258 £SSAVS LV PHILOSOPHY 



Love that does not thus in the renunciation of all 

 might address itself to the freedom of its object, 

 and find its satisfaction in the spontaneous move- 

 ment toward it from within the mind beloved, is not 

 the reality of love. The moral government of God, 

 springing from the Divine Love, is a government 

 by moral agencies purely. It relies utterly on the 

 operation of the powers native to the soul itself ; and 

 leaving aside all the juridical enginery of reward and 

 punishment, it lets his sun shine and his rain fall 

 alike on the just and on the unjust, that the cause of 

 God may everywhere win simply upon its merits. 



Thus God's revelation of himself is in a certain 

 great sense accomplished by his hiding : ^ invisible, 

 impalpable, his very existence is unknown to other 

 spirits, except as it is avouched by their own in- 

 ward voice. On this point, such is his love and jus- 

 tice, he will assume for himself no privileges ; he only 

 takes the common lot of every soul, the fact of 

 whose being must be gathered by all the rest from 

 the testimony of their own interior thought. And 

 as the very root and beginning of God's relations 

 with men or other souls thus springs out of his 

 recognition and reverence of their thinking freedom, 

 so, according to the idea of Jesus, the entire pro- 



1 Christ's new principle gives this new meaning and enlarged ful- 

 filment to the saying of the ancient prophet, " Our God is a God who 

 hideth himself." 



