r everything that does not involve logical contradiction.
He can make BEING --in other words his power includes CREATION. If
what He creates were made of his own substance, it would have to be
infinite in essence, as that substance is; but it is finite; so it must
be non-divine in substance. If it were made of a substance, an
eternally existing matter, for example, which God found there to his
hand, and to which He simply gave its form, that would contradict God's
definition as First Cause, and make Him a mere mover of something
caused already. The things he creates, then, He creates ex nihilo, and
gives them absolute being as so many finite substances additional to
himself. The forms which he imprints upon them have their prototypes
in his ideas. But as in God there is no such thing as multiplicity,
and as these ideas for us are manifold, we must distinguish the ideas
as they are in God and the way in which our minds externally imitate
them. We must attribute them to Him only in a TERMINATIVE sense, as
differing aspects, from the finite point of view, of his unique essence.

God of course is holy, good, and just. He can do no evil, for He is
positive being's fullness, and evil is negation. It is true that He
has created physical evil in places, but only as a means of wider good,
for bonum totius praeeminet bonum partis. Moral evil He cannot will,
either as end or means, for that would contradict his holiness. By
creating free beings He PERMITS it only, neither his justice nor his
goodness obliging Him to prevent the recipients of freedom from
misusing the gift.

As regards God's purpose in creating, primarily it can only have been
to exercise his absolute freedom by the manifestation to others of his
glory. From this it follows that the others must be rational beings,
capable in the first place of knowledge, love, and honor, and in the
second place of happiness, for the knowledge and love of God is the
mainspring of felicity. In so far forth one may say that God's
secondary purpose in creating is LOVE.

I will not weary you by pursuing these metaphysical determinations
farther, into the mysteries of God's Trinity, for example. What I have
given will serve as a specimen of the orthodox philosophical theology
of both Catholics and Protestants. Newman, filled with enthusiasm at
God's list of perfections, continues the passage which I began to quote
to you by a couple of pages of a rhetoric so magnificent th