God not only gives, but also takes, not only communicates with but is communicated with, not only knows but is known, not only speaks but hears—all of which is a species of passivity and contradicts tanzih. Or you must say that man's intelligence is as mechanical and as illusory as his will: he seems to hear, but it is only God hearing Himself; he seems to speak but it is only God speaking to Himself; he seems to know, but really he only dreams. His individual consciousness is an illusion—his very individuality and selfhood vanishes, and he becomes like a character in a novel, a thing that seems to act and think and speak, but really only exists in the mind of its writer. So that if tanzih is incapable of being harmonized with the creation of nature, it is doubly incapable of being harmonized with the creation of any spiritual being such as man.

And in fact we often see, in the history of Islamic thought, men who have in their very insistence on absolute tanzih positively asserted this very thing, namely, that only Allah exists, and that all other existence is illusory, a semblance. This is the thought that underlies their name for God—Al Haqq. They mean that no other being has reality or existence. These men, whether they know it or not, are pure pantheists, their belief resembling the Indian philosophic pantheism, whereby all that we see is Maya (illusion). Thus easily does pure tanzih fall to its extreme opposite. In the language of these men, tawhid did not merely mean calling God the One, but calling Him the Only—that is,

denying reality or even existence to all phenomena whatsoever.

Such are the terrible difficulties, intellectual and moral, into which the Islamic doctrine of God falls, especially in relation to the creation of man.

But the difficulties seem almost to vanish when we conceive of God by the aid of the mind of Christ, and know Him as Father, Son and Spirit. We have already seen how this trinitarian conception as Love facilitates the conception of Him as Creator of the world generally. How much more then of man, particularly—man, who alone of all creation has, decisively, the power of memory and forethought, of self-consciousness and of other-consciousness, of conscience, rational thought—in one word, who alone of all created things (as far as we know) has spirit, and is capable of prayer, gratitude, and love; who is like unto God, 'in His image' in these respects. We note the following considerations:

1. If God created a being capable of love, while He Himself is incapable of real love, He created a being greater than Himself; for 'love is the greatest thing in the world.' But we have seen God has love—is love; therefore the creation of a loving creature occasions no surprise but the reverse.

2. For creation, if it has any significance, must have for its end the manifestation of the glory of God—by which we do not mean His power, for that were by itself and in itself a barren display—but His love and His power in His love. Therefore