Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/491

430 function of creation, taken literally, is unessential to this moral perfection of God, but that it is in hopeless contradiction with it; and that the obscurely felt fact of this contradiction, a feeling growing ever more clear as the Christian consciousness grows more sure of itself, is at the bottom of all that restlessness in the region of Christian theology which we all know so well, and which is the characteristic fact in the later Christian world.

To remove the name of God from the clarified and purified conception of the eternal Ideal Type would be to do violence, inexcusable affront, to the deepest and truest element in the historic religious consciousness. I feel the strongest assurance that ray new interpretation of the name of God is the genuine fulfilment of the highest and profoundest prescience in the historic religious life. What offends us in the Spinozistic or other monistic appropriations of the name “God” is the evident absence from their Absolute of all the essential moral qualities. In these it is that true Deity lies, and all God’s metaphysical attributes must be keyed up to them; not one of these “natural” attributes dare be construed in any way that conflicts with the eternal moral essence. If they have been so construed historically (as indeed they have), genuine theology requires that the conception of God shall be relieved of these errors, in order that God's nature may stand revealed as it is in its own reality.