Problems of Immanence: studies critical and constructive

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ce at least, been both complicated and accentuated by the displacement of Deism. If, as we have argued on a previous occasion, there is a certain causal connection between Deism and a somewhat sombre outlook upon the world, on the other hand the existence of evil seemed to fit in better with a view of God which represented Him

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s own creation. "No one can enter into the house of the strong, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong"; and since a direct overpowering of God by Satan is out of the question, is not the assumption to which we are driven this-that the Strong One is absent while His goods are being spoiled, and that it is this very absence of which the spoiler has taken advantage? Somehow, we feel, if He were really present-as present as the d

thought that, however mysterious God's standing afar off might be, by and by, when He drew nigh again, He would deal out even-handed justice to all; but such comfort is not open to those who explicitly deny God's remoteness, but on the contrary assert that He is the Presence from which there is no escaping. And the fact of evil, physical an

ce of Theism to attribute to Him, and which alone could render Him an object of religion, or even of interest, to mankind." Sometimes in accents of wistful {90} wonder, sometimes in tones of revolt and defiant unbelief, the question is asked:-Why does God allow dire calamity, painful disease, earthquakes and shipwrecks, and accidents of

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ly obvious. It would be a positive relief were it

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a practitioner doing his best for a wilful patient, with poor applianc

calamity that may have befallen us, but makes it easier to bear; but an indifferent God is equivalent to no God at all-or, as we have previously expressed it, a God who does not care, does not count. The mere sense that He was sorry for us would lighten the stroke of fate which He had not been able to avert; but if the truth is that He might have averted it by the simple exerci

eating the world, He withdrew from it to an inconceivable {92} distance, it is none the less His handiwork; if it is in and through His absence that the cosmic mechanism has got out of gear, it is yet He who willed to be so absent, well knowing what results would supervene; if a power other than He and h

rongly put forward by Mill, according to whom natural theo

s) have, I am satisfied, never really believed that Governor to be, in the strict sense of the term, omnipotent. They have always saved

the limitation of His power?" he r

angements by which His purposes could be more completely fulfilled; or else, the purposes might have been more fully attained, but the Creator

control, and which, therefore, so far from having been called into being by Him, must be thought of as existing independently of Him. Had He really created the raw material from which He was to frame the universe, He would of course have created some medium perfectly plastic to His hand and adapted to His purposes; but if He merely operates on matter from witho

in, e.g., would become an utterly meaningless term. But if omnipotence is limited-which sounds, we admit, a contradiction in terms-we ask once more, In what way and by whom? To that question we have no other reply than the one given in our first chapter, viz., that when we predicate limitation of the Deity, we must mean self-limitation. In creating the universe, we said, God made a distinction between His creation and Himself, and to that extent limited His Being-for the universe is not identical with God; we now add that in endowing man with an existen

fallacy according to which God, being the Author of all, is the causative Agent answerable for all the happenings in His universe, for all human pain and all human sin. Where freedom is, there is responsibility. For let us bring the matter down from the abstract to the concrete: if a dreadful railway accident is caused through the momentary mental lapse of a signalman who has been overtaxed by excessive working hours, how is the responsibility God's? It obviously belongs to those who impo

nd more general question, Must we, in view of the facts of life, surrender the idea of the Divine benevolence? It is quite true that the evidence of purpose discernible in the whole structure of the universe proclaims the Deity

rk. We really cannot plead such inexperience of right and wrong, such ignorance of moral safety and moral danger, as would furnish a true parallel between playing with temptation and playing with cyanide of potassium. In setting before us "life and good, and death and evil," God has as distinctly placed within our hearts the moral intuition which, says, "Therefore choose life." But why, the questioner proceeds, have made sin even possible? Because, we answer, not to have done so would have made morality impossible. It cannot be too often, or too plainly, pointed out that just as the only alternative to purpose is chance, so the only alternative to liberty is necessity. That is to say, God could no d

poetic insight in Andersen's story of the Nightingale-the immeasurable difference between the artificial bird and the real songster, whose melodious raptures somehow touched a chord in the listener which all the nicely-calculated trills and cadences of the ingenious mechanical toy failed to set in motion. In like manner we repeat that the power to determine his own course raises man to a plane incomparably higher than he could have occupied as an automaton. The same faculty of free choice which in its abuse makes the sinner, in its right {99} exercise furnishes forth the saint. All that we mean by moral progress, by "the steady gain of man," his rise to more exalted ideals, his conquest of baser appetites-all that makes the history of the race a thrilling and uplifting drama-is bound u

ystery. It could not be otherwise; that we, with our limited vision and circumscribed understanding, should be able to solve that mystery with any completeness, is not even to be imagined. Nevertheless, we may claim that we have at least obtained a glimpse of the purpose of God in conferring

says on Reli

bid,

memechanmenon." Compare also Browning's unhappy p

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