violence to the collective facts of our experience, which rise up
in unanimous and spontaneous testimony against the monstrous fiction
that we are either nothing or God. The fallacy upon which this fiction
rests is not a {27} very subtle one. When we speak of God's indwelling
in man, we predicate that community of nature which the writer of Gen.
ii expresses by saying that God created man in His own image; we
predicate, _i.e._, what we already called homogeneity--likeness of
substance--and not identity, which is a very different thing. We do
not commit ourselves to the proposition that "God _in_ man is God _as_
man." Parent and child are linked together by a precisely analogous
bond to that subsisting between God and man, but they are nevertheless
distinct individualities.

"But," it will be objected, "the analogy does not hold, for parent and
child are both finite; how can a similar separateness be so much as
thought to exist between God and man, seeing that God is infinite?" It
will be seen that the objection merely restates the allness of God
under a different form; and this brings us to the very heart of the
matter. We must at length face the one conclusion which does not land
us in self-contradiction--_viz._, that _in the act of creation God
limits His own infinity_, no matter to how infinitesimal an extent. On
the alternative supposition we have ultimately to think of God and man
either as All _plus_ something or All _plus_ zero--which is absurd.
Mr. Chesterton has rendered useful service by insisting that in
creating the world God distinguishes Himself from the world, as a poet
is distinct from his poem--a truth which he has condensed into an
aphorism, {28} "All creation is separation"; but on the part of the
Deity such "separation" implies of necessity the self-limitation just
spoken of. Just as a billion, _minus_ the billionth fraction of a
unit, is no longer a billion, so infinity itself, limited though it be
but by a hair's-breadth, is no longer, strictly speaking, infinite.
Once we admit this Divine self-limitation as a working theory, we shall
no longer be troubled by the unreal difficulty of having to reconcile
the principle of Divine immanence with the fact of individual
existence. The Divine spark may burn in man, brightly or dimly as the
case may be, and yet be separate from the central and eternal Fire
whence it has been flung forth; in other words, man may be a partaker
of the Divine nature w