oncerned with their particular problem I shall indicate
only briefly this great metaphysical suggestion. All descriptions of
the creating or sustaining principle in things must be metaphorical,
because they must be verbal. Thus the pantheist is forced to speak of
God _in_ all things as if he were in a box. Thus the evolutionist has,
in his very name, the idea of being unrolled like a carpet. All terms,
religious and irreligious, are open to this charge. The only question is
whether all terms are useless, or whether one can, with such a phrase,
cover a distinct _idea_ about the origin of things. I think one can, and
so evidently does the evolutionist, or he would not talk about
evolution. And the root phrase for all Christian theism was this, that
God was a creator, as an artist is a creator. A poet is so separate from
his poem that he himself speaks of it as a little thing he has "thrown
off." Even in giving it forth he has flung it away. This principle that
all creation and procreation is a breaking off is at least as consistent
through the cosmos as the evolutionary principle that all growth is a
branching out. A woman loses a child even in having a child. All
creation is separation. Birth is as solemn a parting as death.

It was the prime philosophic principle of Christianity that this divorce
in the divine act of making (such as severs the poet from the poem or
the mother from the new-born child) was the true description of the act
whereby the absolute energy made the world. According to most
philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to
Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much
a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which
had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had
since made a great mess of it. I will discuss the truth of this theorem
later. Here I have only to point out with what a startling smoothness it
passed the dilemma we have discussed in this chapter. In this way at
least one could be both happy and indignant without degrading one's self
to be either a pessimist or an optimist. On this system one could fight
all the forces of existence without deserting the flag of existence. One
could be at peace with the universe and yet be at war with the world.
St. George could still fight the dragon, however big the monster bulked
in the cosmos, though he were bigger than the mighty cities or bigger
than the everlasting