pen of Professor
William James,[1] some sentences from which might to a large extent be
taken as indicating {6} the standpoint of the volume now submitted to
the reader:--

"God," in the religious life of ordinary men is the name not of the
whole of things, heaven forbid, but only of the ideal tendency in
things, believed in as a superhuman person who calls us to co-operate
in His purposes, and who furthers ours if they are worthy. He works in
an external environment, has limits, and has enemies. When John Mill
said that the notion of God's omnipotence must be given up, if God is
to be kept as a religious object, he was surely accurately right; yet,
so prevalent is the lazy Monism that idly haunts the regions of God's
name, that so simple and truthful a saying was generally treated as a
paradox; God, it was said, _could_ not be finite. I believe that the
only God worthy of the name _must_ be finite.

It is precisely the theory which identifies God with "the whole of
things" which will be combated in the following discussions; it is
precisely "the lazy Monism that idly haunts the regions of God's name"
to which they offer a plain and direct challenge. At the same time
such a phrase as that in which Professor James speaks of God as working
"in an external environment" would seem unduly to under-emphasise the
fact of immanence; and it may be said at once that the theory of Divine
finitude put forward by the present writer will be seen to differ from
that of John Stuart Mill, as the idea of _self_-limitation differs from
that of a limitation _ab extra_--in other words, as Theism differs from
Deism.

It is perhaps a little remarkable that the fundamental antinomies which
arise from the assumption of the actual infinity of God should not have
been more frequently dealt with; or rather, that thinkers postulating
that infinity {7} as a basal axiom should have been comparatively blind
to its logical implications. For if God is infinite, then He is all;
and if He is all, what becomes of human individuality, or how are human
initiative and responsibility so much as thinkable? Benjamin Jowett,
in his Essay on Predestination and Freewill, glanced at this problem in
passing, and the remarks he made upon it more than fifty years ago, if
somewhat tentative, are well worth consideration to-day:--

"God is infinite." But in what sense? . . . Press the idea of the
infinite to its utmost extent, till it is alone in the un