fact, that it flows forth with an interior perfection that anticipates and provides for all results, and makes them things not to be deprecated or departed from. The results certainly are relative, the activity of God is relative within itself; but there is still left a consistent and sufficient meaning to the word absolute, when we express by it the transcendent fact, that these relations are the exclusive product of the Divine Reason, acting under its own law: that they are not, as with us, more or less foreign to His thought and a limit on His power. This explanation also sweeps away another large class of alleged contradictions. Each divine act is, indeed, relative, but relative under relations imposed exclusively by the Divine Reason; and this is the fact stated when we say that God is absolute. The thought of God is sufficient unto itself. The Absolute is in its manifestation the relative, precisely as the Infinite is the finite. It is for this very purpose, the inclusion of all things, that the idea of God enters.

§ 4. Now let us look a little more independently at the conception properly covered by the word God. We shall do it but briefly, as we should otherwise anticipate more favorable opportunities for the gradual expansion of the idea which will be offered in connection with the proof of His being. It is not necessary for the purposes of rational belief that we have a complete, or anything like a complete conception of the Divine Nature; but only that we have one consistent and intelligible. We have but a vague notion of the form of being