The prestige of the absolute has rather crumbled in our hands.
The logical proofs of it miss fire; the portraits which its best
court-painters show of it are featureless and foggy in the extreme;
and, apart from the cold comfort of assuring us that with _it_ all is
well, and that to see that all is well with us also we need only rise
to its eternal point of view, it yields us no relief whatever. It
introduces, on the contrary, into philosophy and theology certain
poisonous difficulties of which but for its intrusion we never should
have heard.

But if we drop the absolute out of the world, must we then conclude
that the world contains nothing better in the way of consciousness
than our consciousness? Is our whole instinctive belief in higher
presences, our persistent inner turning towards divine companionship,
to count for nothing? Is it but the pathetic illusion of beings with
incorrigibly social and imaginative minds?

Such a negative conclusion would, I believe, be desperately hasty,
a sort of pouring out of the child with the bath. Logically it is
possible to believe in superhuman beings without identifying them with
the absolute at all. The treaty of offensive and defensive alliance
which certain groups of the Christian clergy have recently made with
our transcendentalist philosophers seems to me to be based on a
well-meaning but baleful mistake. Neither the Jehovah of the old
testament nor the heavenly father of the new has anything in common
with the absolute except that they are all three greater than man;
and if you say that the notion of the absolute is what the gods of
Abraham, of David, and of Jesus, after first developing into each
other, were inevitably destined to develop into in more reflective
and modern minds, I reply that although in certain specifically
philosophical minds this may have been the case, in minds more
properly to be termed religious the development has followed quite
another path. The whole history of evangelical Christianity is there
to prove it. I propose in these lectures to plead for that other line
of development. To set the doctrine of the absolute in its proper
framework, so that it shall not fill the whole welkin and exclude all
alternative possibilities of higher thought--as it seems to do for
many students who approach it with a limited previous acquaintance
with philosophy--I will contrast it with a system which, abstractly
considered, seems at first to have much in com