between His creation and Himself, and to that extent
limited His Being--for the universe is not identical with God; we now
add that in endowing man with an existence related to, but distinct
from, His own, He limited not only His infinite Being, but also His
infinite Power, delegating some portion thereof to us--for man's will
is not identical with God's will, but capable of resisting, though also
capable of co-operating with it. Without such individual initiative,
without such an individual faculty of choosing between alternatives of
action, man could never have been a moral agent; but moral liberty to
choose and act aright or amiss implies also {95} moral responsibility
for such choice on the part of the chooser.

This neglected truth of God's self-limitation of His power needs to be
far more explicitly avowed than has generally been the case. Only so
shall we get clear of the confusion and uncertainty with which the
subject of human freedom is so largely surrounded; only so shall we be
enabled to place the burden of responsibility for sin, the cause of so
immense a proportion of the world's suffering, upon the right
shoulders--_i.e._, man's, not God's. It is urgently necessary to
disperse the common fallacy according to which God, being the Author of
all, is the causative Agent answerable for all the happenings in His
universe, for all human pain and all human sin. Where freedom is,
_there_ is responsibility. For let us bring the matter down from the
abstract to the concrete: if a dreadful railway accident is caused
through the momentary mental lapse of a signalman who has been
overtaxed by excessive working hours, how is the responsibility God's?
It obviously belongs to those who imposed a task involving the safety
of human lives on a man who was not in a fit condition to fulfil such a
duty. If an explosion in a coal-mine, accompanied by terrible loss of
life, is caused through some miner striking a match, or carrying a
naked light, in defiance of well-known regulations of safety, how is
God responsible? He has endowed us with intelligence whereby to {96}
discover His laws, and with freedom to obey or disobey them: the use or
misuse of that freedom rests with ourselves.

But now it may be asked--Was it the act of a benevolent Deity to
entrust this terribly two-edged weapon of liberty to our unskilful
hands, in which it was bound to work so vast an amount of injury? And
this opens up the larger and more gen