should hear him."

I replied that I really did not know what his views were, beyond having a
vague notion that he was an Atheist of a rather pronounced type, but that
I would go and hear him when I had an opportunity.

Mr. Conway had passed beyond the emotional Theism of Mr. Voysey, and talk
with him did something towards widening my views on the question of a
Divine Existence. I re-read carefully Mansel's Bampton Lectures, and
found in them much to provoke doubt, nothing to induce faith. Take the
following phrases, and think whither they carry us. Dean Mansel is
speaking of God as Infinite, and he says: "That a man can be conscious of
the Infinite is, then, a supposition which, in the very terms in which it
is expressed, annihilates itself.... The Infinite, if it is to be
conceived at all, must be conceived as potentially everything and
actually nothing; for if there is anything in general which it cannot
become, it is thereby limited; and if there is anything in particular
which it actually is, it is thereby excluded from being any other thing.
But again, it must also be conceived as actually everything and
potentially nothing: for an unrealised potentiality is likewise a
limitation. If the infinite can be that which it is not, it is by that
very possibility marked out as incomplete and capable of a higher
perfection. If it is actually everything, it possesses no characteristic
feature by which it can be distinguished from anything else and discerned
as an object of consciousness."

Could any argument more thoroughly Atheistic be put before a mind which
dared to think out to the logical end any train of thought? Such
reasoning can lead but to one of two ends: despair of truth and
consequent acceptance of the incomprehensible as Divine, or else the