The Sword of Song

tycarb 92 joss of Genesis to the intangible, but self- contradictory spectre of to-day. But if G be infinite, the other forces can have no possible effect on it. As Whewell says, in the strange accident by which he anticipates the m etre of In Memoriam: “No force on earth, however great, can s tretch a cord, 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 daresay I could myself discover some reasonably good ones. [I hardly expect to be asked, somehow.] The resulting equilibrium of God and man, destructive of worship, is of course absurd. We must reject it, unless we want to fall into Positivism, Materialism, or something of the sort. But if, then, we call God i nfinite, 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 ortho- doxy) that a finite God is absurd, but in the assumption that man has any real force.1 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 hy pothesis we are still working, either m atter fills or does not fill it. If the form er, m atter is infinitely great; if the latter, infinitely small. Whether the matter-universe be 1010000 light-years in diameter or half a mile makes no difference; i t is infinitely sm all—in effect, Nothing. The unm athematical illusion that it does exist is what the Hindus call Maya. If, on the other hand, the matter-universe i s infinite, Brahm and God are crowded out, and the possibility of religion is equally excluded. 1 Lully, Descartes, Spinoza, S chelling. See their works. We may now shift our objective. The Hindus cannot account intelligibly , though they try hard, for May a, the cause of all suffering. Their position is radically weak, but at least we m ay say for them that they have tried to square their religion with their common sense. The Christians, on the other hand, though they saw whither the Manichean Heresy1 must lead, and crushed it, have not officially admitted the precisely similar conclusion with regard to man, and denied the exis tence of the hum an s oul as distinct from the divine soul. Trismegistus, Iamblichus, Porphy ry, Boehme, and the my stics generally have of course substantially done so, though occa- sionally with rather inexplicable reservations, similar to those m ade in som e cases by the Vedantists themselves. Man then being disproved, God the Person disappears for ever, and becom es Atm an, Pleroma, Ain Soph, what nam e y ou will, infinite in all directions and in all c ategories —to deny one is to destroy the entire argu- ment and throw us back on to our old Dvaitistic bases. I entirely sympathise with my unhappy friend Rev. Mansel, B.D.,2 in his piteous and pitiful plaints against the logical results of the Advaitist School. But, on his basal hypothesis of an infinite God, infinite space, time, and so on, no other conclusion is possible. Dean Mansel is found in the im- possible position of one who will neither g ive up his premisses nor dispute the validity of his logical processes, but who shrinks in horror from the inevitable conclusion; he supposes there must be something wrong somewhere, and concludes that the sole use of reason is to discover its own inferiority to faith. As Deussen 3 well points out, faith in the Christian sense merely amounts to 1 The conception of Satan as a positive evil force; the lower triangle of the Hexagram. 2 Encyclopedia Britannica, Art. Meta- physics. 3 “The Pr inciples of M etaphysics.” M ac- millan.