of beings, and God
Himself, viewed as personal (in this sense) is but one among many.
Albeit immeasurably the greatest, He cannot be regarded as the ground of
the possibility and existence of all the rest--the home and bond of
union of all other spirits which in Him live and move and have their
being.

The belief in the personality of God is all-essential for the
satisfaction of our religious cravings, as a presupposition of trust,
love, prayer, obedience, and such relationships; as bringing out the
transcendence in contrast with the all-pervading immanence of the deity;
as checking the pantheistic perversion of this latter truth by which, in
turn, its own deistic perversion is checked. God is not only in and
through all things; but also outside and above all things; just as
Christ is not only the soul of the Church, but also its Head and Ruler.
Between these two compensating statements the exact truth is hidden from
our eyes.

But it is not to the conception of the Divine personality and
separateness that we are to look for the missing bond by which the head
and members are to be knit together, and the essential disconnection of
these "spheres of experience" overcome. The ultimate unity is a mystery;
in a word, philosophy, as a quest of that unity, breaks down. The
solution is suggested only by the revelation of a superpersonal unity in
some sense prior to the multiplicity of Divine Persons, a unity in which
they being many are one, and in which we too are, not merged, but
unified without prejudice to our personal distinctness.

Hence, the writer concludes: "Materialism, when its defect is discovered
and understood, points on to idealism. Idealism, when its defect is
disclosed, points to Christian theism." For those who have not come to
Christian theism by this thorny and circuitous path, the mode in which
the idealist extricates himself from his self-wrought entanglement may
seem of little interest; but inasmuch as they take for granted the
existence of that same multitude of mutually impenetrable personalities
which he, by a revolt of his common-sense against his philosophy is
forced to confess, the problem of the ultimate unity exists for them
also.

If in its endeavour to vindicate the spirituality of man against the
materialist, idealism tumbles into the slough of solipsism and needs to
be fetched out by the doctrine of the Trinity, it fares much the same
way in its attempted defence of free-will against nece