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fessor Le Conte has expounded some of them impressively.^[1] It is doubtless with a view to such conceptions that ministers of religion nowadays so often say, “The evolution of man is well enough, if biologists will only leave us a Personal God at the beginning of the process.” But that if, when conjoined with that consequent, is an if of tragic meaning: the Power behind evolution, were the whole of man evolved, could never be a personal God — in short, would not be a God at all. For it is the essence of a person to stand in a relation with beings having an autonomy, in whom he recognises rights, toward whom he acknowledges duties. No conception of a professed God that fails to give this moral quality, can by providing continuance of existence, however lasting, compensate for the loss; since it should never be forgotten, that, when moral freedom is cancelled, immortality can have no moral worth, no genuinely human dignity, and consequently cannot answer to what we mean by the hope of Eternal Life. But hope of immortality as Life Eternal and faith toward Duty — fealty to our human dignity as moral free-agents, quickened by fealty to God as the grounding Type of that freedom — are the very soul of Christian Faith. The impartial philosophical observer cannot but be filled

1. See, especially, the statement in his contribution to The Conception of God, pp. 75-78.