its time, is His living energy withdrawn, or less intensely present than
in any crisis fitly called creative. But the very same principle which
establishes a _Unity_ of all external causality makes it antithetic to
the internal, and establishes a _Duality_ between our own and that which
is other than ours; so that, were not our personal power known to us as
_one_, the cosmical power would not be guaranteed to us as the _other_.
Here, therefore, at the boundary of the proper Ego, the absorbing claim
of the Supreme will arrests itself, and recognises a ground on which it
does not mean to step. Did it still press on and annex this field also,
it would simply abolish the very base of its own recognisable existence,
and, in making itself all in all, would vanish totally from view. . .
Are we, then, to find Him in the sunshine and the rain, and to miss Him
in our thought, our duty and our love? Far from it; He is with us in
both: only in the former it is His _immanent_ life, in the latter His
_transcendent_, with which we are in communion." [5]

Only where this fundamental principle of the non-identity of God and man
is recognised, can the facts of human personality, {144} freedom and
responsibility for willed acts be rationally based and defended.

At the same time this "otherness" of God, while it is the condition, is
not necessarily the guarantee, of our freedom. Determinism is quite
compatible, in theory, and has been so found in history, with belief in
the Divine transcendence; but it is scarcely compatible with belief in
the Divine goodness. There is no _a priori_ reason making it
inconceivable that the doctrine of absolute predestination might be true;
but such a doctrine is not reconcilable with the belief that the Eternal
Other is also the Eternal Father. The Divine Autocrat of Calvinism, who
pre-ordained some of His creatures to eternal damnation--not for any
demerit of theirs, but "just choosing so"--is not unthinkable; what is
unthinkable is that we could love such a One--a God who had predestined
all human sin and woe, who had fore-ordered things in such a manner that
unnumbered hapless souls were doomed evermore to stumble and to suffer.
Such a God might inspire a shuddering, wondering, abject awe, but never
affection. Only a good God, aiming at the evolution of goodness, the
making of character, could have endowed us with freedom, for only through
such an endowment can such an aim be realised.

And h