Now, to say nothing of the sparkling beauty of these words, let us pause at this definite idea:  The Eternal, the first universal Cause of all things, independently of which nothing exists, could only create under the impelling motive of the goodness which gives, and not of the love which seeks requital.  This proposition is as clear in the abstract as any theorem of geometry.  But we have touched the threshold of the infinite; and we never touch the threshold of the infinite without falling into some degree of bewilderment.  Clear as this thought is in the abstract, if we wish to analyze it in its real substance, our view is confused.  You understand well that goodness increases in the proportion in which its object is diminished.  We are by so much more good as we stoop to that which is poorer and more miserable.  What then shall be the infinite goodness?  In order to find it, we must infinitely diminish its object:  and here we encounter mystery.  To diminish an object infinitely is an operation impossible to our thought.  This mystery is encountered even in the mathematical sciences.  We take a quantity, halve it, and again halve this half, and so on without end, but we shall never obtain the infinity of smallness; for the quantity indefinitely divided will always remain indefinitely divisible.  At whatever degree of division we may have arrived, between what remains and nothingness there extends always the abyss of the infinite.  So I seek for the object of infinite goodness:  that object must be infinitely destitute.  I diminish accordingly the existence of the universe:  I extinguish all the rays of its beauty; I take from it order, life, measure, color, light; I reduce it until it is nothing but formless matter, a something—­I know not what—­which has no longer a name.  Vain attempt!  This nameless something, so long as it is anything, will not be nothing.  Between it and nothing there will always be the infinite.  If the goodness of God is applied to any object which was existing independently of Him, however poor and abject that object be conceived to have been, then God is no longer the unique, the absolute Creator.  If imagination will cross the abyss, we shall come of necessity to say—­what? that the object of infinite love must have been non-existence.  This is what the orator already quoted has done:—­“All perfection supposes an object to which to apply itself.  The divine goodness therefore requires an object as vast and profound as itself.  God discovered it.  From the bosom of His own fulness He saw that being without beauty, without form, without life, without name, that being without being which we call non-existence:  He heard the cry of worlds which were not, the cry of a measureless destitution calling to a measureless goodness.  Eternity was troubled, she said to Time:  Begin!”