om us but with whose deathless
goodness, beauty and truth our mortality by some mediator may be
endowed, is that the argument that supports such transcendence is
the argument from necessity. It is the facts of experience, the very
stuff of human life, coming down alike from Hebraic and Hellenic
civilization, which demand Him. Immanence and transcendence are merely
theistic terms for identity and difference. Through them is revealed
and discovered personality, the "I" which is the ultimate fact of
my consciousness. I can but reckon from the known to the unknown.
The world which produced me is also, then, a cosmic identity and
difference. In that double fact is found divine personality. But
that aspect of His Person, that portion of the fact which feeds
the imaginative and volitional life, is the glorious and saving
unlikeness of God--His unthinkable and inexpressible glory; His utter
comprehension and unbelievable compassion; His justice which knows no
flaw and brooks no evasion and cannot be swerved; His power which
may not be withstood and hence is a sure and certain tenderness; His
hatred of sin, terrible and flaming, a hatred which will send sinful
men through a thousand hells, if they will have them, and can only be
saved thereby; His love for men, which is what makes Him hate their
sin and leads Him by His very nature as God to walk into hell with the
sinner, suffering with him a thousand times more than the sinner is
able to understand or know,--like the Paul who could not wish himself,
for himself, in hell, but who did wish himself accursed of God for
his brethren's sake; like Jesus, who, in Gethsemane, would for Himself
avoid His cross, but who accepted it and was willing to hang, forsaken
of God, upon it, for the lives of men, identifying Himself to the
uttermost with their fate. Yes; it is such a supernal God--that God
who is apart, incredible, awful--that the soul of humanity craves and
needs.

Of course, here again, as throughout these discussions, we are
returning to a form of the old dualism. We cannot seem to help it. We
may construct philosophies like Hegel's in which thesis and antithesis
merge in a higher synthesis; we may use the dual view of the world as
representing only a stage, a present achievement in cosmic progress or
human understanding. But that does not alter the incontestable witness
of present experience that the religious consciousness is based upon,
interwoven with, the sense of the cos