Him a determining force which would control Him. Can
He be God if He can no more separate Himself from His creation in a past
eternity than in the coming eternity?

"This face of the problem is insoluble in its cause. Let us now inquire
into its effects. If a God compelled to have created the world from all
eternity seems inexplicable, He is quite as unintelligible in perpetual
cohesion with His work. God, constrained to live eternally united to His
creation is held down to His first position as workman. Can you conceive
of a God who shall be neither independent of nor dependent on His work?
Could He destroy that work without challenging Himself? Ask yourself,
and decide! Whether He destroys it some day, or whether He never
destroys it, either way is fatal to the attributes without which God
cannot exist. Is the world an experiment? is it a perishable form to
which destruction must come? If it is, is not God inconsistent and
impotent? inconsistent, because He ought to have seen the result before
the attempt,--moreover why should He delay to destroy that which He is
to destroy?--impotent, for how else could He have created an imperfect
man?

"If an imperfect creation contradicts the faculties which man attributes
to God we are forced back upon the question, Is creation perfect? The
idea is in harmony with that of a God supremely intelligent who could
make no mistakes; but then, what means the degradation of His work,
and its regeneration? Moreover, a perfect world is, necessarily,
indestructible; its forms would not perish, it could neither advance nor
recede, it would revolve in the everlasting circumference from which it
would never issue. In that case God would be dependent on His work;
it would be co-eternal with Him; and so we fall back into one of the
propositions most antagonistic to God. If the world is imperfect, it
can progress; if perfect, it is stationary. On the other hand, if it
be impossible to admit of a progressive God ignorant through a past
eternity of the results of His creative work, can there be a stationary
God? would not that imply the triumph of Matter? would it not be the
greatest of all negations? Under the first hypothesis God perishes
through weakness; under the second through the Force of his inertia.

"Therefore, to all sincere minds the supposition that Matter, in the
conception and execution of the worlds, is contemporaneous with God, is
to deny God. Forced to choose, in order to gover