do not profess to understand. We are not mere individual
organ-stops, each without use or significance apart from the rest,
waiting for our mutual dissonances to be swallowed up in some "music of
the whole," but members of a family, each with a place in the Parent's
heart and thought. Finally, to the Christian there is one last, {73}
crowning proof of the soul's value for God, and God's yearning for the
soul; that proof is Calvary. To the Christian there is one experience
which settles this problem fully and finally for him; it is the
experience which Paul embodied in the cry, "He loved me, and gave
Himself for me."

For Monism the individual is a mere surface ripple on an infinite
ocean, alike impermanent and impersonal; for Christianity the soul is a
child of the Father of all souls, loved with an everlasting love.
Between these two conceptions we have to choose, remembering that each
utterly excludes the other. There is no third alternative.

{74}

CHAPTER V

THE DIVINE PERSONALITY

While in our last three chapters we have been dealing with certain
theories which implicitly or explicitly deny the Divine Personality, and
while an impersonal God can be, as we have already seen, of no value for
religion, there is no mistaking the fact that this very
question--whether, _i.e._, it is possible and legitimate for us to think
of God as personal--constitutes one of the most typical of modern
"difficulties." It is probably correct to say that this difficulty, like
others we have reviewed, dates practically from the collapse of Deism, a
creed which possessed a certain hard lucidity satisfying to many for the
very reason that it required no very profound insight for its
understanding. That a Deity localised in a far-away heaven, seated on a
celestial throne and surrounded by an angelic court, should be a person,
like any other sovereign, presented no problem to the understanding; but
if God was not merely transcendent but also immanent--not merely
somewhere but in some indefinable manner everywhere--then to predicate
personality of {75} such a One seemed a very paradox. In one of
Feuillet's novels there occurs a phrase which sums up in a few expressive
words a very common spiritual misadventure: the hero says, "_J'avais vu
disparaitre parmi les nuages la tete de ce bon vieillard qu'on appelle
Dieu_"--"I had seen the head of that good old man called God disappear
amongst the clouds." His naive material concept