HKB
and Negation--with the attributes of Holiness, Providence, Love, Justice, and Mercy. It comprehends, moreover, the independent (extra-mundane) existence and personality of the supreme ONE, as our Creator, Lord, and Judge.
The hypothesis of a one Ground and Principle of the Universe (necessary as an hypothesis; but having only a logical and conditional necessity) is thus raised into the Idea of the LIVING GOD, the supreme Object of our Faith, Love, Fear, and Adoration. Religion and Morality do indeed constrain us to declare him Eternal and Immutable. But if from the Eternity of the Supreme Being a Reasoner should deduce the impossibility of a Creation; or conclude with Aristotle, that the Creation was co-eternal; or, like the latter Platonists, should turn Creation into Emanation, and make the universe proceed from Deity, as the Sunbeams from the Solar Orb;--or if from the divine Immutability he should infer, that all prayer and supplication must be vain and superstitious: then however evident and logically necessary such conclusions may appear, it is scarcely worth our while to examine, whether they are so or not. The positions themselves must be false. For were they true, the Idea would lose the sole ground of its reality. It would be no longer the Idea intended by the Believer in his premise--in the premise, with which alone Religion and Morality are concerned. The very subject of the discussion would be changed. It would no longer be the God in whom we believe; but a stoical FATE, or the superessential ONE of Plotinus, to whom neither Intelligence, nor Self-consciousness, nor Life, nor even Being can be attributed; nor lastly, the world itself, the indivisible one and only substance (substantia una et unica) of Spinoza, of which all phænomena, all particular and individual things, lives, minds, thoughts, and actions are but modifications.
Let the believer never be alarmed by objections wholly speculative, however plausible on speculative grounds such objections may appear, if he can but satisfy himself, that the result is repugnant to the dictates of conscience, and irreconcilable with the interests of morality. For to baffle the objector we have only to demand of him, by what right and under what authority he converts a thought into a substance, or asserts the existence of a real somewhat corresponding to a notion not derived from the experience of his senses. It will be of no purpose for him to answer, that it is a legitimate notion. The notion may have its mould in the understanding; but its realization must be the work of the FANCY.