Page:The Other Life.djvu/157

 is proof that some great determining power intervenes between God and the universe. That power is the free agency, the selfhood of our spirits.

Again, nature is not God, any more than the emanations of a man's mind constitute the man. Take nature away, obliterate every organic form from the dew-drop to the sun, and God remains the same, infinite, indivisible, self-existing, sole-existing Spirit.

The love and wisdom emanating from the Supreme Being may then be so appropriated by the selfhood of his creatures as to be turned into hatred and folly. This is the origin of evil and of hell. The angel receives them in a different manner. By obedience to the divine law, he permits the divine love and wisdom to reign in him and to work through him. He knows that nothing is his own. His apparent goodness and truth are the Lord's love and wisdom, received, implanted and manifested in his life. In profound humility and self-renunciation he feels that he is not good; that he is not wise; that "there is none good but God."

The evil spirit claims everything as his own. He maintains that his evil is good and that his falsity is truth.

It is the presence of the Lord, therefore, through