Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/86

Rh St. Thomas Aquinas belongs the credit of the first explicit and fully developed synthesis of the Aristotelian and the Christian conception of God. The Thomistic proofs of God’s existence — repeated, diluted, and thus often rendered very trivial, by popular apologetic writers — have now, at best, lost much of their speculative interest. But the conception of the Divine that St. Thomas reached remains in certain important respects central, and in essence identical, I think, with the definition that I have here tried to repeat; and that, too, despite the paradoxes and the errors involved in the traditional concept of the creation of the world.

For the rest, let me in closing be perfectly frank with you. I myself am one of those students whom a more modern and radical scepticism has, indeed, put in general very much out of sympathy with many of what seem to me the unessential accidents of religious tradition as represented in the historical faith; and for such students this scepticism has transformed, in many ways, our methods of defining our relation to truth. But this scepticism has not thrown even the most radical of us, if we are enlightened, out of a close, a rational, a spiritually intelligent relation to those deep ideas that, despite all these accidents, have moulded the heart of the history of religion. In brief, then, the foregoing conception of God undertakes to be distinctly theistic, and not pantheistic. It is not the conception of any Unconscious Reality, into which finite beings are absorbed; nor of a Universal Substance, in whose law our ethical independence is lost; nor of an Ineffable Mystery, which