ENDS AND MEANS
two illegitimate children called respectively Power and
Glory—the long succession of divinely justified cranks and
lunatics and criminals comes marching down through
history into the present time. Belief in a personal God
has released an enormous amount of energy directed
towards good ends; but it has probably released an equal
amount of energy directed towards ends that were silly,
or mad, or downright evil. It has also led to that enormous
over-valuation of the individual ego, which is so charac-
teristic of Western popular philosophy. All the great
religions have taught the necessity of transcending per-
sonality; but the Christians have made it particularly
difficult for themselves to act upon this teaching. They
have accompanied the injunction that men should lose
their lives in order to save them by the assertion that
God himself is a person and that personal values are the
highest that we can know.
A personal deity tends to be regarded as completely
transcendent, as somebody out there^ apart from the per-
cipient and different from him. At various times in the
history of Christendom, thinkers have insisted with par-
ticular emphasis upon the incommensurable otherness of
God. Augustine, Calvin, Kierkegaard and, in our own
day, Earth have dwelt emphatically and at length upon
this theme. The doctrine of the complete transcendence
and otherness of God is probably untrue and its results
in the lives of those who believed it have always been
extremely undesirable. God being completely other is
regarded as being capable of anything—even (in Kierke-
gaard's phrase) of thfc most monstrous 'teleological sus-
pensions of morality.' Again, belief in the otherness of
God entails belief that grace alone is effective in procuring
salvation and that works and a systematic cultivation of the
inner life are useless. There is nothing fortuitous in the
fact that the first and most ruthless capitalists were men
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