Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/464

Rh in a real absolutely perfect Person, transcendent of every other, immanent in none, except by the presence eternally of his Image, or Ideal, before each mind; a real Being, not an Ideal simply; complete in Holiness, Justice, and Love, changelessly attentive to every other mind, rationally sympathetic with all its experiences, and bent on its spiritual success; its inexorable Judge, but also its eternal Inspirer, by his omnipresent reality and his ever-present Image in the conscience.

The absence of objective reality from such an ideal Being, its reduction to a subjective ideal simply, as some modern philosophers caught in an agnostic snare have proposed, would strip moral life of the main support for its struggle against wrong. Amid the manifold disappointments and discouragements of the long battle with defect and wrong, the merely subjective ideal would tend to fade out, to decline both in vividness and in character, and so cease to attract and adequately guide effort. The only adequate support — and it is adequate — is the reality of God, the heavenly Judge, the unfailing Beholder and Sympathiser. To him, the one Absolute Conscience, in every moral disaster our conscience turns for assured refuge and certain renewal of moral courage and strength. That is the real act and infallible function of Prayer.

I think it may justly be said that the new Harmonic Pluralism furnishes the only valid proofs for the reality of such a Being. What these proofs are, I must again spare space by avoiding here to recite. For one form they take, let me again refer to the preceding volume, in its concluding essay, and also, in a somewhat simpler expression, in its fifth. I would point out the fact, however, that all other systems professedly theistic either draw their intended proofs for the being of God from naturalistic considerations that must fall short of all attributes properly divine, while at the same time unavoidably staining the image of the Most High with direct