of these two terms, finite and infinite. It is applicable to a personal being, and all the meaning it has is permeated through and through with the notion of personality. It may be employed with reference to any act in which a personal being decisively expresses himself, and it wholly avoids the contradiction between definite action and the so-called infinity of the Divine Being. It is exactly the expression best suited for describing action, and in the present application of it, it shows us Creation as in harmony with the revealed nature of God. The principle of self-limitation is, if we may so say, at the root of the idea of the Holy Trinity, and Creation is a carrying out of the principle.

In the last chapter we observed that the Trinitarian conception of God afforded us some glimpse of a possible motive on the part of God for Creation, in that He is Love. That Creation and the whole course of the world till its final consummation is the manifestation of Divine Love cannot be doubted by any one who believes that God is Love. But we do not conceal the fact that this position presents difficulties in three directions. It is difficult, if it be assumed, (1) to explain the existence of evil; (2) to explain the fact that the eternal Love of God was displayed gradually, in time, and not universally; (3) to explain in what sense God is the subject of love, and in what sense the Divine Love can be said to rest upon creatures yet unborn. Of these difficulties we must reserve the first two for a time; the former is the most serious and will require lengthy discussion; the latter will depend partly upon our decision in the question of evil, and is in part involved in the general question of time. We come, then, at once to the third point-the question, what we mean by the Divine Love, in what

sense God can be said to be the subject of love? Love, as we know it, is a passion, that is, a condition of the emotions due to an external cause. Men depend upon the appearance and the suggestion of other persons for the excitation of their love. They do not begin by loving generally, and then finding a particular person to be the object of love, but they have the capacity in them, and contact with some other person draws it on into activity. The whole process is carried on through physical means, the senses and the brain; however lofty its inspiration, it is never dissociated from the physical life. At the same time, with our acknowledgment of this we assert that God, though He is Love, is without parts and passions; our difficulty is, then, to reconcile these two statements. In treating above of the Holy Trinity, we pointed out that this view of God corresponds with the Johannine intuition that God is Love-because the complex character which experience reveals as essential to love in man is thus carried into the very nature of God. Thus far, therefore, we have applied the notion of love to God without involving ourselves in the difficulty of external relations. The eternal activity of self-manifest- . ation which is the human method of expressing the idea of a Trinity of Persons is carried out as it were, in the Creation. No change is involved, no adoption of a new principle. God being, as S. Athanasius expresses it, the source of all goodness, builds a world in which He may set forth His glory. There is no thought here of an incitement from without; the act of Creation is a flowing-out and a new expression of the Eternal Law of the Divine Being. What is obscure, and must, at present at any rate, remain obscure, is the entry of this act into time. If we have been right in saying that the

world is no necessary element in the Divine Life, then Creation must have taken place in time, that is, the selfmanifestation of God which is Creation is not to be regarded as eternal, though the Love of God resting upon the Son, and conveyed through the Holy Spirit, is to be so regarded.

II. These preliminary difficulties being thus provisionally discussed, we may take for granted that Creation implies that God is really and exclusively the agent in the process by which the world came into being. We must now consider the other idea which appears essential to the notion of Creation, viz., that the process occurs in time. This point is by no means an easy one to discuss. We may express the truth which the phrase above conveys by saying that neither the world nor the matter of which it is composed is eternal. In so saying, we place ourselves in antagonism with the position of Plato and many others who have followed him. According to these thinkers, Creation consists in giving form to a pre-existent matter, co-eternal with God. God, according to Plato, finds matter floating in a chaotic condition, and, having no envy in His nature, gives it form and order, thus producing the world. This resembles in some respects the theory which we regard as the true one; at any rate, it seems to admit that the world is a product in time.1 But it is open to objection on other grounds. It reduces the action of God from that of a creator to that of an artificer; it makes Him dependent upon the character of His material. And, when pressed further, it tends towards the immanent type of Pantheism, God and the world being in eternal correlation.2

1 Plato, Timæus, pp. 29E-30в; Philo Jud., De Opif. Mundi, chap. v. 2 Cf. S. Ath., De Inc., chap. ii. §§ 3-5.

We maintain, then, that Creation implies that the world came into being in time, and at this point a huge crop of difficulties arise. For, as we have already seen in part, we find ourselves at all points applying the form of time to the actions of God. We have argued that there is nothing derogatory to the nature of God in willing a change, though we cannot believe that He can change His will. We have endeavoured to show that the Creation is an act of God manifesting no new law of being, but carrying out that which we believe to be His nature. But still, we cannot avoid the admission that in some sense Creation implies a new movement, a thought, eternal perhaps in itself, which yet takes shape and is externalized in time. Certainly we are here engaged on the most perilous ground; we are dealing with a subject where the danger of anthropomorphism in its worst sense is strongest. Let us consider how the action of God is described in this regard. Nothing is clearer in Scripture than that God, in some sense, waits for moments-the due moments for action. The promise to Abraham waits for its fulfilment till the iniquity of the Canaanitish peoples is filled up (cf. Gen. xv. 16). So in the New Testament it is when the fulness of time has come that God sends His Son (Gal. iv. 4). And during that Son's incarnate life the same principle is at work. Christ acts and suffers when His hour is come (S. John xiii. 1). The powers of darkness must wait for the hour when the Divine counsels permit their doing their worst upon the Son of God (S. Luke xxii. 53). Till then they are powerless. There is, then, on its human side, a sense in which the purposes of God express themselves in time.

But it is never easy for us to express or conceive the

connexion, for the simple reason that we know so little about time. For us, it is a necessary condition of our experience that we know things in succession; it is the only way in which we become sensible of our personal being. We recognise ourselves as the same through a long series of varied experiences, and thus come to consciousness. Our plans, our hopes, our desires take time to realize. However rapidly they may become effectual in the world, there is an interval between the moment when we form them, and the moment when they take shape outside of us. This law of temporal succession is, as we have already noticed, an ultimate condition of our life; more almost than anything it is a sign of our bondage to the external world. And it has already shown itself to be a fatal principle to apply to the Divine life. It was this rock upon which Arius split. He attempted to force the form of time upon the generation of the Son, and ended by denying that the Son was God at all. Must we confess, then, that we have reached the insoluble-that there is an irreconcileable contradiction between the language of Scripture and the laws of our thought? Before we admit this absolutely, let us ask the question in a somewhat different way.

What exactly is the consequence of the two alternative answers? If we say that the world is eternal, what is the result? What is the result again of trying to think of its coming into being in time? We have already pointed out the result of the former hypothesis. It binds God to the world, as if it were a part of Himself, or at least a necessary condition to the fulness of His life. That is, it raises material existence to a position of equality with Him; or, to say the same thing in different words, it brings Him down to the level of the material world.