Diverse religions offer us, it is true, only too often the most bizarre and monstrous representations of the divine essence.  But we must not confine ourselves to a superficial consideration and consequent rejection of these representations and the religious practices which follow upon them as being engendered by superstition, by error, or by imposture, or even by a simple piety, and so neglect their essential value.  There is need to discover in these representations and in these practices their relation with truth.

II.—­GOD THE UNIVERSAL

For us, who have religion, God is a familiar being, a substantial truth existing in our subjective consciousness.  But, scientifically considered, God is a general and abstract term.  The philosophy of religion it is which develops and grasps the divine nature and which teaches us what God is.  God is a familiar idea, but an idea which has still to be scientifically developed.

The result of philosophic examination is that God is the absolute truth, the universal in and for itself, embracing all things and in which all things subsist.  And in regard to this assertion, we may appeal in the first place to the religious consciousness, and to its conviction that God is the absolute truth whence all things proceed, whither they all return, upon which all things depend, and in respect of which nothing can possess a true and absolute independence.

The heart may very well be full of this representation of God, but science is not built up of what is in the heart.  The object of science is that which has arisen to the level of consciousness, and of thinking consciousness that is, in other words, that which has attained to the form of thought.

In so much as He is the universal, God is, for us, in relation to development, Being enclosed in itself, Being at unity with itself.  When we say God is Being enclosed in itself, we enunciate a proposition which is bound to a development which we await.  But this envelopment of God in Himself which we have called His universality we must not conceive, relatively to God Himself and His content, as an abstract universality, outside of which, and as opposed to which, the particular has an independent existence.

So we must consider this universal as an absolutely concrete universal.  This sense of fulness is the sense in which God is one, and there is but one God—­that is to say, God is not one merely by contrast with other gods, but because it is He that is the One, that is, God.

The things which are, the developments of the worlds of nature and of mind, show a multiplicity of forms and an infinite variety of existences.  But whatever may be their difference of degree, of force, of content, these things have no true independence; their being is consequent, and, so to speak, contingent.  When we predicate being of particular things, it is not of Being which is absolute that we speak—­Being of and from itself; that is, God—­but a borrowed being, a semblance of being.