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So that an aristocratic or theistic system in order to deserve respect must discard its sinister apologies for evil and clearly propose such an order of existences, one superposed upon the other, as should involve no suffering on any of its levels. The services required of each must involve no injury to any; to perform them should be made the servant's spontaneous and specific ideal.
The contribution of Plato to the theistic argument was, characteristically, the form of the "Ontological proof" which has been called "Idealogical." This process is a very natural development for Plato's Dialectic.
Every attempt to minimise the struggle of those earlier ages has failed. At a time when there was no possibility of "spiritual advantage" there was acute consciousness of pain, the struggle and suffering were prodigious. Theistic literature of the last half century, growing more weary and more wistful in each decade, reflects the increasing difficulty.
Ahura Mazda seems to be a development of the deity who appears as Varuṇa in India though he has not the same name, and the main difference between Indian and Iranian religion lies in this, that the latter was systematized by a theistic reformer who exalted one deity above the others, whereas in India, where there was more religious vitality, polytheistic and pantheistic fancies flourished uncurbed and the greatest reformer, the Buddha, was not a theist.
Let it not be thought, however, that we do not appreciate the living spark of theistic truth which this movement represents, combined, as it is, with hostility to the caste system, which is India's greatest curse, and its antagonism to many of the superstitions and unworthy ceremonials of the ancestral faith.
The absolute mind which they offer us, the mind that makes our universe by thinking it, might, for aught they show us to the contrary, have made any one of a million other universes just as well as this. You can deduce no single actual particular from the notion of it. It is compatible with any state of things whatever being true here below. And the theistic God is almost as sterile a principle.
Nothing whatever is to be respected. Among the opponents of the Hegelian philosophy the members of the "theistic school," who have above been designated as semi-Hegelians, approximate it most closely.
This view of evolution harmonizes well with Theistic conceptions; not, of course, that this harmony is brought forward as an argument in its favour generally, but it will have weight with those who are convinced that Theism reposes upon solid grounds of reason as the rational view of the universe.
If man realised all that that belief involved it might indeed rob his mind of all strength to struggle against the forces that make for his destruction. Fortunately no race of people could act upon the logical implications of the theistic theory and maintain its existence. In practice, as well as in theory, theism has had to come to terms with facts.
In our examination of these examples of the theistic argument in the Fathers, it cannot escape our notice that they occur much more frequently, and in more developed and conventional form in the West than in the East under the influence of Rome than under that of Alexandria and the Orient.
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