some special form of religious belief.  Intuition is not what the religious mind means by Faith, in the accepted sense of belief in a doctrine or a deity, which is to be neither criticized nor reasoned about.  Religion demands “what passeth knowledge.”  Furthermore, it seeks a reality that abides above the world of Change, “The same yesterday, to-day, and for ever,” to which it appeals.  The religious consciousness finds itself most reluctant to admit the reality of Change, and this, we must remember, is the fundamental principle of Bergson’s thought.  Faber, one of the noblest hymn writers, well expresses this attitude: 

“O, Lord, my heart is sick,
Sick of this everlasting change,
And Life runs tediously quick
Through its unresting race and varied range. 
Change finds no likeness of itself in Thee,
And makes no echo in Thy mute eternity.”

For Bergson, God reveals Himself in the world of Time, in the very principle of Change.  He is not “a Father of lights in Whom is no variableness nor shadow of turning.”

It has been said that the Idea of God is one of the objects of philosophy, and this is true, if, by God, we agree to mean the principle of the universe, or the Absolute.  Unity is essential to the Idea of God.  For the religious consciousness, of course, God’s existence is a necessary one, not merely contingent.  It views Him as eternal and unchangeable.  But if we accept the Bergsonian philosophy, God cannot be regarded as “timeless,” or as “perfect” in the sense of being “eternal” and “complete.”  He is, so to speak, realizing Himself in the universe, and is not merely a unity which sums up the multiplicity of time existence.  Further, He must be a God who acts freely and creatively and who is in time.  Trouble has arisen in the past over the relation of “temporal” and “eternal”—­the former being regarded as appearance.  For Bergson, this difficulty does not arise; there is, for him, no such dualism.  His God is not exempt from Change, He is not to be conceived as existing apart from and independent of the world.  Indeed, for him, God would seem to be merely a focus imaginarius of Life and Spirit, a “hypostatization” of la duree.  He cannot be regarded as the loving Father of the human race whom He has begotten or created in order that intelligent beings “may glorify Him and enjoy Him for ever.”  Bergson does not offer us a God, personal, loving, and redemptive, as the Christian religious consciousness demands or imagines.  He does not, and can not, affirm Christian Theism, for he considers that the facts do not warrant the positing of a self-conscious and personal Individual in the only sense in which we, from our experience, can understand these words.  God is pure, creative activity, a flowing rather than a fountain head; a continuity of emanation, not a centre from which things emanate.  For Bergson, God is anthropomorphic—­as He must necessarily be for us all—­ but Bergson’s is anthropomorphism of a subtle kind.