Are these objections sound? When we study man, are we not then also studying Nature? Is not man himself the highest manifestation of Nature? If so, and if we see the quality of any power best in its highest and fullest operations, we can study the nature of God best by looking into our own. We should, in fact, know very little of Nature if we did not look within as well as without. Tyndall justly demands unlimited freedom of investigation in the pursuit of science. But whence came this very idea of freedom except from the human mind? Nothing in the external world is free; all is fatal. Such ideas as cause, force, substance, law, unity, ideality, are not observed in the outward world--they are given by the activity of the mind itself. Subtract these from our thought, and we should know very little of Nature or its origin. No doubt the idea of a Creator, and of one perfect in wisdom, power, and goodness, is derived by man from his own mind. But it is not necessary that such a Creator should be an "artificer," or proceed by "broken efforts." He may act by evolution, or processes of development. He may create perpetually, by a life flowing from himself into all things. He may create the universe anew at every moment--not as a man lights a torch with a match and then goes away, but as the sun creates his image in the water by a perpetual process. Thus God may be regarded as _creating_ each animal and each plant, while he maintains the mysterious force of development by which it grows from its egg or its seed. The essential idea of creation is an infinite cause, acting according to a perfect intelligence, for a perfect good. There is nothing, necessarily, of an artificer or of broken efforts in this. It is the very idea of divine creation given in the New Testament. "From whom, and through whom, and to whom, are all things." "In him, we live, and move, and have our being." The theist may well accept the view given by Goethe, in his little poem, "Gott, Gemüth, und Welt." "What kind of God would He be who only pushes the universe from without? Who lets the All of Things run round and round on his finger? It becomes him far better to move the universe from within, To take Nature up into Himself, to let Himself down into Nature, So that whatever lives, and moves, and has its being in Him Never loses His power, never misses His spirit."