm in some religious minds. M. Saisset misunderstands Hegel, and holds him up to scorn. The Père Gratry, one of the most eminent theologians of the Gallican Church, thinks that the mention of his trichotomy is sufficient to entitle him to be called an atheist.2 M. Lewes has fallen into the same mistake. Yet Hegel was himself a Christian, and, in his obscure and uncouth way, he laboured to reconcile his philosophy with Christian dogma. That he did not make himself intelligible is not astonishing to any one familiar with his style; that he failed to perfect the union, was due to his Lutheran prejudices.

Aristotelianism was, in the same way, dreaded as subversive to Christianity. Tertullian called the Stagyrite the patriarch of heretics, and a French council at Paris in 1209 proscribed his writings. Nevertheless, S. Thomas Aquinas mastered his method, and Aristotelianized Christianity.

In like manner, if I am not mistaken, Hegel is destined to play a conspicuous part in the reconciliation of modern thought to the dogma of the Incarnation. He supplies a key to unlock the golden gate which has remained closed to the minds of modern Europe.

It is incorrect to assert, as is done repeatedly, that Hegel lays down the identity of contraries. He teaches that every thesis implies and contains an antithesis and its mediating moment, which is their synthesis. That Hegel

1 Modern Pantheism, vol. ii. treatise 7.

2 Philosophie du Credo, p. 26; Logique, vol. i. p. 194.

3 History of Philosophy, vol. ii. p. 545.