To say that God is eternally producing things is fundamentally the same
as saying that things are eternally producing God. And the belief in a
personal and spiritual God is based on the belief in our own personality
and spirituality. Because we feel ourselves to be consciousness, we
feel God to be consciousness--that is to say, a person; and because we
desire ardently that our consciousness shall live and be independently
of the body, we believe that the divine person lives and exists
independently of the universe, that his state of consciousness is _ad
extra_.
No doubt logicians will come forward and confront us with the evident
rational difficulties which this involves; but we have already stated
that, although presented under logical forms, the content of all this is
not strictly rational. Every rational conception of God is in itself
contradictory. Faith in God is born of love for God--we believe that God
exists by force of wishing that He may exist, and it is born also,
perhaps, of God's love for us. Reason does not prove to us that God
exists, but neither does it prove that He cannot exist.
But of this conception of faith in God as the personalization of the
universe we shall have more to say presently.
And recalling what has been said in another part of this work, we may
say that material things, in so far as they are known to us, issue into
knowledge through the agency of hunger, and out of hunger issues the
sensible or material universe in which we conglomerate these things; and
that ideal things issue out of love, and out of love issues God, in whom
we conglomerate these ideal things as in the Consciousness of the
Universe.
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