Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/27

xxvi than a “final inexplicability,” — the utmost explanatory reach of the “Unknowable.”

These sketches of the historic thought lying directly behind us, barest outline though they are, suffice to explain the issues in which we at this day are engaged. If the scientific doctrine of Evolution, taken with all its suggestions, has been to the religious conceptions inherited by our century the surpassing summons to prepare for a radical change; and if to those friends of the deep things in the traditional faith who incline to hearken at the summons the Spencerian construction of evolution in terms of the Unknowable” seems a revolution amounting to the abandonment of all religious conceptions worth human concern, — since it puts an end to the conscious communion of the creature with a conscious Creator and Saviour, and in its depths unmistakably forebodes the eventual extinction of personal being from the universe, — if these things are so, then it is easy to understand how the idealistic conceptions of Kant’s successors, especially in the form given to them by Hegel, should appeal as strongly as they have appealed, and are still appealing, to those who would preserve to their conviction the Personality of the Eternal, and all that this carries with it for religion. For this idealistic philosophy seems by one and the same stroke to assure them of God's reality, and to adjust his nature, and his way of existence, to their minds “as affected by modern knowledge.” It assigns to him such an immanence in his works as explains evolution by presenting it as “continuous creation,” and it gives, at last, what seems like a