Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/303

278 these conceptions, namely, a power that acts and an external product resulting from its acts; and at once you need a higher power and a higher law, external to the first power, to explain how the first power, acting in just this way, could achieve just this external result. Hence either God creates nothing external to himself, or else, in creating, he works under the laws that presuppose a power higher than himself, and external to himself. In the briefest form: Acts that produce external changes imply adjustment of means to ends. The creation of external things is such an act. Unless an actor is identical with the product itself, he must therefore be subject to the external conditions of adjustment, i.e., he must be finite.

Certain thinkers are accustomed to suppose that they honor God by having obscure and self-contradictory ideas about him. Hence they avoid all of the foregoing difficulties by calling the creative act a mystery. Now there are mysteries and mysteries. We do not know how trees grow, nor why the planets obey the law of gravitation. But we are sure that they do. On the other hand, we do not know how squares can be round; but we happen in this case to perceive that squares cannot be round. Now if somebody tells me that God is a round square, and appeals to me to consider reverently whether piety allows me to assert, in view of the mystery of God’s being, that God is not a round square, my answer is very plain. I say at once that it must be as irreverent to call God absurd and self-contradictory in his nature as to call him anything else discreditable;