give the two knowings one and the same name!¹ May we not as well drop this indefensible position; cease futile juggling with words, and say that while God transcends us in every imaginable way, there are aspects in which He has graciously 'made man in His image', so that the same names may properly be applied to both Man and God, and denote a real relation and identity?

The fear of attributing to Allah what is unworthy of Him is certainly an honourable one, but Christianity does not transgress the limits. In the matter before us, for example, we are simply asserting a mental need when we say that we cannot value or even imagine an abstract unity, and that the highest Unity must exhibit the highest differentiation. What is gross or material or unworthy of God in this?

(2) It may be objected, that Islam itself asserts the plurality of the attributes, mercy, justice, and so forth, that are possessed by the Divine Unity. But Islam has always and utterly objected to the hypostatizing of those attributes, which is what Christians do.

We have two remarks to make to this. (a) That the assertion of the plurality of the attributes in no respect meets the mental demand that has been spoken of, for, instead of asserting the highest and

most transcendent form of differentiation, we have merely the assertion of the very feeblest possible form conceivable. For attributes are in themselves nothing; apart from the essence they are unreal abstractions. And mercy, justice, etc., are merely so many aspects of the divine action; they might be at will increased or reduced. And this again shows the arbitrary and unreal character of the multiplicity thus asserted. What we want is a multiplicity of differentiations that shall be as real and immutable as the unity itself. (b) Christianity does not 'simply hypostatize attributes' as Islam has misunderstood. This misunderstanding—that the Father personified Justice, the Son Mercy, and so forth—is a total mistake which dates from very far back. It has no foundation in the Bible or in our theology. Both Father and Son are equally to be characterized as 'just' and 'merciful'.

(3) It may be objected that this category of unity-in-difference is only applicable to material beings, not to spiritual beings. But on the contrary we found that the spirituality of those beings increased directly with the differentiation of each grade as we ascended upwards through the inanimate, animate, sensitive, and, finally, rational. What now hinders us, logically and rationally, from taking one further analogous step and saying that, when we come to the highest mode of being—the Divine—where the material gives entire place to the spiritual, we shall find that unity-in-distinction is as applicable as it was to all the lower categories,