30 
Do You Believe in God? 
Cara Soror, 
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. 
You are quite right , as usual. True, we have gone over a 
great deal of the ground in various learned disquisitions on 
Gods, Angels, Elves, et hoc genus omne. 
But God with a capital G in the singular is a totally 
different pair of Bluchers-nicht wahr? 
Let me go back just for a moment to the meaning of 
belief. We agreed that the word was senseless except as it 
implies an opinion , instinct, conviction-what you please!-so 
fIrmly entrenched in our natures that we act automatically as 
if it were 'true' and 'certain without error', perhaps even 'of 
the essence of truth'. (Browning discusses this in Mr. Sludge 
the Medium. ) Good: the fIeld is clear for an enquiry into this 
word 'God' . 
We fInd ourselves in trouble from the start. 
We must defIne, and to defIne is to limit; and to limit is to 
reduce 'God' to 'a God' or at best 'the God'. 
He must be omniscient 
omnipotent 
and 
omnipresent (8) ; yet to such a Being no purpose would be 
possible; so that all the apologies for the existence of "evil" 
crash. If there be opposites of any kind, there can be no 
consistency. He cannot be Two ; He must be One; yet , as is 
obvious, he isn't. 
How do the Hindu philosophers try to get out of this 
quag? 'Evil' is 'illusion'; has no 'real' existence. Then what is 
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