Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/165

128 receive its philosophic confirmation, and the reality of the World of Persons, and of God as its eternal Fount and Ground and Light, will be made out. Then genuine and inspiring religion — the religion not of submission but of aspiration, not of bondage but of freedom, of Love rather than of Faith and of Hope — will have passed from its present stage of anxious conjecture to the stage of settled fact, —

For the sake, particularly, of readers unfamiliar with philosophical technicalities, I may here recapitulate my criticisms of the evening’s addresses, suggest a few others, and hint a little more fully at my own answers to the problems discussed, by means of the following questions:

1. Does a Supreme Being, or Ultimate Reality, no matter how assuredly proved, deserve the name of, simply by virtue of its Reality and Supremacy? Is simple Supremacy divine, even if made out in idealistic terms — in terms, say, of Omniscience?

2. Can the attribute of Omniscience amount to a criterion of Deity until we determine the nature of the objects contained in the total sphere of its cognition, and find there real persons as the supreme and all-determining objects of its view?