s not lessen the actual calamity that may have
befallen us, but makes it easier to bear; but an _indifferent_ God is
equivalent to no God at all--or, as we have previously expressed it, a
God who does not care, does not count. The mere sense that He was
sorry for us would lighten the stroke of fate which He had not been
able to avert; but if the truth is that He might have averted it by the
simple exercise of His will, but refused to do so, coldly looking on at
our grief--not from afar, but close by--then we can only say that no
God at all were better than that. It seems, then, as though, in order
to escape from palpable inconsistency between theory and fact, we
should have to make a surrender either of His immanence, or His
omnipotence, or His benevolence, or the reality of evil.

To surrender the Divine immanence will not really solve our problem.
Near or far, closer to us than breathing or dwelling beyond the
furthest star, God is still the Author of our being, the Framer of the
world and all that therein is, the Cause without which there would have
been no effects. If, after creating the world, He withdrew from it to
an inconceivable {92} distance, it is none the less His handiwork; if
it is in and through His absence that the cosmic mechanism has got out
of gear, it is yet He who willed to be so absent, well knowing what
results would supervene; if a power other than He and hostile to Him
has usurped the place and title of Prince of this world, such
usurpation would have been impossible but for His acquiescence, and
personified Evil, playing with human happiness, would still be His
licensed agent. Evidently, the solution of which we are in search does
not lie along that way.

We turn, therefore, to the second possible explanation, strongly put
forward by Mill, according to whom natural theology points to God as "a
Being of great but limited power."

Those who have been strengthened in goodness by relying on the
sympathising support of a powerful and good Governor of the world (he
says) have, I am satisfied, never really believed that Governor to be,
in the strict sense of the term, omnipotent. They have always saved
His goodness at the expense of His power. They have believed . . .
that the world is inevitably imperfect, contrary to His intention.[1]

To the question, "Of what nature is the limitation of His power?" he
returns the tentative answer that it

probably results either from the qualities