"We must not fall down and worship," writes one of these philosophers, "as the source of our life and virtue, the image which our own minds have set up. Why is such idolatry any better than that of the old wood and stone? If we worship the creations of our minds, why not also those of our hands? The one is, indeed, a more refined self-adoration than the other; but the radical error remains the same in both. The old idolaters were wrong, not because they worshipped themselves, but because they worshipped their creation as if it were their creator; and how can any anthropomorphic theory 'escape the same condemnation'?"[14] The writer does not see that God can only be thought of as wise and righteous and free because the mind of man is His creation, so that His being thus thought of can be no proof that He is _its_ creation. The fact that we can think of God as wise and righteous and free is no evidence that He is an image which our own minds have set up. The man who draws such an inference from such a premiss can be no dispassionate reasoner. And certainly the fact that we can think of God as possessed of intellectual and moral perfections is no reason for our not falling down and worshipping Him, and no evidence that our doing so is idolatry. To fall down and worship any being whom we do not know to possess these characteristics is what would clearly be idolatry. And this idolatry is what the philosophers to whom I refer are manifestly chargeable with encouraging. When they have rejected the living, personal, righteous, loving God, in whom humanity has so long trusted, they can only suggest as a substitute for Him a mysterious Power which is wholly unknown, and even unknowable. Great is their simplicity if they fancy that they can persuade men to receive any such god as that, or if they fancy that men would be any better for a faith so vague and empty. To believe in we know not what, is directly contrary to reason; to worship it would be "an idolatry no better than that of the old wood and stone." What we know is often not the creation of our minds: the unknowable is in itself nothing at all to us, and, as a thought, is always the mere creation of our minds; it is different for each creature, each mind; it is the mere result and reflection of our finiteness. There can be no unknown or unknowable to an infinite mind. To worship what is unknowable would be, therefore, simply to worship our own ignorance--one of the creations of our minds least worthy, perhaps, of being worshipped. There is, at least, no kind of worship less entitled "to escape condemnation," even as anthropomorphic idolatry, than the worship of the Unknowable,--the god proposed to us by some as the alone true God, belief in whom--perhaps I should rather say, belief in which--is to be the final and perfect reconciliation of science and religion. [14] Barrett's Physical Ethics, p. 225.