te definitely
declined to place such a construction upon immanence, we are preserved
from the absurdities which flow from it. We may and do hold that all
the works of the Lord manifest Him in some manner and in some measure;
but, as we already stated in our introductory chapter, not all do so in
the same manner or the same measure, and not any of them nor all of
them are He. To the specific inquiry, What, if not part of God, is
this stone?--we can, indeed, only answer in the words of Tennyson that
if we knew what the least object was in itself, we "should know what
God and man is." But, dealing with the question more generally, we may
say that what inorganic nature shows forth of the indwelling God is His
prevailing Power and abiding Law; looking upon the works of Him who
"stretcheth out the north over empty space, and hangeth the earth upon
{36} nothing," we can but feel that awed admiration of His wisdom and
might which is expressed over and over again in the Book of Job. And
this impression deepens when we pass upward from the inorganic to the
organic creation; for not only do we behold the entire vast spectacle
thrilled through and through by one Life, but we are also enabled to
discern something of the august Purpose which progressively realises
itself in all the phases of the cosmic process. That the God revealed
by the universe must transcend the universe in order to be in any real
sense its Creator, is self-evident; but that it is His own Energy which
pervades it, a present Power operating from within--in other words,
that He is immanent in the world, as well as transcendent--is a thought
from which we cannot legitimately escape.

When we speak of the immanence of God in nature, therefore, we mean
principally immanence of Power; and due weight should be given to this
qualification, since its effect is to remove the obstacles we have
enumerated above. For it ought to be plain, though in popular
discussion it is constantly overlooked, that God cannot be _ethically_
present in the unethical, nor _personally_ present in the impersonal.
And here, it seems to us, we go to the root of our present problem,
_viz._, by re-emphasising what is indispensable to a right conception
of this whole doctrine--that immanence is of necessity a matter of
degrees. Nature is not moral, {37} and hence does not reveal God's
moral character to us; nature is not personal, and therefore, while its
operations point with irresistible c