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REV. STEWART A. MCDOWALL, M.A., B.D., ON 



On the other hand, our Lord Himself, whose " face," we read, was 

 " more marred than any man's," and of whom the prophet wrote, 

 " There is no beauty that we should desire Him," is disqualified by 

 the showing of an exaggerated cult of the external from being what 

 we believe and know He is, the True Way to God. 



One more point in closing. On page 225 it is asserted that if God is 

 to find an adequate object for His love, He must eternally be Creative, 

 otherwise His love could only be selfishness raised to its highest 

 power. This strikes one as very hazardous. It makes God as 

 dependent on His creation for unselfishness as it is on Him for 

 consistence. Matter must then be eternal, otherwise there would 

 have been an eternity of selfish love in the being of God. This 

 challenges His Self-sufficiency and contradicts both Holy Scripture 

 and Christian philosophy. Were Creation a necessity to the bene 

 esse of God, how could it be " a free act of His wisdom and Almighty 

 power," and where do we find a hint in the Scripture that it was 

 anything else ? Such passages as Prov. viii speak of a time 

 in a past Eternity when Wisdom personified was possessed by God, 

 in the beginning, before His works of old. Not even a finite being 

 can find an adequate object short of the infinite. This is agreeable 

 to the famous dictum of Augustine. And Prof. Orr asks pertinently 

 in his Side Lights on Christian Doctrine, page 46, " Is it not true of 

 everyone of us . . . that our souls can only find their complete 

 rest in the Infinite God, in an Infinite love ? . . . . How, then, 

 is God, the Infinite One, Himself to find an object for His Fatherly 

 love, commensurate with His infinitude, in our finite souls ? 

 Creation could never be the sufficient object of His love. That the 

 Eternal Son in the bosom of the Father alone could be. 



The Rev. H. J. R. Marston, M.A., writes : — I am grateful for 

 my first introduction to Croce, who till to-day has been for me but 

 a name. I admire the range and acuteness of his thinking, and 

 feel, with the lecturer, that one who goes so far, might well go 

 further on the road to God. At the same time, we need not limit 

 our appreciation of his thought because he stops too soon, and 

 we can follow the lead given in the lecture with advantage and with - 

 out fear of doing violence to the starting point itself. 



The definition of Beauty as aesthetic expression — which means, I 

 suppose, perception put into form — is perhaps inadequate, for when a 



