unsupported, it must fall to the ground, or into some other
planet, or into a sun, or go on revolving round the earth or some
other heavenly body-or not be personal. None of those
whose opinions will carry weight will assign a position either in
some country on this earth, or yet again in space, to Jesus
Christ, but this involves the rendering meaningless of all
expressions which involve his personality.

The Christian conception, therefore, of the Deity proves when
examined with any desire to understand our own meaning (and what
lawlessness so great as the attempt to impose words upon our
understandings which have no lawful settlement within them?) to
be no less a contradiction in terms than the Pantheistic
conception. It is Atheistic, as offering us a God which is not a
God, inasmuch as we can conceive of no such being, nor of
anything in the least like it. It is, like Pantheism, an
illusion, which can be believed only by those who repeat a
formula which they have learnt by heart in a foreign language of
which they understand nothing, and yet aver that they believe it.
There are doubtless many who will say that this is possible, but
the majority of my readers will hold that no proposition can be
believed or disbelieved until its nature is understood.

It may perhaps be said that there is another conception of God
possible, and that we may see him as personal, without at the
same time believing that he has any actual tangible existence.
Thus we personify hope, truth, and justice, without intending to
convey to anyone the impression that these qualities are women,
with flesh and blood. Again, we do not think of Nature as an
actual woman, though we call her one; why may we not conceive of