ANTHROPOMORPHIC THEISM 



a totally different quality from that which I 

 love and venerate — what do I mean by calling 

 it goodness ? and what reason have I for ven- 

 erating it? To say that God's goodness may 

 be different in kind from man's goodness, what 

 is it but saying, with a slight change of phrase- 

 ology, that God may possibly not be good ? " 

 With Mr. Mill, therefore, " I will call no Be- 

 ing good, who is not what I mean when I ap- 

 ply that epithet to my fellow creatures." ^ And 

 going a step farther, I will add that it is impossi- 

 ble to call that Being good, who, existing prior 

 to the phenomenal universe, and creating it out 

 of the plenitude of infinite power and foreknow- 

 ledge, endowed it with such properties that its 

 material and moral development must inevi- 

 tably be attended by the misery of untold mil- 

 lions of sentient creatures for whose existence 

 their Creator is ultimately alone responsible. 

 In shorty there can be no hypothesis of a " moral 

 government'* of the worlds which does not impli- 

 citly assert an immoral government. As soon 

 as we seek to go beyond the process of evolu- 

 tion disclosed by science, and posit an external 

 Agency which is in the slightest degree anthro- 

 pomorphic, we are obliged either to supple- 

 ment and limit this Agency by a second one 



1 [Mill's statement occurs in his famous reply to Mansel, 

 in Mill's Examination of the Philosophy of Sir William 

 Hamilton J chapter vii.] 



VOL. IV 225 



