Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/123

This page needs to be proofread.
86
THE CONCEPTION OF GOD

mind — “exhausts and fathoms what we mean by our fellow-being,” we naturally put this and that together, and conclude that he, too, holds the central doctrine of his latest teacher, — the doctrine that all existence is summed and resumed into the enfolding consciousness of one single Inclusive Self; that human selves, and other selves, if others there be, are not selves in at all the same sense that the Inclusive Self is, nor in the meaning that moral common-sense attaches to the word. They are mutually exclusive groups of empirical feelings — merely summaries, more or less partial and fragmentary, of separate items of experience, at best only partially organised. It is He that gives vital unity and real life to all. He alone that embraces all, penetrates and pervades all, and is genuinely organic; He alone is integral and one. Yet He is just as unquestionably all and many; his unity is not in the least excludent, not in the least repellent, but, on the contrary, is infinitely inclusive, absolutely all-embracing. Literally, “His tender mercies are over all his works”; and whatever is at all, is his work, his act, directly. His being encompasses alike perfection and imperfection, evil and good, joy and anguish, the just and the unjust. His is the Harmony of discords actually present, but also actually dissolved; the Peace of conflicts at once raging and stilled; the Love that bears in the bosom of its utterly infinite benignity even malice itself, and atones for it with infinite Pity and by infinite Benevolence; his, finally, is the Eternal Penitence that repents of his sin in its very act, — nay, in its very germination, — and provides