ntimate partner, a character of externality invades the
field. God is not heart of our heart and reason of our reason, but our
magistrate, rather; and mechanically to obey his commands, however
strange they may be, remains our only moral duty. Conceptions of
criminal law have in fact played a great part in defining our
relations with him. Our relations with speculative truth show the
same externality. One of our duties is to know truth, and rationalist
thinkers have always assumed it to be our sovereign duty. But in
scholastic theism we find truth already instituted and established
without our help, complete apart from our knowing; and the most we
can do is to acknowledge it passively and adhere to it, altho such
adhesion as ours can make no jot of difference to what is adhered to.
The situation here again is radically dualistic. It is not as if the
world came to know itself, or God came to know himself, partly through
us, as pantheistic idealists have maintained, but truth exists _per
se_ and absolutely, by God's grace and decree, no matter who of us
knows it or is ignorant, and it would continue to exist unaltered,
even though we finite knowers were all annihilated.

It has to be confessed that this dualism and lack of intimacy has
always operated as a drag and handicap on Christian thought. Orthodox
theology has had to wage a steady fight within the schools against the
various forms of pantheistic heresy which the mystical experiences
of religious persons, on the one hand, and the formal or aesthetic
superiorities of monism to dualism, on the other, kept producing. God
as intimate soul and reason of the universe has always seemed to some
people a more worthy conception than God as external creator. So
conceived, he appeared to unify the world more perfectly, he made
it less finite and mechanical, and in comparison with such a God an
external creator seemed more like the product of a childish fancy. I
have been told by Hindoos that the great obstacle to the spread
of Christianity in their country is the puerility of our dogma
of creation. It has not sweep and infinity enough to meet the
requirements of even the illiterate natives of India.

Assuredly most members of this audience are ready to side with
Hinduism in this matter. Those of us who are sexagenarians have
witnessed in our own persons one of those gradual mutations of
intellectual climate, due to innumerable influences, that make the
thought of a past gener