erve itself in itself, but to perpetuate itself,
and, moreover, to invade all other beings, to be others without ceasing
to be itself, to extend its limits to the infinite, but without breaking
them. It does not wish to throw down its walls and leave everything laid
flat, common and undefended, confounding and losing its own
individuality, but it wishes to carry its walls to the extreme limits of
creation and to embrace everything within them. It seeks the maximum of
individuality with the maximum also of personality; it aspires to the
identification of the Universe with itself; it aspires to God.

And this vast I, within which each individual I seeks to put the
Universe--what is it but God? And because I aspire to God, I love Him;
and this aspiration of mine towards God is my love for Him, and just as
I suffer in being He, He also suffers in being I, and in being each one
of us.

I am well aware that in spite of my warning that I am attempting here to
give a logical form to a system of a-logical feelings, I shall be
scandalizing not a few of my readers in speaking of a God who suffers,
and in applying to God Himself, as God, the passion of Christ. The God
of so-called rational theology excludes in effect all suffering. And the
reader will no doubt think that this idea of suffering can have only a
metaphorical value when applied to God, similar to that which is
supposed to attach to those passages in the Old Testament which
describe the human passions of the God of Israel. For anger, wrath, and
vengeance are impossible without suffering. And as for saying that God
suffers through being bound by matter, I shall be told that, in the
words of Plotinus (_Second Ennead_, ix., 7), the Universal Soul cannot
be bound by the very thing--namely, bodies or matter--which is bound by
It.

Herein is involved the whole problem of the origin of evil, the evil of
sin no less than the evil of pain, for if God does not suffer, He causes
suffering; and if His life, since God lives, is not a process of
realizing in Himself a total consciousness which is continually becoming
fuller--that is to say, which is continually becoming more and more
God--it is a process of drawing all things towards Himself, of imparting
Himself to all, of constraining the consciousness of each part to enter
into the consciousness of the All, which is He Himself, until at last He
comes to be all in all--_panta en paot_, according to the expression of
St. Paul, th