Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/49

12 place in an experience of triumph and of self-possession. In brief, every time we are weak, downcast, horror-stricken, alone with our sin, the victims of evil fortune or of our own baseness, we stand, as we all know, not only in presence of agonising fragmentary experiences, but in presence of besetting problems, which in fact constitute the very heart of our calamity. We are beset by questions to which we now get no answers. Those questions could only be answered, those bitter problems that pierce our hearts with the keen edge of doubt and of wonder, — when friends part, when lovers weep, when the lightning of fortune blasts our hopes, when remorse and failure make desolate the lonely hours of our private despair, — such questions, such problems, I say, could only be answered if the flickering ideas then present in the midst of our darkness shone steadily in the presence of some world of superhuman experience, of which ours would then seem to be only the remote hint. Such superhuman experience might in its wholeness at once contain the answer to our questions, and the triumph over — yes, and through — our fragmentary experience. But, as we are, we can only question.

Well, then, — if the divorce of idea and experience characterises every form of our human consciousness of finitude, of weakness, of evil, of sin, of despair, — you see that Omniscience, involving, by definition, the complete and final fulfilment of idea in experience, the unity of thought and fact, the illumination of feeling by comprehension, would be an attribute implying, for the being who possessed it, much more than a