For myself, I must admit that I have never succeeded to my own satisfaction in fusing the two conceptions. Yet I do not profess to be content with their separation. The attribution of personality to God, though much truer, I think, than the denial of it, is manifestly inadequate to the full reality we are struggling to express. Some of the greatest religious teachers, Christian and non-Christian, that the world has seen have more or less explicitly held both, or at least have leaned towards neither exclusively. This is surely true, for example, of Plato the Greek philosopher, of Philo the platonising Jew, of St. Paul the Christian Apostle, of St. Augustine the patristic theologian. Nor (so far as I know), has religious mysticism ever felt the least difficulty in bridging the chasm by which, in the eyes of discursive reason, the two conceptions seem to be divided. This may well represent the highest wisdom. But, the argument of these lectures has a narrower scope: and when, in the course of them, I speak of God, I mean something other than an Identity wherein all differences vanish, or a Unity which includes but does not transcend the differences which it somehow holds in solution. I mean a God whom men can love, a God to whom men can pray, who takes sides, who has purposes and preferences, whose attributes, howsoever conceived, leave unimpaired the possibility of a personal relation between Himself and those whom He has created. But is not this (it may be objected) the degradation of religion? What is a deity so conceived but the old tribal god, with his character improved and his local limitations swept away? If God be not the Absolute, can he be more than a magnified man? Can you hope to cleanse these religious conceptions from the mud in which they once so rankly flourished? Now there are plenty of unsolved, and perhaps insoluble, difficulties involved in the religious, or indeed in any other, conception of God. But I hardly count among them the lowly origin and crime-stained history of religious development. On this point you will be able to form a better opinion as these lectures proceed. But, in the meanwhile, it may be observed that though no tragic accompaniments attach to the growth of a purely Absolutist philosophy, this by no means implies that metaphysics is better than religion. It is true that, for the sake of a purely logical Absolute, no man has been moved to do what a later and higher morality condemns—to placate it, for example, with bloody rites or obscene revels. But this is because, for the sake of such an Absolute, no man has ever yet been moved to do anything at all. A belief in it may be the conclusion of our intellectual labours; but hardly (as it seems to me) their motive or their reward. IV Let me now bring this introductory lecture to a close by adding to what, so far, must seem a bare and obscure suggestion of what my argument _is_, a warning hint as to what, at first sight, it might seem to be, but is _not_.