tion of God, I could not hold to
the one which I had worked out in the letter.

If you have not seen the ex-President's book, you will, I am sure, enjoy
it more than I did, but I doubt whether you will profit as much by it,
for it verges towards your lines and away from mine; and so it set me to
studying as it will not you, with the result of rejecting the new
conception of God which I had worked out for myself, but with it I threw
over the old one and ceased to believe in the existence of a conscious,
personal divinity. Of course, my faith in the existence of a spiritual
world and hope for a future life in it went with the god.

Dr. Williamson Smith and you are entirely correct in the contention that
something cannot come out of nothing: but I no longer pretend that it
can and I now see that the stones which have been thrown at me by you
both and others have come from glass houses; for this is really the
pretension of orthodox theologians. They affirm that the universe was
created by God out of nothing, but produce no scrap of evidence for His
existence, and even if they could prove that He exists, they would have
to admit that He came out of nothing, or at least from something which
did so.

It is indeed true that I am unable to tell what matter, force and motion
came from, or if I agree with most physicists that they arose from
ether, I cannot give its derivative; but, granting that I am as
incapable of proving their existence as you are of proving the existence
of the Christian trinity, nevertheless I have this immense advantage
over you, that I can prove that everything both physical and psychical
(including man and his civilization) entering into the constitution of
the universe, lives, moves and has its being in my divine
trinity--matter, force and motion: whereas you cannot prove that
anything is indebted for what it is to your divine trinity--Father, Son
and Spirit: therefore I insist that your trinity is a symbol of mine.

What is true of the Christian trinity is true of all the divinities of
the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion. The Jews live with no
reference to the Christian God, or at least not with any to his second
and third persons, and neither Christians nor Jews do so in the case of
either the Mohammedan or Buddhistic divinity, and so on, all around the
whole circle of gods.

But no representative of any god lives without constant reference to
mine, of which yours and all the others