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other, the one the bestower, the other the recipient, of a sacred trust, and exchange no thought and give no sign of the love which subsists between them?" Yes, and from the other or human side the agnostic position is to be clearly taken as consisting of an unwarrantable arrest of reason's movement. For what right have we to maintain the truth and fact of the Divine Noumenon or Absolute Reality, as something that, though supersensible, lies open to our knowledge and view, and yet to ban all knowledge of the nature or character of said Noumenon? What need is there to give way to the imbecility of a philosophy that rears such unjustifiable barriers to reason or sets such bounds to knowledge, as though the universe were of a kind not to be everywhere penetrable by reason?

We may not here go into the related question of miracle, as the pledge of the reality of this revelation of Deity, further than to say that theistic philosophy has not failed to ponder in its heart the saying of Zeller, that the miraculous is an immediate consequence of theism. No, nor to retain in view the word of Steffens, who, in his philosophy of religion, says that "Christ could not be bound by any condition of nature, His entire significance consisting in this, that He proclaimed to us the unconditional freedom of spirit." Personality, it has been said, will express itself rather "by individual words and deeds" than "by eternal pro

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cesses." Much more will it do so by these than by inanimate laws of gravitation and molecular attraction, since these latter are less in keeping with those analogies of personal life and consciousness which may be corrected in what they teach us as to how God may be worthily conceived, but which may not be abandoned. We do not forget, as has earlier in this chapter been made manifest, how the real personality of God is being imperilled by idealistic evolutionism: it were absurd to think of an immanent Cosmic Consciousness as though it were personal Deity. What other beings of thoroughgoing reality does it recognise? If it cannot, does not, recognise them as personal entities capable of reciprocal relations, wherein is its own essential personality? What psychic acting is there in this Cosmic Immanent Mind leaving to me, to all, the possibilities of real freedom? We maintain that modern science has only more fully disclosed the wisdom, power, and goodness-the thought, will, and feeling-which form the essential manifestations of personality in the Infinite. The scientific realism of our time has certainly tended to cast idealistic evolution, with its treatment of the universe as purely phenomenal, into the background as so far unsatisfactory. It is but just to say, however, that it is precisely in depicting the living process of absolute spirit, and in tracing the inner movements of spiritual activity, that the philosophy of Hegel stands pre-eminent. We

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account it a notable advance in Hegel that the Absolute-the Ding-an-sich-was by him rescued from the shadows of cloudland and made to stand out in its reality, richness, and totality, to our wondering view. For, in his conception of the Absolute, all the actual world-processes of evolution and development are seen to be but externalisations of pure immaterial thought, which, dimly perceived by us, are, on the timeless view, fulfilments of an order that is Divine. But surely our anthropomorphism will have carried us an extraordinary length when it shall lead us to believe that only in the world can the Absolute realise itself, that only in man can it become self-conscious, and that our consciousness is indispensable to the growth and enrichment of the Absolute. A strange Absolute, verily, that is reduced to such a position of virtual dependence! A merely potential Absolute-than Whom there must be higher actuality-can be no God of any thoroughgoing theistic philosophy.

We believe our recent philosophy has indorsed what Franz Hoffmann so well pointed out, as to the personality-pantheism originated by Schelling, and exemplified in Lotze's not very self-consistent personal pantheism, that "if God is personality, the world cannot be His actuality or realisation, because, whilst a person may work and bring works into existence ad extra, He cannot have His own actuality outside; and if the world is the actuality of God, God cannot be personality, because a per

sonal being cannot be constituted by an infinitude of transient unconscious and conscious existences." By M. Saisset and others it has been rendered more manifest how the personality of God is maintained by pantheism only and always at the expense of personality in man, owing to its false emphasis or exclusive stress on the Divine term or form of personality. Not without satisfaction has recent philosophical theism found that expounder of late Spencerianism, John Fiske, say in his Idea of God' that "the final conclusion is, that we must not say that God is Force,' since such a phrase inevitably calls up those pantheistic notions of blind necessity which it is my desire to avoid; but, always bearing in mind the symbolic character of the words, we may say that 'God is spirit.' How my belief in the personality of God could be more strongly expressed without entirely deserting the language of modern philosophy and taking refuge in pure mythology, I am unable to see." We need not dwell on the vague and imperfect theism of the philosophic Vatke, whose concrete monism seemed to favour a suprapersonal view.

Recent philosophy of theism has been as little able to rest content with such meagre, abstract theism as that of Biedermann, to whom, in his able and too little studied treatment, the Godhead yet transcends the realm of Vorstellung, and in whose train Pfleiderer and others follow. Bieder

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mann sharply distinguishes between spirit and personality, the latter of which he confines to finite spirit. He does not regard spirit and personality as identical conceptions, but attaches to the latter an individual corporealness. Theistic philosophy, however, does not transfer accidental limitations of personality to Deity. Biedermann, with his unwonted clearness, great warmth, and rich speculative power, dwells in his 'Dogmatik' on the irreconcilableness of absoluteness and personality, which latter is reached via eminentiæ. He thinks that, in the conception of personality, the mind objectifies the absolute and eternal nature (Wesen) of God. In the individual he finds potential finite spirit; in personality actual finite spirit. But absolute personality is to his view a contradictio in adjecto. Now, it is sheer inconsequence or arbitrariness for Biedermann to withhold predication of personality from the Absolute, when his admission of consciousness and self-consciousness-those essentials of freedom and intelligence—are considered. Nor does his position grow less inconsequential when he—in spite of the impersonality of the Absolute Spirit-asserts the inability of the religious consciousness to do without the personality of God. If thought forbids us to view the absolute spirit as personal, why, we ask, not boldly drop the illusive glass with which religious experience vainly thinks to view the absolute object as objective fact? Does it not belong to the very essence of any living or worthy faith that it