divine personality.  But that aspect of His Person, that portion of the fact which feeds the imaginative and volitional life, is the glorious and saving unlikeness of God—­His unthinkable and inexpressible glory; His utter comprehension and unbelievable compassion; His justice which knows no flaw and brooks no evasion and cannot be swerved; His power which may not be withstood and hence is a sure and certain tenderness; His hatred of sin, terrible and flaming, a hatred which will send sinful men through a thousand hells, if they will have them, and can only be saved thereby; His love for men, which is what makes Him hate their sin and leads Him by His very nature as God to walk into hell with the sinner, suffering with him a thousand times more than the sinner is able to understand or know,—­like the Paul who could not wish himself, for himself, in hell, but who did wish himself accursed of God for his brethren’s sake; like Jesus, who, in Gethsemane, would for Himself avoid His cross, but who accepted it and was willing to hang, forsaken of God, upon it, for the lives of men, identifying Himself to the uttermost with their fate.  Yes; it is such a supernal God—­that God who is apart, incredible, awful—­that the soul of humanity craves and needs.

Of course, here again, as throughout these discussions, we are returning to a form of the old dualism.  We cannot seem to help it.  We may construct philosophies like Hegel’s in which thesis and antithesis merge in a higher synthesis; we may use the dual view of the world as representing only a stage, a present achievement in cosmic progress or human understanding.  But that does not alter the incontestable witness of present experience that the religious consciousness is based upon, interwoven with, the sense of the cosmic division without, and the unresolved moral dualism within the individual life.  It is important enough to remember, however, that we have rejected, at least for this generation, the old scholastic theologies founded on this general experience.  Fashions of thought change with significant facility; there is not much of the Absolute about them!  Nevertheless we cannot think with forgotten terms.  Therefore ours is no mechanically divided world where man and God, nature and supernature, soul and body, belong to mutually exclusive territories.  We do not deny the principle of identity.  Hence we have discarded that old view of the world and all the elder doctrines of an absentee creator, a worthless and totally depraved humanity, a legalistic or substitutionary atonement, a magical and non-understandable Incarnation which flowed from it.  But we are not discarding with them that other aspect of the truth, the principle of separateness, nor those value judgments, that perpetual vision of another nature, behind and beneath phenomena, from which the old dualism took its rise.  It is the form which it assumed, the interpretation of experience which it gave, not the facts themselves, obscure but stubborn as they are, which it confessed, that we have dropped.  Identity and difference are still here; man is a part of his world, but he is also apart from it.  God is in nature and in us; God is without and other than nature and most awfully something other than us.