His faculties, has engendered things dissimilar to Himself.  Must He not in all things and through all things be like unto Himself?  Can there be in God certain evil parts of which at some future day he may rid Himself?—­a conjecture less offensive and absurd than terrible, for the reason that it drags back into Him the two principles which the preceding theory proved to be inadmissible.  God must be ONE; He cannot be divided without renouncing the most important condition of His existence.  It is therefore impossible to admit of a fraction of God which yet is not God.  This hypothesis seemed so criminal to the Roman Church that she has made the omnipresence of God in the least particles of the Eucharist an article of faith.

“But how then can we imagine an omnipotent mind which does not triumph?  How associate it unless in triumph with Nature?  But Nature is not triumphant; she seeks, combines, remodels, dies, and is born again; she is even more convulsed when creating than when all was fusion; Nature suffers, groans, is ignorant, degenerates, does evil; deceives herself, annihilates herself, disappears, and begins again.  If God is associated with Nature, how can we explain the inoperative indifference of the divine principle?  Wherefore death?  How came it that Evil, king of the earth, was born of a God supremely good in His essence and in His faculties, who can produce nothing that is not made in His own image?

“But if, from this relentless conclusion which leads at once to absurdity, we pass to details, what end are we to assign to the world?  If all is God, all is reciprocally cause and effect; all is One as God is One, and we can perceive neither points of likeness nor points of difference.  Can the real end be a rotation of Matter which subtilizes and disappears?  In whatever sense it were done, would not this mechanical trick of Matter issuing from God and returning to God seem a sort of child’s play?  Why should God make himself gross with Matter?  Under which form is he most God?  Which has the ascendant, Matter or Spirit, when neither can in any way do wrong?  Who can comprehend the Deity engaged in this perpetual business, by which he divides Himself into two Natures, one of which knows nothing, while the other knows all?  Can you conceive of God amusing Himself in the form of man, laughing at His own efforts, dying Friday, to be born again Sunday, and continuing this play from age to age, knowing the end from all eternity, and telling nothing to Himself, the Creature, of what He the Creator, does?  The God of the preceding hypothesis, a God so nugatory by the very power of His inertia, seems the more possible of the two if we are compelled to choose between the impossibilities with which this God, so dull a jester, fusillades Himself when two sections of humanity argue face to face, weapons in hand.