o rival schools of thought is the
Divine power: not the existence of such power, for there is no
noticeable difference on that point, but only its quality or mode of
operation. The Orthodox attribute to God a strictly moral, which is a
specific method of action, addressed to purely personal or subjective
issues; their opponents, a strictly physical, which is a universal
method, addressed to purely impersonal and objective issues. The one
party assigns to God a finite personality, or one limited by Nature; the
other, an indefinite personality, as identified with natural law. The
Orthodox, of course, maintain that God's _creative_ action was
universal, inasmuch as it contemplated only cosmical issues; but as that
mode of action was exhausted by its own universality, His subsequent
relation to His creatures must be purely administrative, as expressing
His personal pleasure or displeasure in their various functioning. The
other side do not dogmatize about the Divine power, or its method of
action, in the abstract. They only insist, as against their antagonists,
that the Divine administration of Nature is _not_, within the limits of
our science, personal; that it is not a power exerted _upon_ Nature, or
from without, and in contravention of her ordinary processes; that, so
far as our _knowledge_ goes, on the contrary, whatever may be our faith,
it is a power invariably exerted _through_ Nature, or from within, and
therefore in habitual consistency with her ordinary effects. In other
words, they insist, that, so far as the Divine power is cognizable to
us, it falls exclusively within and never without the routine of Nature;
and as universality is the characteristic of that routine, they do not
hesitate, on behalf of science, to affirm that the Divine action is
never addressed to specific or differential results, but always to
universal or identical ones. In short, they logically refuse to the
Divine power as exhibited in Nature all personal or moral quality, as
inferring on the part of Deity any possible unequal or inequitable
relations to the creatures He has made; and assign to all such reputed
partial exhibitions of it a purely educative, and therefore universal,
bearing upon the mind of the race.

Such, in brief, is the question agitated between the old and new faiths;
whether God acts outwardly _upon_ Nature, or inwardly _through_
Nature,--that is to say, whether His action is specific as addressed to
private ends, or st