is Himself all that He has caused us to revere and love, and never has been or can be aught that by the constitution of our nature we hate or despise. The difference between the characters ascribed to God by traditional creeds and by Theism lies in this, that the traditional creeds, though attributing every epithet of honour to Him, yet in effect neutralize them all by delineations of His dealings with mankind wholly at variance with the natural sense of such epithets, insomuch that the words “Good” and “Merciful,” when applied to God, have often come to bear as conventional a sense as the titles of honour appropriated to the petty royalties of earth. Theism, on the contrary, confessedly rests its conception of the Divine character on such consciousness as He has Himself given us of what is Good and Just. This consciousness is as yet all imperfect and incomplete. God must be more good than our conception of goodness, as the heavens are higher than the earth. But so far as it goes, our consciousness is true, and negatively it must be absolutely true. God's character—could all its awful splendours be revealed to us, God's dealings with His creatures—could all their scope and purport from eternity to eternity be unveiled before our eyes, might never bear one blot or contain one act which in our heart of hearts we could regard as cruel or unjust,—nay, that we could fail to adore as infinitely good and merciful.
Thus Theism teaches that God is absolutely, infinitely, eternally good, in our sense of goodness; not good only to angels, Jews, and Christians,—a few elect out of a lost world; not good only in Time, and tremendous in the Day of Wrath, when Time shall be no more,—but good to all, good for ever, able and willing to bring back every creature He has made to be folded at last in His eternal love.
And in the most awful of all mysteries, the mystery of Sin and its forgiveness, this same Absolute Goodness of God is our hope and our refuge. We need no other, and (as Channing said well) “a broader and a surer the universe cannot supply.” Theism teaches that God, the Just Ruler, must punish sin, but it also assures us that God, the Good One, can only do so in the highest love. In His government, Retribution and Correction are one and the same. The sins of a finite being—finite in number and graduated in degree—are necessarily finite also, and deserving of finite retribution. The sins of a creature of God, made by Him in His own image, are necessarily capable
