reflection on
such experience, must suffice to dispose of such a misapprehension; let
us use the most obvious of illustrations for showing where the error
lies. We have only to imagine one of those everyday tragedies that make
a short newspaper paragraph--say, the case of a man passing a house in
process of erection, and being killed on the spot by a piece of falling
timber. He is left as a material form; he is decidedly not left as a
person. Something has disappeared in that fatal moment that no one had
ever seen or handled--his self-consciousness, his intelligence, his will,
his affections, his moral sense: _with_ these he was a person; _without_
them, he is a corpse. If, then, it is these unseen, intangible
qualities, and not flesh and bones, muscle and "nerve structure," that
constitute _human_ personality, is it not rather childish to argue that,
unless God possesses a body of some sort, the _Divine_ Personality is a
contradiction in terms? If we can validly affirm in the Deity qualities
corresponding to those which in human beings we call consciousness,
intelligence, etc., we shall obviously be compelled to assign personality
to Him; the question is, Have we sufficient grounds for making such an
affirmation?

But before we are allowed to answer that question, we have to meet
another preliminary {78} objection; for it seems that we are in conflict
with philosophy--or, to be more exact, with a certain philosophy which,
while no longer perhaps in the heyday of its influence with students,
still enjoys a good deal of popular vogue. We are, of course, referring
to the Spencerian system, in which the word "Absolute" is used as a
synonym for what we should call the Deity; but, argues the Spencerian,
since "Absolute is that which exists out of all relation," [3] whereas
"even intelligence or consciousness itself is conceivable only as a
relation," it follows that "the Absolute cannot be thought of as
conscious." But if God cannot even be thought of as conscious, how much
less can He be thought of as personal!

Such an inference would, indeed, be irresistible if only the premises on
which it rests were sound. But is it legitimate, we ask, to identify God
with "the Absolute," or is not this merely a way of begging the question?
"Absolute is that which exists out of all relation," we were just told,
and such a genuine Absolute would be genuinely "unknowable," because its
very existence could not be so much as guesse