Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/160

Rh it is not the conception of a being that we can adore at all. The fault of it at the bar of the religious reason is, that by force of the argument leading to it all the turmoil and all the contradictions and tragic discords belonging to experience must be taken up directly into the life of the Absolute; they are his experiences as well as ours, and must be left in him at once both dissolved and undissolved, unharmonised as well as harmonised, stilled and yet raging, atoned for and yet all unatoned. Contradiction is thus not only introduced into the very being of the Eternal, and left there, but its dialectic back-and-forth throb is made the very quickening heart of that being. It is impossible for the religious reason to accept this, no matter what the apparently philosophical reason may say in its behalf. In that fealty which is the true “substance of things hoped for,” the religious reason firmly avers there must be some flaw in such philosophising, and in the name of all reason, protests against the claim that this conception of God is “the inevitable outcome of a reflective philosophy.”

Is there really, then, an impassable chasm between the logical consciousness and the religious consciousness? Can the ought to be ever yield its autonomous authority to the mere is? — can the mere is, simply because it is, — nay, can the must be, simply because