THEISM AND EVOLUTION. 303 



simple Divine fiat, but no human intellect is 

 able to conceive how matter and spirit were educed 

 from nothingness into actuality. The very feeble- 

 ness and limitations of human language and hu- 

 man thought compel us, when speaking of God 

 and His operations, to employ terms that often 

 but faintly adumbrate the magnificent realities of 

 which we can never form an adequate conception. 

 We speak of God as Creator, as giving ear to the 

 prayers of His creatures, as being holy, just, power- 

 ful, omniscient, omnipresent, but we do not thereby 

 think of Him as some sort of magnified man, as 

 skeptics are often wont to assert. When we speak 

 of the attributes and perfections of the Deity, we 

 must needs use the same terms as when we speak 

 of corresponding attributes and perfections in man. 

 This, however, does not necessarily imply an anthro- 

 pomorphic conception of God, and still less does 

 it, as is so often assumed, imply the alternative of a 

 blank and hopeless skepticism. 



" God," as a scholarly writer truthfully observes, 

 "contains in Himself all human perfections, but not 

 in the same manner as they exist in man. In man 

 they are limited, dependent, conditioned, imperfect, 

 finite nature. In God they are unlimited, independ- 

 ent, absolute, perfect, infinite nature. In man 

 they can be separated one from the other ; in God 

 they are all one and the same, and we can distinguish 

 the Divine attributes after our human fashion, only 

 because their perfect and absolute unity contains 

 virtually in itself an infinite multiplicity. In man 

 they are essentially human ; in God they are all 



