That keen, clear-minded man, Cardinal Newman, regarded God under the image of a maker, detached absolutely like any human workman from the work of his hand. He is the Eternal King, absolutely distinct from the world as being its center,--“Upholder, Governor, and Sovereign Lord.” “He created all things out of nothing, and preserves them every moment, and could destroy them as He made them.” “He is separated from them by an abyss, and is incommunicable in all his attributes.” This being is always described and interpreted in terms of man, or of our own finite human nature, reflecting in his outlines human history, human political and social institutions, and the aims and objects of concrete human beings. He does not hesitate to relate this God to “every movement which has convulsed and refashioned the surface of the earth,” and hence to make him responsible for the death and destruction and misery which have attended earthquakes and have set back the tide of human progress. Of course every noxious insect, every noxious plant and beast and death-dealing germ is from Him also. “Wars when just” are from Him also. Who or what are they from when they are not just, the great Cardinal does not say. Can both sides be just? Into such absurdities does the conception of a manlike God lead us. The modern scientific mind, quite as imaginative--if not more so--as the typical theological mind, never gets mired in such contradictions or tangled up in such childish anthropomorphism. Such confusion arises out of the habit of mind which sees the whole creation directed to man; his good is its one object and aim, and when his good suffers, something has miscarried. The cruel and destructive things in nature can only be accounted for on the theory that some aboriginal calamity, like the fall of man, had visited the world before God took charge of things. The naturalist sees this as the best possible world, sees that Nature is not an indulgent stepmother, but a strict disciplinarian; that the good and well-being of all is her aim; that suffering and defeat are relative; that God’s ways to man are not justified in a day or a week, or in this place or that, but require ages and continents to come to their full fruition. The good and the evil that will come out of the terrible World War will not all be apparent this year, or next, but only in the perspective of history--in the sum total of human progress of the ages. Such a view is a slap in the face of our egotism which demands instant returns, and which makes the individual supreme.