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his philosophy, not to prove the existence of God. Before it, and the notion of creation it involves, were formulated men believed in Deity; and if it has lived long as a buttress to faith, it began to be as a creature of knowledge.

It would, within the limits possible to us here, only burden our argument were we to pursue the point further or illustrate it in fuller detail. All that is needed meanwhile is to note what has been proved the idea of creation did not create the belief in God. The belief has lived where men had no theory of creation, or one that was not theistic. Further, creation by God need not be construed as the work of a "manlike artificer"; where He has been best conceived, it has been otherwise construed. Again, the idea of contrivance or design in nature was not theistic, but scientific or cosmic in its origin, the discovery of men anxious to explain the universe, not of men anxious to prove the being of God. A change in this idea may affect our cosmic conception, but it should not touch or concern our conception of the Deity. What did not create the belief in God need not destroy it. But to determine this point is only to come face to face with another and more fundamental matter the way in which we are to conceive God as related to nature, and as active in creation.

This, is the

2. How are God and nature related? Must we conceive creation by Deity as an anthropomorphic, or "manlike" process, say of architecture or manufacture? This, is the philosophical or positive side of our previous question, concerns not the historical relation between the idea of creation and contrivance and the belief in God, but the way in which the reason

may conceive the action of Deity, the mode in which He is related to nature, and acts within or upon it.

It has been already remarked that this relation has been very variously conceived and expressed. Certain peoples have regarded creation as a process of emanation, the procession from the Deity of the whole order of things which existed or was believed to exist. Certain others have expressed their idea by the figure of generation; others again by the figure of incubation; hardly any, certainly no people of the first importance in religion, by the image of the handicraftsman. The Hindus have exhausted the resources of their reason and their speech to represent the nature and action and relations of a Deity who creates by a ceaseless process of alternate evolution and involution. The Hebrew conceived God as a Spirit, who was everywhere present, and active wherever He was. Nature lived, moved, and had its being in Him at every moment, and in every atom depended on Him. He marshalled the hosts of heaven, and called them all by their names; their order was His will. action was too universal to be conceived as special, too natural and necessary to be regarded as miraculous. The most common processes of nature were acts of God, resultful only as they were His. "He covereth the heaven with clouds, He prepareth rain for the earth, He maketh grass to grow upon the mountains. giveth to the beast his food, and to the young ravens which cry." The extraordinary and supernatural thing to the Hebrew would have been, not the active presence, but the actual absence of God from nature, or the continued activity of a nature without God. This

1 Psalm cxlvii. 8, 9.

His

He

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faith was confessed every time he read or repeated the mysterious name. Without Iahveh, "He who causes to happen," there might be chance, but there was no nature or order. The Greek, when he came to speculate as to how the Creator stood related to the creation, found himself face to face with his hardest problem; yet the tendency in the highest minds was towards one solution. Plato did not uniformly conceive Deity as the perfect handicraftsman, his Anuoupyós was but a deúтepos Ocós, a second or minor God. In his sublimest moments he thought of Deity as the Thinker, the Reason which was the home of the ideas, the only eternal realities, which were expressed in the appearances that at once pleased and deceived the senses. At the root of the Platonic philosophy lies the idea that the Creator is related to the creation as the thinker to his thought and to the speech that at once externalizes and embalms it. Aristotle laboured with varied success to express his notion of the causal and creative relation. He thinks that the mover of all things moves them while himself unmoved, just as the object of reason and desire is an unmoved cause of motion. God is the end towards which all things yearn and struggle; His very being is an attraction which creates the motion of each, and regulates the movement of the whole. In a very remarkable passage, Aristotle speaks as if the truth might lie in the union of two ideas, those of transcendence and immanence transcendence may be represented by the general of an army; immanence by the order or discipline he at once institutes and maintains. As here, so in the universe; the supreme good men call God, may be conceived as both a distinct being and an inherent

order. Yet while the two are distinguished they are not divided, the order is created by the being, is, not in independence, but in consequence of His existence and action. The highest thought of the Greek mind on the matter that now concerns us may therefore be formulated somewhat thus :-the eternal reason and will which, as God's, are transcendent, created what we call nature, and constitute, so far as expressed and realized in it, its immanent order and law.

This discussion, abstruse though it may have seemed, will have made our problem more intelligible, perhaps also more capable of solution. Men have not been shut up to one mode of conceiving God and His relation to nature, and no more need we. The right conception will be the one truest on the one hand to our notion of nature, and on the other to our notion of God, able, while doing injustice to neither, to unite and harmonize the two. Now at this point there is one thing I must do-entirely dissent from any conception of nature that makes it independent of God, that leaves out the Divine energies, or regards them as so foreign to it as to be capable of action only by interference or miracle. God is in one sense no supernatural being-nature were not natural without Him. Activity is of His very essence; He cannot act without touching nature, and nature cannot be without touching Him. God may be conceived without nature, but not nature without God. Nor can He be conceived otherwise than as everywhere present, and to be present is to Him to be the rational energy of all that moves. He could be inactive only by an act of will, and voluntary inaction could only signify His imperfection, moral and essential. The corporate being, as

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it were, of God and the world is necessary to both; His transcendental will becomes its immanent energies, that its system may be an order and its course a progress.

This conception of the relation of God and nature harmonizes no less with the new idea of nature than with the old idea of God. Nature used to be conceived as a more or less artful and artificial product, a congeries of wonderful contrivances and adaptations, mechanical and organic. It was a product of mathematical and manual skill; a structure built from the foundation upwards by an architect who planned the whole, designed and fitted together all the parts. Where nature was conceived as a construction, its author had to be conceived as a constructor; the one notion implied the other. But the idea of the Creator as an Architect and Artificer was due to the conception of nature, was not necessitated by the conception of God. Now nature is no longer conceived as a made or manufactured product, but as a system which, alike as a whole and in all its parts, has become by a process of growth or development or evolution. The image which represents the becoming of nature is not a machine like a watch, but an organism like a tree or an animal, which had grown from seed sown somehow in fit soil. If the creative process be conceived as one of evolution, or development, it is evident that the Creator cannot be conceived as a mechanic, or builder, standing without the thing He makes, but as the energy or life working within the process He conducts. The creative power, whether we name it Matter or Reason, Force or Will, must be embodied, or as it were incarnate in nature; in a word,