not to distinguish God, is to become, what I have called elsewhere, a personal autocrat; in other words, a practical atheist. To distinguish one's self sharply from God, without breaking the link which unites us; to constitute one's self one's own centre, without forgetting that God is the centre of all personalities, such is the problem. God is the sun around Whom all creatures revolve, but each revolves around his own axis. Break the solar attraction, and he shoots into infinite and outer darkness.

To distinguish one's self from God, and to separate one's self from Him, are two very different things.

The only manner of distinguishing without separating is to will that God should be, and to will one's self to be,but not apart from God, but for Him—that is, to love God.

Thus, the law we seek, the manner in which the creature can preserve its liberty whilst manifesting it, is the love of God. God loves us, and He is our model. The supreme law is a reflexion of the supreme fact. Love is the rule of rules, the key to all mysteries. To obey God is to realize our liberty, and to obey God is to love Him.

In love, the two terms, the subject and the object of love, are perfectly distinct, though they mutually interpenetrate. By loving God, the creature constitutes itself in its complete personality, as the idea of liberty requires, without for a moment forgetting the existence of God on one side, and the existence of itself on the other.

Before advancing to the third hypothesis of Christianity, let us briefly recapitulate our argument.

The motive of creation cannot be found in the nature of the Absolute, for an inherent motive would destroy the idea of the liberty of the Absolute.

The motive must therefore be sought in the possible creature. We find in this idea, which is the idea of love,

the only reason which could induce a perfect being to

create.

The power, wisdom, and goodness of God exhibit themselves in Creation, but He does not create with the intention of manifesting His power, wisdom, and goodness; His motive is not to acquire a superfluous glory, but to make another being happy. But happiness is the manifestation of well-being, and God wills the well-being of His creature, and that creature knows when it is accomplishing the will of God when it feels happy.

The perfection of well-being is to love God; the condition of well-being is liberty.

Consequently the creature is primitively free. It is therefore primitively indetermined; it is called to compose its own destiny, to produce its own nature or to fix its relation to God, which is the same thing; for its nature and its destiny depend wholly on the relation in which it stands towards God.

It is indetermined, but the indetermination is not absolute, since its creation is not purposeless.

Being free, it may become what it will, but it ought to become what God wills it; that is, the liberty which it has potentially it should make effective. It can only make this effective by willing itself, that is its liberty, and it can only fulfil its liberty and establish its personality by maintaining its relation to God.

The act of will constitutes the personality of the creature. Personality is, in fact, only a free being emphasizing and recognizing itself as such. Every man makes his own personality, he is to that extent his own creator. Personality is not an attribute, but an act of force.

When the creature takes full possession of the liberty it has received it becomes a person. This decisive act may

be accomplished in many ways. But this act is what God wills, for it is what constitutes the well-being of the creature.

But this cannot take place apart from God. The wellbeing of the creature can only be effected by recognition of God and by maintaining union with Him by love. To be, and to be for itself, the creature must distinguish itself from God by an act which unites it to Him. This act is love.

By the love of the creature for its Creator, all the problems of reason are resolved. The work of creation is completed. God, the Absolute, Who, by His essence, is All, abases Himself, by creation, to the sphere of relations; He consents to be not-All, that He may re-become All by the act of His creature.

CHAPTER VII

THE HYPOTHESIS OF THE INCARNATION

ἵνα τοὺς δυο κτίσῃ ἐν ἑαυτῷ εἰς ἕνα καινὸν ἄνθρωπον, ποιῶν εἰρήνην.
-EPH. ii. 15.

The difficulty of obtaining a rational idea of God-The idea traverses two stages, one constructive, the other destructive-The first process, the idealizing of God-The second process, the emancipation of the idea from all relations—The true rational idea of God one of negation—The rational idea opposed to the Ideal-Are philosophy and religion necessarily antagonistic?-The hypothesis of the Incarnation conciliates both Christ is the Absolute and the Ideal-conciliates reason and sentiment-Belief and Reason necessary to one another-No system of thought without a postulate-The postulate of the Incarnation may be turned into a demonstration-Elucidation of the difficulty of identifying the Absolute with the Ideal—and of considering God as a Person.

WE

E have seen that man cannot realize his personality, and obtain his liberty in its entirety, except on the condition of acknowledging and loving God.

To acknowledge God he must make an act of will; to love God he must make an act of sentiment or of faith.

Here we encounter a difficulty which has been already indicated. There is a contradiction between the idea of God formed by the reason, and the idea of God desired by the heart. When Simonides was asked by King Hiero to define God, he asked a day to consider; at the end of that day, instead of giving his answer, he demanded two more, and when these were expired, he requested four; "for,"

said he, “the more I consider the subject, the more I find the difficulties double upon me.”

These difficulties arise from the rational idea of God having to traverse two stages, very different, the first constructive, the latter destructive.

Let us consider the first process.

Our conception of God being derived from ourselves and the objects affecting us, we can form no idea except one made up of materials furnished by our experience and reflection. Therefore we select whatever powers and qualities we find amongst ourselves, and consider to be most commendable; we separate them from everything gross, material and imperfect, and heighten them to the utmost imaginable pitch;-the aggregate of all these makes up our first rational conception of God.

Consequently our idea of the Deity is that of the archetype of our own minds.

And as we perceive that virtue assumes a multitude of diverse forms, this variety discovered in intelligent beings convinces us that the most perfect Being is He who unites in Himself the greatest number, or the sum total, of all these perfections. By generalization of this sort, Plato, Descartes and Fenelon were led to the most comprehensive idea of God as the focus of all perfections of which His creatures are radiations.

But this conception of God is entirely humanistic. To say that He is infinitely powerful, infinitely wise, infinitely just, infinitely holy, is but the raising of human qualities to the nth power.

These qualities are simply inconceivable apart from the existence of the world and man. If we give Him these qualities, save for the sake of bringing His existence within the scope of our faculties, we must allow that before the world