teen he had said 'God and real
existence are the same; God is, and there is none else.'[10] The same
doctrine is the foundation of the theories expounded in his treatises on
Virtue and on the End of God in Creation. In the last of these, for
example, he uses the argument (depending upon a conception familiar to
the metaphysicians of the previous age), that benevolence, consisting in
regard to 'Being in general,' must be due to any being in proportion to
the degree of existence (ii. 401). Now 'all other being is as nothing in
comparison of the Divine Being.' God is 'the foundation and fountain of
all being and all perfection, from whom all is perfectly derived, and on
whom all is most absolutely and perfectly dependent; whose being and
beauty is, as it were, the sum and comprehension of all existence and
excellence, much more than the sun is the fountain and summary
comprehension of all the light and brightness of the day' (ii. 405). As
he says in the companion treatise, 'the eternal and infinite Being is,
in effect, being in general, and comprehends universal existence' (vi.
59). The only end worthy of God must, therefore, be his own glory. This
is not to attribute selfishness to God, for 'in God, the love of Himself
and the love of the public are not to be distinguished as in man,
because God's being, as it were, comprehends all' (vi. 53). In
communicating His fulness to His creatures, He is of necessity the
ultimate end; but it is a fallacy to make God and the creature in this
affair of the emanation of the Divine fulness, 'the opposite parts of a
disjunction' (vi. 55). The creature's love of God and complacence in the
Divine perfections are the same thing as the manifestation of the Divine
glory. 'They are all but the emanations of God's glory, or the excellent
brightness and fulness of the Divinity diffused, overflowing, and, as it
were, enlarged; or, in one word, existing _ad extra_' (vi. 117). In more
familiar dialect, our love to God is but God's goodness making itself
objective. The only knowledge which deserves the name is the knowledge
of God, and virtue is but the knowledge of God under a different name.

Without dwelling upon the relations of this doctrine to modern forms of
Pantheism, I must consider this last proposition, which is of vital
importance in Edwards' system, and of which the theological and the
metaphysical element is curiously blended. God is to the universe--to
use Edwards' own metaphor--what