The essential character of any anthropomorphic or human attribute--power for example, or wisdom, or goodness--is that it is limited, imperfect, and liable to error. But when we conceive of these qualities as existing in absolute perfection and boundless capacity, while we retain the idea that they are personal qualities, we in fact divest them of their anthropomorphic or human character. It is a contradiction in terms to say that an imperfect human capacity is the same attribute as a divine and unlimited capacity. The difficulty with the ancient religious beliefs, the whole error of anthropomorphism, was that the conceptions stopped short of the idea of unlimited power, wisdom, and benevolence. The attributes ascribed to the Deity likened him to man in form, character, powers, dispositions, passions. He was an exaggerated human being, with vastly more power, more skill, more wisdom, but still with the same kind of power, skill, and wisdom, actuated by like motives and governed by like passions. Now the truth is, that the difference between a limited and imperfect attribute of character and one that is boundless--power, for example--is more than a difference of degree. It is a difference in kind; for while in both cases we conceive of a personal capacity to act and a will to guide the act, in the one case we are thinking of that which is inferior, limited, and feeble, and in the other case we are thinking of that which knows no limitations and is absolutely inexhaustible. It is not true, therefore, that there can be no conception of a Supreme Being without ascribing to him human attributes. When we reason from phenomena to the conclusion that they must have had an author--when we reach the conviction that phenomena must have had a cause, that there must have been an actor, a process, and a product--we have to deal with two classes of phenomena. One is the class in which we know, from the observations of our senses and our experience, that the author and actor was man. It becomes verified to us with irresistible certainty that the phenomena of human society were produced by an actor, and that that actor was man; a personal agent with a limited and imperfect power. When we turn to the phenomena of nature which we know that man did not produce, we are led by the same irresistible logical sequence of thought to the conviction that these phenomena must have been caused to exist, for human reason revolts at the idea that the phenomena which exist were not caused to exist. We come immediately to perceive that the phenomena of nature are of such a character that the power which has produced them must not only have been superhuman, but it must have been absolutely boundless. At the moment we depart from the investigation of phenomena which belong in the department of human efforts, and come to the phenomena which belong in the department of nature alone, while the necessity for a personal actor continues,