uous teaching of the Bible is that God, the
Creator, is a being, a person, infinite in all His powers and
perfections, omnipresent throughout the universe; yet that there is a
place in which He is to be found, or where He abides, in a sense in
which He is not to be found in any other place. This paradox is easily
understood when we realize that God is present everywhere throughout His
universe _by His word and by His Spirit,_--His word being as effective
throughout the remotest corners of His universe as near at hand, for the
very simple reason that matter has no "properties" which He has not
imparted to it, and therefore it can have no innate inertia or
reluctance to act which God's word would need to overcome in order to
induce it to act, even when this word operates across the boundless
fields of space. He has created free personalities, and He leaves the
mind of each of His creatures free to serve Him or not to serve Him,
these free intelligent beings becoming thus true second causes. More
than this, provision for almost innumerable second causes seems to have
been made even among other departments of nature, without however
interfering with the direct action of the word of the Infinite One in
guiding and controlling them all.

Christ Jesus, our Lord and Savior, was associated with the Father in all
the primary work of Creation; and He came to earth to show us what God
the Father is like, that mortals might behold their Creator without
being consumed. In Him we are to behold as much of the Deity as it is
for our good to know; beyond that we must trust the hand that never
wearies, the mind that never blunders, the heart that never grows cold.

In reality the seeming conflict between the doctrine of second causes
and that of God's omnipresence is closely analogous to the old
(imaginary) conflict between the Law and the Gospel, read from the book
of nature instead of from the Bible. The reign of second causes is the
reign of law; but God's immediate action brings in the supernatural, the
miraculous, or the Gospel. Each has its proper place; and neither must
be dwelt on to the exclusion of the other. We are all under the hard
exactitude of the law, with its irrevocable condemnation, until the
Gospel intervenes, and not only pardons the past, but enables us to
fulfil the law's requirements for the future. The reign of second causes
alone would take away man's moral responsibility, making us all mere
creatures of our env