to them. Others, again, who have advanced beyond this crudest stage, and who have been accustomed to talk about atoms and ethers, will still find this conception difficult, because they have not been used to thinking of the divine omnipresence. They will talk with the greatest ease and fluency about their views as facts, and discard our view as a metaphysical dream. It will certainly be difficult, if not impossible, to convince them that one theory is no more metaphysical or unscientific than the other, and that it is purely a question of consistent thinking. Others again, like the Spencerians, who have got used to the notion of an omnipresent force, will find grave difficulty in conceiving that force as intelligent; and having totally misconceived what they are pleased to call the "persistence of force,” the notion of creation will be especially obnoxious. Still others will appeal to common sense against a doctrine so bizarre; and this appeal to a judge without jurisdiction will pass for a final settlement. To all such the customary is the clear, and clear because customary. Finally, some will make merry over some aspects of the doctrine, and ask of what great value many of these new souls are. To which it may be enough to say, that none of us have such supreme worth as to make it safe to press this question. But while allowing the unsearchability of these ways of God, and also the many difficulties before which human wisdom is dumb, we still claim that the conception we have presented is the only one adequate to the facts. Here philosophy must adopt the apostle's words, and say, "In him we live, and move, and have our being." If we reject this view, we must adopt some form of deism, or materialism, or atheism, or pantheism; and when we remember the difficulties and implications of these views, we decide for the one we have presented as the most rational, and as attended with fewest difficulties. ence. We may sum up the results of this discussion as follows: Creation is successive rather than single. The divine plan contains the reason why any thing is as it is, and the divine will is the source of all finite existThe finite has no ground of being in itself, but is absolutely and always dependent upon the divine will and purpose. With the exception, therefore, of the free will, it is not to be thought of as offering in any way a barrier to the divine working, since it is but a form of the divine working. It cannot be our purpose, however, to represent this conception to the fancy, or in any way to construe the methods of the divine mind. Has God always created? How comes he to create? To these and similar questions there is no satisfactory answer. Here all human wisdom is at an end, and silence rather than speech is true wisdom. No more is it our purpose to picture the relation of the human and the divine personality. There is great fascination in this problem for mystical minds. Is God a person over against us, as a finite person is over against us? Or is there a unity and identity in the former case which does not exist in the latter? Is our thought a conditioned divine thought? Is our love for God, as Spinoza said, but the love with which God loves himself? Such questions have a value for devout feeling; and as long as the New Testament declares that we are the temples of the Holy Spirit, and heirs with Christ of God, they cannot be charged with irreverence. But they admit of no theoretical answer. Such a feeling of union with the divine, or such a longing after communion with the divine, will always serve to stimulate thought, but it can never do the work of thought; and thought is obliged to rest content with affirming the human and the divine personality as two facts, whose connection is lost in mystery. CHAPTER IX. THE RELATION OF GOD TO TRUTH AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. UR previous discussions have led us to the convic. OUR tion that God is one, personal, omnipresent, eternal, and independent. The meaning of the first two attributes is clear; that of the third and fourth needs a word of explanation. The notion of the divine omnipresence has two factors. The first is the thought of the immediate presence of God with all finite reality. The second is negative. We finite beings are limited in our immediate presence, so that to reach most things we have to pass over more or less of intervening space, or to use some medium of influence. This necessity we feel as a limitation. Now when we teach the divine omnipresence, there is the double purpose, (1) to affirm the immediate presence of God with all things, and, (2) to deny totally this limitation. God has not to cross a space to reach a given point, or to employ any foreign means of connection; but at every point he is present as the living God. It is not in our thought to affirm a bulk of God, as if he filled infinite space with an infinite volume. Such a conception of omnipresence is only the crude attempt of the imagination, and has no value for reflective thought. In like manner the doctrine of the divine eternity is as much negative as positive. We feel time, also, as a limitation. We are not sufficient to ourselves. We weary, grow old, and pass away. The chief aim in ascribing eternity to God is the negation of these limits which we find in time. The thought of eternity as simply filling out infinite time by an infinite duration is a product of the fantasy rather than of the reason. But it is not our purpose dwell upon these points. The other attribute, that of independence, contains a question of much speculative interest—the relation of God to truth. He is independent of things, but is he independent of truth? He founds and creates the world of things? does he also create the system of rational principles? What is the meaning of the divine independence, or absoluteness? The same question also appears in the theological discussions concerning the divine omnipotence. Is omnipotence only the greatest of possible powers, or is it truly unconditioned power? Can it do all things, or only the doable? Can it make the impossible possible, and conversely? or are the bounds of the possible determined by some bottomless necessity, to which even God must submit? The same question appears in moral discussions. Does God make the right, or only recognize it? If he makes the right, then he is himself above right; but in the other case we seem to trespass on the divine independence, in that we set up a standard which is independent of him, and which he must recognize. Indeed, to think about God at all seems a limitation; for that implies that the laws of thought and the forms of our conception are valid for the absolute. Without this assumption, all possibility of conceiving any thing whatever about the absolute falls |