FIRST PROPOSITION OR ARTICLE IN the first article of the suggested Creed which attempts to name the exclusive attributes of God, it is not said that He is omnipotent. The omission is deliberate and due to the consideration that the term, without qualification, has led to judgments of the Divine actions which are erroneous and harmful. The Scriptures indeed say that "with God all things are possible," but they also say that "it is impossible that God should lie." His power, therefore, is limited by His qualities. The author of "Old Letters" states his belief in the fact in these words, "The freedom of God's will is absolute, and yet we may say with reverence that He is under the necessity of being true to His own character, and were He to do anything unrighteous, unloving, ungracious, He would cease to be God." But again, His power is limited by His own laws. and the facts of all existence. He cannot make two and three to be six, nor the three interior angles of a triangle to be other than, together, equal to two right angles. Applying this thought to the physical world which He has fitted for human habitation, the adjustments of this globe we call the earth to the sun round which it moves, are amazing in their subserviency to the intended purpose. But the very fixing of the axis and of the revolutions which give us the pleasant alternations of the seasons and of day and night makes it necessary that the poles be ribbed in ice and the tropics fierce with heat. But cold and heat are material evils inevitable in the adjustment, and we can conceive of no other by which they could be avoided. So of the still more wonderful creation of the moral and spiritual nature of man. If he be given freedom of will, there must, at some point, be wrongness of choice, the consequent evil of which God Himself cannot avert. The proposition I wish to reach is that God is not omnipotent in the sense in which the word is often loosely used, and that He has done, and is doing now, only the best possible. Let me pursue a little more closely this line of thought which, to my mind, leads better than any other towards the solution of the mystery of the permission of pain and sin. At the outset let us never forget how finite is the human mind. The conception of a Being, or of matter, or of force, which is not the consequence or result of any antecedent cause, is beyond its grasp. We may use words, but the fact itself is unthinkable. So of So of space which is boundless, and of time which has neither beginning nor end. In attempting to reach to such verities, we feel driven back and crushed in the impotence of our imagination. They surround us like impassable walls against which we beat in vain. And even such knowledge of the universe as we have slowly and painfully acquired is awful and overwhelming. The ascertained distance of the sun from the earth is a strain upon thought, yet, by approximate computation, the position of one sun among other suns is likened to that of a solitary ship on the ocean, midway between Europe and America; and astronomers now tell us |