“If an imperfect creation contradicts the faculties which man attributes to God we are forced back upon the question, Is creation perfect?  The idea is in harmony with that of a God supremely intelligent who could make no mistakes; but then, what means the degradation of His work, and its regeneration?  Moreover, a perfect world is, necessarily, indestructible; its forms would not perish, it could neither advance nor recede, it would revolve in the everlasting circumference from which it would never issue.  In that case God would be dependent on His work; it would be co-eternal with Him; and so we fall back into one of the propositions most antagonistic to God.  If the world is imperfect, it can progress; if perfect, it is stationary.  On the other hand, if it be impossible to admit of a progressive God ignorant through a past eternity of the results of His creative work, can there be a stationary God? would not that imply the triumph of Matter? would it not be the greatest of all negations?  Under the first hypothesis God perishes through weakness; under the second through the Force of his inertia.

“Therefore, to all sincere minds the supposition that Matter, in the conception and execution of the worlds, is contemporaneous with God, is to deny God.  Forced to choose, in order to govern the nations, between the two alternatives of the problem, whole generations have preferred this solution of it.  Hence the doctrine of the two principles of Magianism, brought from Asia and adopted in Europe under the form of Satan warring with the Eternal Father.  But this religious formula and the innumerable aspects of divinity that have sprung from it are surely crimes against the Majesty Divine.  What other term can we apply to the belief which sets up as a rival to God a personification of Evil, striving eternally against the Omnipotent Mind without the possibility of ultimate triumph?  Your statics declare that two Forces thus pitted against each other are reciprocally rendered null.

“Do you turn back, therefore, to the other side of the problem, and say that God pre-existed, original, alone?

“I will not go over the preceding arguments (which here return in full force) as to the severance of Eternity into two parts; nor the questions raised by the progression or the immobility of the worlds; let us look only at the difficulties inherent to this second theory.  If God pre-existed alone, the world must have emanated from Him; Matter was therefore drawn from His essence; consequently Matter in itself is non-existent; all forms are veils to cover the Divine Spirit.  If this be so, the World is Eternal, and also it must be God.  Is not this proposition even more fatal than the former to the attributes conferred on God by human reason?  How can the actual condition of Matter be explained if we suppose it to issue from the bosom of God and to be ever united with Him?  Is it possible to believe that the All-Powerful, supremely good in His essence and in