Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/411

350 bearing the ominous title Atheism in Philosophy To be sure, monism was in a way Dr. Hedge’s religion, and so pluralism was for him the unpardonable sin. But for every type of the genuinely religious mind, the omission of God must be unpardonable; and what we need in these perplexing discussions is some settlement of what is the central attribute of God, that shall impart to all the others legitimate meaning, and put an end to unmerited charges of atheism.

So that I am now called upon to show that the elevation of the human spirit to genuine freedom, with the consequent placing of the soul in the order of eternal being, so far from transforming men into gods or rendering God superfluous and non-existent, carries us, on the contrary, to just such a central attribute of genuine godhead. I am to show you, too, that in the world of eternal free-agents, the Divine offices called creation and regeneration not only survive, but are transfigured; that in this transfiguration they are merged in one, so that regeneration is implicit in creation, and becomes the logical spring and aim of creation, while creation itself thus insures both generation and regeneration — the existence of the natural order within the spiritual or rational, and subject to this, and the consequent gradual transformation of the natural into the image of the spiritual: