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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1911. Excerpt:... The Absolute End 453 that idea is Love. But here again we trench on the mystical, the ineffable, and can only speak in parables. Turning to Christianity as exhibiting this truth in the purest form we know, we find it has one great secret--dying to live, and one great mystery--the incarnation. The love of God in creating the world implies both. Leiblichkeit ist das Ende aller Wege Gottes, said an old German theologian. The world is God's selflimitation, self-renunciation might we venture to say? And so God is love. And what must that world be that is worthy of such love? The only worthy object of love is just love: it must then be a world that can love God. But love is free: in a ready-made world then it could have no place. Only as we learn to know God do we learn to love him: hence the long and painful discipline of evolution, with its dying to live--the converse process to incarnation--the putting off the earthly for the likeness of God. In such a realm of ends we trust "that God is love indeed, and love creation's final law." We cannot live or move without faith, that is clear. Is it not then rational to believe in the best, we ask; and can there be a better? » SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES. I. The Mean1ng Of Cont1ngency. (Lect. 1v. p. 76.) While preparing these lectures for the press I have been asked by a friendly critic for a definition of contingency. Possibly the request was prompted by the conviction, commonly enough entertained, that there is really no contingency in the world at all; and this, it is supposed, any serious attempt to define contingency would sooner or later disclose. Absolute chance is certainly nonsense; and relative chance, it may be said, is after all not really chance, and implies nothing but ignorance or--it may be--irrelevance t...