Berashith

3) joss of Genesis to the intangible, but still self-contradictory spectre of to-day. But ifG be infinite, the other forces can have no possible effect on it. As Whewell says, in the strange accident by which he anticipates the metre of In Memoriam: “No force on earth, however great, can pull a chord, however fine, into a horizontal line that shall be absolutely straight.” The definition of God as infinite therefore denies man implicitly; while if he be finite, there is an end of the usual Christian reasons for worship, though I dare- say I could myself discover some reasonably good ones. I hardly expect to be asked, somehow. The resulting equilibrium of God and man, des- tructive of worship, is of course absurd. We must reject it, unless we want to fall into Positivism, Material- ism, or something of the sort. But if, then, we call God infinite, how are we to regard man, and Satan? (the latter, at the very least, surely no integral part of him). ‘The fallacy lies not in my demonstration (which is also that of orthodoxy) that a finite God is absurd, but in the assumption that man has any real force. In our mechanical system (as I have hinted above), if one of the forces be infinite, the others, however great, are both relatively and absolutely nothing. In any category, infinity excludes finity, unless that finity be an identical part of that infinity. In the category of existing things, space being infinite, for on that hypothesis we are still working, either matter fills or does not fill it. If the former, matter is infinitely great ; if the latter, infinitely small. Whether the matter ~ 1