Abram Herbert Lewis - Spiritual Sabbathism

38 SPIRITUAL SABBATHISM
a figure of speech, for human emotions can not in
strictness be attributed to him. He is omniscient,
omnipotent, infinite, timeless, unchangeable, absolute.
But since these attributes, taken abstractly,
seem to nullify each other, he is in very truth indefinable
save by negatives, and in strictness we have
no right to call him either personal or impersonal.
Silence is our only answer to questions as to the absolute.
Such are the two extremes to which the religious
imagination is carried by the antithesis of which we
are speaking, and those which are instinctively associated
with it as corollaries. But the soul can
not rest content with either picture alone, with either
picture conceived intellectually. The religious paradox
insists that God is at once timeless and in time, at
once inscrutable and known, at once passionless and
loving, at once and in some sense active and at rest.
Later we shall see in what way the Bible offers a
spiritual solution of the problem.
§6. The contrast in philosophy.—We next inquire
whether philosophers have achieved any general
agreement among themselves as to the definition
of time and eternity.
Every philosophy has tried to reconcile the
temporal with the eternal, the transitory with
the permanent, the changing with the immut-