While in our last three chapters we have been dealing with certain theories which implicitly or explicitly deny the Divine Personality, and while an impersonal God can be, as we have already seen, of no value for religion, there is no mistaking the fact that this very question--whether, _i.e._, it is possible and legitimate for us to think of God as personal--constitutes one of the most typical of modern "difficulties." It is probably correct to say that this difficulty, like others we have reviewed, dates practically from the collapse of Deism, a creed which possessed a certain hard lucidity satisfying to many for the very reason that it required no very profound insight for its understanding. That a Deity localised in a far-away heaven, seated on a celestial throne and surrounded by an angelic court, should be a person, like any other sovereign, presented no problem to the understanding; but if God was not merely transcendent but also immanent--not merely somewhere but in some indefinable manner everywhere--then to predicate personality of {75} such a One seemed a very paradox. In one of Feuillet's novels there occurs a phrase which sums up in a few expressive words a very common spiritual misadventure: the hero says, "_J'avais vu disparaitre parmi les nuages la tete de ce bon vieillard qu'on appelle Dieu_"--"I had seen the head of that good old man called God disappear amongst the clouds." His naive material conception of the Eternal had dissolved--and dissolved into nothingness. May we not surmise that nine times out of ten this is precisely what has happened when we hear the question asked, "But how _can_ God be personal?"