Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/32

Rh the theory of an Immanent God? This, for a few awakened minds at least, now becomes the “burning question.” It well may be, that, in their preoccupation with the task of rescuing out of Agnosticism something absolutely real which they could also call a Person, these philosophical allies of religion have overlooked a lurking but fatal antagonism between their form of Idealism and the central soul of the traditional faith, the vital interests of man as man. At all events, the time has come when the question whether this is not so should be raised with all emphasis, and examined to the end. For if our genuine freedom is to disappear when we accept the religion whose God is the Immanent Spirit, then the new religion is in truth a decline from the highest conceptions of the historic faith, and in this regard has no advantage over the religion of the “Unknowable,” — a religion which, not simply by the confession, but by the emphatic proclamation of its philosophical sponsor and its chief heralds, is based on the doctrine of hereditary necessitation, and from which personal freedom and moral opportunity equal for all minds are cancelled entirely and finally.

Our question, then, urgent for religion and for philosophy alike, is the one that must surely give character to the immediate future of both. As shown already, it is really the main question of the present book. If the discussion here printed has any significance for current thought, the significance lies in the fact that its centre of conflict is upon just this question. The problem of Freedom, the search into the