say that he hates; is angry, or grieved; repents; is moved by the special prayer of James and John; that he is sad to-day and to-morrow joyful; all these are human, limitations of our personality, and are no more to be ascribed to God than the form of the Reindeer, or the shrewdness of the Beaver. But Love implies no finiteness. This we conceive as Infinite.
At the end of the Analysis, what is left? Being, Cause, Knowledge, Love, each with no conceivable limitation. To express it in a word, a being of Infinite Power, Wisdom, Justice, Love, and Holiness, Fidelity to himself. Thus by an analysis of the conception of God, we find in fact, or by implication, just what was given synthetically by the intuition of Reason. But do these qualities exhaust the Deity? Surely not. They only form our Idea of Him. It is idle, impious in men to say, the finite creature of yesterday can measure Him who is the All in All, the True, the Holy, the Good, the Altogether-beautiful. Let a man look into the Milky-way, and strive to conceive of the Mind that is the Cause, the Will, of all those centres to unknown worlds, and ask, What can I know of Him? Nay, let a man turn over in his hand a single crystal of snow, and consider its elements, their history, transformation, influence, and try to grasp up the philosophy of this little atom of matter, and he will learn to bow before the thought of Him, and say there is no searching of his understanding. If there are other orders of beings higher than ourselves, their idea of God must include elements above our reach. The finite approximates, but cannot reach the Infinite.
In criticizing the conception of God, I would not
attempt the fool's task, to define and describe God's nature,
but to separate our Idea of Him from all other ideas; not
to tell all in God that answers to the Idea in Man,—that
of course is impossible,—but to separate the eternal
Idea from the transient conception; to declare the positive
and necessary existence of this Idea in Man, of its
Object out of Man, while I deny the existence of any
limitations of human personality, or of our anthropomorphitic
consciousness in the Deity.
