at tells us of what we
lack, and directs us to Him who alone can supply our want out of His
inexhaustible fulness.

And if we have thus found an answer to the question, "How, from the
point of view of {32} Divine immanence, can there be anything but God?"
we have at the same time received a hint indicating where we shall have
to look for the answer to another query of even more directly practical
interest, _viz._, "How, from the same point of view, can there be
anything but _good_--how can there be any real evil, physical or
moral?" Put in that extreme form, this problem, like the one with
which we have just dealt, arises from the erroneous assertion of the
allness of God; but as the whole subject of the reality of evil will
come up for treatment at a later stage, we need not now enter into its
discussion. At one aspect, and one only, of this vast and complex
theme we may, however, be permitted to glance for a moment before we
pass on. If God dwells in us, it is frequently asked, whence comes
what Paul so pathetically calls "the law of sin which is in our
members"--whence come the wrongful desires and harmful passions of
whose power we are so painfully conscious? That is an entirely
legitimate and even inevitable query, but the solution of the enigma is
not past finding out, though we must content ourselves with a mere
suggestion. We have, in the first place to keep our hold of the fact,
disregarding all pleas to the contrary, that sin is a reality, and not
a phantasm of our imagination; we shall then diagnose its nature as the
misuse, the unfaithful administration, of the power which God has
conferred upon us for employment in His holy service; and then, {33}
lastly, we shall grow aware that the very pain, the sense of
unhappiness and moral discord by which the consciousness of guilt is
ever accompanied, is the protesting voice of that which is the deepest
reality within ourselves--the indwelling Divine.

But when we have shown that the doctrine of Divine immanence does not,
as some of its advocates would have us believe, swallow up human
individuality--a subject to which we shall return--we are faced with
yet another difficulty. The question is asked--again, quite naturally
and inevitably--In what sense can we speak of God as immanent in the
inorganic world? How, _e.g._, does a stone embody or express His
essence?--and yet, if it is not somehow a manifestation of Him, what is
this cold, lifeless, ponderable