of the material--the
substances and forces of which the universe is composed not admitting
of any arrangements by which His purposes could be more completely
fulfilled; or else, the purposes might have been more fully attained,
but the Creator did not know how to do it; creative {93} skill,
wonderful as it is, was not sufficiently perfect to accomplish His
purposes more thoroughly.[2]

Such an answer, we need scarcely say, could only have been given by a
thinker who had grown up in the intellectual atmosphere of Deism; the
Deity which he contemplates is One who works upon the world purely _ab
extra_, who cannot be spoken of as the Creator, except by courtesy; in
reality He merely shapes and adapts materials over which He has only an
incomplete control, and which, therefore, so far from having been
called into being by Him, must be thought of as existing independently
of Him. Had He really _created_ the raw material from which He was to
frame the universe, He would of course have created some medium
perfectly plastic to His hand and adapted to His purposes; but if He
merely operates on matter from without, finding it stubborn and
unamenable, He is only a secondary Deity or Demiurge, and we have still
to answer the question, What is that real First Cause, the _Urgott_ who
created the _Urstoff_, matter in its most elementary form, and endowed
it with qualities some of which were destined to serve, while others
resisted and frustrated, the sub-Divinity's intentions?

Clearly, this notion also will not do; but while we may reject Mill's
theory as to the _nature_ of the limitations of Divine power, there
{94} is distinct force in his shrewd contention that religious people
generally--professions to the contrary notwithstanding--have never
really believed God to be, in the strict sense of the term, omnipotent.
This contention we believe, indeed, to be almost self-evidently true;
for on the contrary supposition nothing can happen contrary to God's
will--all things and beings would necessarily be carrying out that
will, and sin, _e.g._, would become an utterly meaningless term. But
if omnipotence is limited--which sounds, we admit, a contradiction in
terms--we ask once more, In what way and by whom? To that question we
have no other reply than the one given in our first chapter, _viz._,
that when we predicate limitation of the Deity, we must mean
self-limitation. In creating the universe, we said, God made a
distinction