The living God, the human God, is reached not by the way of reason but by the way of love and of suffering. Reason rather separates us from Him. It is not possible to know Him in order that afterwards we may love Him; we must begin by loving Him, longing for Him, hungering for Him, before knowing Him. The knowledge of God proceeds from the love of God, and it is a knowledge that has little or nothing of the rational in it. For God is indefinable. To seek to define Him is to claim to limit Him in our mind--that is to say, to kill Him. In so far as we attempt to define Him, we are confronted by Nothingness. The idea of God which the would-be rational theodicy presents us with is merely an hypothesis, like the hypothesis of the ether, for example. The ether is, in effect, merely a hypothetical entity, which is of value only in so far as it explains that which by means of it we seek to explain--light, or electricity, or universal gravitation--and only so far as these facts cannot be explained in any other way. Similarly the idea of God is also an hypothesis which is of value only in so far as we explain by means of it that which we seek to explain--the essence and existence of the Universe--and only so long as these cannot be explained better in some other way. And since in reality we explain the Universe neither better nor worse with this idea than without it, the idea of God, the supreme _petitio principii_, fails of its purpose. But if the ether is nothing but an hypothesis intended to explain light, air on the other hand is a thing that is directly felt; and even though it did not enable us to explain sound, we should have a direct sensation of it, and, above all, of the lack of it in moments of suffocation or air-hunger. And in the same way, God Himself, not the idea of God, may become a directly felt reality; and although the idea of Him may not enable us to explain either the existence or the essence of the Universe, we have at times the direct feeling of God, above all in moments of spiritual suffocation. And this feeling--mark it well, for herein lies its tragicness and the whole tragic sense of life--is a feeling of hunger for God, of lack of God. To believe in God is, in the first instance, to wish that there may be a God, not to be able to live without Him.