vereign over His own will and
actions, though always according to the eternal Rule of right and wrong,
which is Himself. I mean, moreover, that He created all things out of
nothing, and preserves them every moment, and could destroy them as easily
as He made them; and that, in consequence, He is separated from them by an
abyss, and is incommunicable in all His attributes. And further, He has
stamped upon all things, in the hour of their creation, their respective
natures, and has given them their work and mission and their length of
days, greater or less, in their appointed place. I mean, too, that He is
ever present with His works, one by one, and confronts every thing He has
made by His particular and most loving Providence, and manifests Himself
to each according to its needs: and has on rational beings imprinted the
moral law, and given them power to obey it, imposing on them the duty of
worship and service, searching and scanning them through and through with
His omniscient eye, and putting before them a present trial and a judgment
to come.

Such is what Theology teaches about God, a doctrine, as the very idea of
its subject-matter presupposes, so mysterious as in its fulness to lie
beyond any system, and in particular aspects to be simply external to
nature, and to seem in parts even to be irreconcileable with itself, the
imagination being unable to embrace what the reason determines. It teaches
of a Being infinite, yet personal; all-blessed, yet ever operative;
absolutely separate from the creature, yet in every part of the creation
at every moment; above all things, yet under every thing. It teaches of a
Being who, though the highest, yet in the work of creation, conservation,
government, retribution, makes Himself, as it were, the minister and
servant of all; who, though inhabiting eternity, allows Himself to take an
interest, and to have a sympathy, in the matters of space and time. His
are all beings, visible and invisible, the noblest and the vilest of them.
His are the substance, and the operation, and the results of that system
of physical nature into which we are born. His too are the powers and
achievements of the intellectual essences, on which He has bestowed an
independent action and the gift of origination. The laws of the universe,
the principles of truth, the relation of one thing to another, their
qualities and virtues, the order and harmony of the whole, all that
exists, is from Him; and, if evil