gious synthesis, so
may you still be the champions of mental completeness and
all-sidedness. May you, with equal success, avert the formation of a
narrow scientific tradition, and burst the bonds of any synthesis which
would pretend to leave out of account those forms of being, those
relations of reality, to which at present our active and emotional
tendencies are our only avenues of approach. I hear it said that
Unitarianism is not growing in these days. I know nothing of the truth
of the statement; but if it be true, it is surely because the great
ship of Orthodoxy is nearing the port and the pilot is being taken on
board. If you will only lead in a theistic science, as successfully as
you have led in a scientific theology, your separate name as Unitarians
may perish from the mouths of men; for your task will have been done,
and your function at an end. Until that distant day, you have work
enough in both directions awaiting you.

Meanwhile, let me pass to the next division of our subject. I said
that we are forced to regard God as {134} the normal object of the
mind's belief, inasmuch as any conception that falls short of God is
irrational, if the word 'rational' be taken in its fullest sense; while
any conception that goes beyond God is impossible, if the human mind be
constructed after the triadic-reflex pattern we have discussed at such
length. The first half of the thesis has been disposed of.
Infra-theistic conceptions, materialisms and agnosticisms, are
irrational because they are inadequate stimuli to man's practical
nature. I have now to justify the latter half of the thesis.

I dare say it may for an instant have perplexed some of you that I
should speak of conceptions that aimed at going beyond God, and of
attempts to fly above him or outbid him; so I will now explain exactly
what I mean. In defining the essential attributes of God, I said he
was a personality lying outside our own and other than us,--a power not
ourselves. Now, the attempts to fly beyond theism, of which I speak,
are attempts to get over this ultimate duality of God and his believer,
and to transform it into some sort or other of identity. If
infratheistic ways of looking on the world leave it in the third
person, a mere _it_; and if theism turns the _it_ into a _thou_,--so we
may say that these other theories try to cover it with the mantle of
the first person, and to make it a part of _me_.

I am well aware that I begin h