him any generic nature whatever; he can be classed with nothing. There
is a sense, then, in which philosophic theism makes us outsiders and
keeps us foreigners in relation to God, in which, at any rate, his
connexion with us appears as unilateral and not reciprocal. His action
can affect us, but he can never be affected by our reaction. Our
relation, in short, is not a strictly social relation. Of course in
common men's religion the relation is believed to be social, but that
is only one of the many differences between religion and theology.

This essential dualism of the theistic view has all sorts of
collateral consequences. Man being an outsider and a mere subject to
God, not his intimate partner, a character of externality invades the
field. God is not heart of our heart and reason of our reason, but our
magistrate, rather; and mechanically to obey his commands, however
strange they may be, remains our only moral duty. Conceptions of
criminal law have in fact played a great part in defining our
relations with him. Our relations with speculative truth show the
same externality. One of our duties is to know truth, and rationalist
thinkers have always assumed it to be our sovereign duty. But in
scholastic theism we find truth already instituted and established
without our help, complete apart from our knowing; and the most we
can do is to acknowledge it passively and adhere to it, altho such
adhesion as ours can make no jot of difference to what is adhered to.
The situation here again is radically dualistic. It is not as if the
world came to know itself, or God came to know himself, partly through
us, as pantheistic idealists have maintained, but truth exists _per
se_ and absolutely, by God's grace and decree, no matter who of us
knows it or is ignorant, and it would continue to exist unaltered,
even though we finite knowers were all annihilated.