Page:Society the Redeemed Form of Man.djvu/183

METHOD OF SPIRITUAL CREATION. 167 and quasi-vital mother-substance of things, or furnishes, Himself, the natural material out of which they are fashioned. This is the adorable difference of creative to created art. No artist or inventor amongst us ever finds the mother-substance or material of his work exclusively within himself, or supplied by his own spiritual resources. lie finds it already provided to his hand by nature, and all he has to do consequently is to apply ordinary skill and judgment to the manipulation of this material, in order that his work may duly appear. So that unless the artist or inventor had first some natural community with these lower or artificial things he makes—his statue, his poem, his picture, his clock, his house, his steam-engine, his what-not, and were himself, to begin with, the fruit of a most spiritual Divine art, even as these lower things are a fruit of his own natural art, he would never be able to conceive them even, let alone execute them. Now the creator of man has, to begin with, no such community of nature with his creature as this. He is not a subject of being, but its unalterable source, nor is He capable of naturally or subjectively existing save in his creature. All natural or subjective existence derives from Him accordingly, being nothing else but that instinctive and unconscious appropriation and imprisonment of His most holy