ose other attributes,
negative or positive, as the case may be.

Now, as regards a great many of the attributes of God, and their
amounts and mutual relations, the world has been delivered over to
disputes. All such may for our present purpose be considered as quite
inessential. Not only such matters as his mode of revealing himself,
the precise extent of his providence and power and their connection
with our free-will, the proportion of his mercy to his justice, and the
amount of his responsibility for evil; but also his metaphysical
relation to the phenomenal world, whether causal, substantial, ideal,
or what not,--are affairs of purely sectarian opinion that need not
concern us at all. Whoso debates them presupposes the essential
features of theism to be granted already; and it is with these
essential features, the bare poles of the subject, that our business
exclusively lies.

{122}

Now, what are these essential features? First, it is essential that
God be conceived as the deepest power in the universe; and, second, he
must be conceived under the form of a mental personality. The
personality need not be determined intrinsically any further than is
involved in the holding of certain things dear, and in the recognition
of our dispositions toward those things, the things themselves being
all good and righteous things. But, extrinsically considered, so to
speak, God's personality is to be regarded, like any other personality,
as something lying outside of my own and other than me, and whose
existence I simply come upon and find. A power not ourselves, then,
which not only makes for righteousness, but means it, and which
recognizes us,--such is the definition which I think nobody will be
inclined to dispute. Various are the attempts to shadow forth the
other lineaments of so supreme a personality to our human imagination;
various the ways of conceiving in what mode the recognition, the
hearkening to our cry, can come. Some are gross and idolatrous; some
are the most sustained efforts man's intellect has ever made to keep
still living on that subtile edge of things where speech and thought
expire. But, with all these differences, the essence remains
unchanged. In whatever other respects the divine personality may
differ from ours or may resemble it, the two are consanguineous at
least in this,--that both have purposes for which they care, and each
can hear the other's call.

Meanwhile, we can already s