Jesus, Vol.  CXXX, 1912.] To this it was replied that, for Catholic theology, God is not merely the source from which the river springs, God does not develop Himself to a world but He causes it to appear by a kind of creation quite different from that of Bergson.  Bergson’s God is not the God of pantheism, because, for him, the Deity is immanent in nature, not identifiable with it.  A true account of the Absolute would, for him, take the form of history.  Human history has a vital meaning for him.  God is not omnipotent; He is a fighter who takes sides.  He is not a “potter-God” with a clay world.  The world involves a limiting of God, and theology has always found this its most difficult problem, for the evils or defects against which the Creator is waging war are evils and defects in a world of His own creating.  Speaking in 1914, at the Edinburgh Philosophical Society, Bergson remarked that God might be looked upon as “a Creator of creators.”  Such a view, more explicitly worked out, might bring him into line with the religious attempt to reconcile the divine action with our own work and freedom.  Our wills are ours, but in some mystic way religion believes they may become His also, and that we may be “fellow-labourers together with God.”  The religious view of the perfection of the Divine, its omniscience and omnipotence, has always been hard to reconcile with free will.  Christian theology, when based on the perfection of the Divine nature, has always tended to be determinist.  Indeed, free will has been advocated rather as an explanation of the presence of evil (our waywardness as in opposition to the will of God) than as the privilege and necessary endowment of a spiritual being, and so the really orthodox religious mind has been forced to seek salvation in self-surrender and has found consolation in reliance on the “grace” or “active good will” of God.  Thus many theologians in an attempt to reconcile this with human freedom speak mystically, nevertheless confidently, of “the interaction of Grace and Free-Will.”

The acceptance of Creative Evolution involves the acceptance of a God who expresses Himself in creative action called forth by changing situations.  It cannot regard Evolution as merely the unrolling in time of the eternally complete, as in the view of monistic idealism.  We find in Bergson, however, two hints which suggest that some vague idealistic conception has been present to his mind.  For instance, in speaking of Time in relation to God, we find him suggesting that “the whole of history might be contained in a very short time for a consciousness at a higher degree of tension than our own, which should watch the development of humanity while contracting it, so to speak, into the great phases of its evolution.” [Footnote:  Matter and Memory, p. 275 (Fr. p. 231).] This remark seems an echo of the words of the old Hebrew poet: 

     “For a thousand years in Thy sight
      Are but as yesterday when it is past,
      And as a watch in the night.”