the sympathies of his soul, sweeping across it either with dark doubts and fears, or with bright intimations of life and glorious anticipation.
I spoke deliberately when I said to many of these questioning feelings and perplexities of the human mind, and not all of them. For to expect a satisfactory answer to them all in the present state of science, or generally in this terrestrial life, brief as it is, and limited on all sides and short-sighted, would be agreeable neither with the course nor whole constitution of human affairs. A thoroughly complete and perfectly systematic demonstration of the wisdom in the divine order of nature, which should meet and explain every difficulty, would, even on account of such a pretension, command little respect, and be of slight influence. Much is there in nature which is to remain long hidden from man; much, too, which we shall see first of all in the other world, when death shall have opened our eyes and made us clear-sighted in one direction or another. But the beginning and the end are even here and now placed clearly and intelligibly before us, if only we are ready and willing to walk by the light that is so graciously given us, and here, as elsewhere, invariably to refer the first cause and the final consummation to the Creator and to God. Without such a reference, without thus, as it were, placing its two poles in God, the right understanding of nature is absolutely impossible, and every scientific attempt to attain it apart from and independently of God, must simply as such prove vain and involve itself in absurdities. Hence it is, however paradoxical it may sound, that we can recognize more distinctly, and better understand the end of nature, its meaning and significance as a whole, than we can the final cause of many a single object in it, which, however, as contrasted with the whole, appears inconsiderable and trifling. For the clear perception that we have of the final cause of nature comes immediately from the divine illumination, which therefore we can, so far as it is given to us, see and understand. But in the darker levels, in the subterranean shaft of the obscure sensible world, the prophetic candle of an antlike burrowing science, even though it be originally kindled at that higher light, can not reach to every quarter, can not illuminate every object in this mine of darkness.
But this final cause of creation, such as it is given to us clearly and intelligibly, will be rendered most clear by a comparison and contrast with the conceptions of the end of nature which human reason has put forth. If the proposition already quoted from one of the latest of German philosophers, that the essence of mind consists in the negation of the opposite, be now applied (which was the application I then had in my mind) to the Creator of the world and uncreated Intelligence, then the following must be the meaning involved in it. That which is the opposite of God or the Creator is nothing; and so far the proposition is quite true, since man can not but admit that the Almighty has created the world out of nothing. For if, with some of the ancient philosophers, we were to suppose a matter existing from all eternity, out of which God did not so much create as form the world, then in this case we should have two Gods, and both imperfect and finite, instead of the one all-perfect and self-sufficient Being. But if, on the other hand, the Deity be regarded as merely a not-nothing; if the final cause of creation be simply the negation of naught, then would such a view ascribe a sort of imaginary reality to the nothing, and it would seem that the world was created solely in order to get rid of the nothing, which comes pretty much to the same as saying—if we may allow ourselves so Lessing-like a boldness of expression—the Infinite made the world out of ennui. Thus, in every case do the skeptical views and empty negations of idealism lead to a contradictory nothing.
But, in reality and truth, it was out of love that God made the worlds; and, indeed, out of a superabundant love. This we may well venture to assert, and even to call it a fact; and that the divine love is also the final cause, as well as the beginning of creation. A superabundance of love in God we must, however, call the final cause-ground of creation, inasmuch as He stood in no need of it; no need of the love of the creature, nor absolutely of the world itself, or created things. For in His inmost essence, where one depth of eternal love responds fully and eternally to the other, He was perfectly sufficient for himself. And yet it is even so: there is in God the superabundance of love, for He has created the worlds, and it is the divine will to be loved by His creatures. For this end and purpose has He created them; and because He would have their love, He has created them free, and given both to the pure spirits and to men a free will. The whole secret in the relation subsisting between the creature, and man especially, and the Creator, lies even in this great fact, that He has created them out of love, and requires in return the service of their love. There is, perhaps, something awful in this requisition, and in the relation thus found to subsist between a weak and imperfect creature and the infinite and omnipotent Being. But it is even so: we are really free, and are really required by God to give him our love. But now a finite and created being can only be free so far as God leaves him free; and this is only conceivable in the light I have already set it in by the simile of a fond mother teaching her babe to walk, and in order to tempt it to make the first essay with its little limbs, stepping back from it a few steps, and leaving it a moment to itself. No creature could be free did not God, in a similar way, leave it to itself, and, after the first impulse of creation, withhold from it His controlling energy. But if He did not do so—were He, on the contrary, to act upon His creatures without reserve, and with the whole infinite extent of his might—then the liberty of the latter, overwhelmed in His omnipotence, must be destroyed, as being only possible through the spontaneous limitation of the divine power, which results from the superabundance of creative love.
Now we can, it is true, distinguish in the essence or energy of God, between His intelligence and His will—His omniscience and His omnipotence; but they can not be absolutely separated from and opposed to each other, for in Him and in His operations, they, as indeed all else in Him, are one. It would, therefore, be nothing but a foolish and unmeaning subtlety to demand, “Why, then, has the Omniscient created rational beings, of whom He must assuredly have known beforehand that they would fall and perish?” For it is but a logical illusion, when we transfer from the human to the divine mind a form of thought fluctuating between the conceivably possible and the apparently necessary. Man’s freedom undoubtedly consists in the choice between one possibility and another, or in that indefinite possibility which subsists half way between one necessity and another. But God’s freedom is not as man’s: in Him there is neither contingent possibility nor unconditional necessity. All in Him is truly actual, living, and positive. His freedom lies even in the superabundance of His essence—the fact, viz., that He is not bound by any law of necessity to remain contented with this His own internal fullness. For otherwise He were a Fate rather than a free God, and to that conclusion the doctrine of the Stoics consistently enough arrived at last. Extremely difficult must it ever be, in such a system and with such a conception of an intrinsically necessary God, and one bound by this necessity, consistently to account for the creation of the world, which, in appearance, is so irreconcilable with the idea of the self-sufficiency of the divine Being. On this account some of the similarly rationalizing systems of ancient times had recourse to the ingenious device of ascribing the work of creation to a spiritual being of an inferior order, and degrading this secondary deity far below the infinite perfections of the supreme and all-sufficient God. But by this expedient men did but fall, as is, alas! but too commonly the case, from one error into another still greater and even more monstrous. It is, in short, nothing but a mere logical delusion and an illegitimate transference from our limited faculty of thought to the divine intelligence, which gives rise to these pernicious doctrines of an absolute and unconditional predestination, which fundamentally amount and bring us back to a blind and heathenish fatalism.
Thus much, as connected with our subject, will be sufficient on the difficult subject both of the freedom of the pure created spirits and also of man’s will, as regarded solely from its philosophical aspect, and without any reference to the moral theory, and solely in relation to the system of the universe. Difficult, however, is this subject, merely on one account. The logical illusion, from which springs all error, strife, and confusion, and which we are too apt to transfer to the divine mind, is so far innate in the very form of man’s finite intellect, than even when we have recognized it for what it really is; yet, so long as we confine ourselves to mere logical reasoning, and are seduced by its seeming rigor of consequence, we are ever ready to fall anew into this dangerous error without even remarking it.
In the same way, now, that the existence of free beings follows naturally from the love of God, as the final cause