Let us now suppose, and the supposition falls in with what our conscience and the Bible tell us, that in God all goodness dwells. This goodness cannot lie stored away as in a treasure-house, so as to be merely an object of contemplation, it must be active and in operation. This is essential to our idea of goodness, and it agrees with the view of God which Christ presents to us, which is that of a being ever _operating_. “My Father worketh hitherto,” says our Lord, “and I work.” For good to unfold, and advance toward perfection in its manifold ways, an arena is wanted. The world we know of affords the arena required; in this, God has been working from the first One kind of His work we can conceive to be the suggesting thoughts to men; but if it be so, He leaves the will free either to entertain or to reject the suggestions, as we might those of a friend. That we may not lose ourselves in the immensity of God and eternity, we will withdraw our gaze from the rest of the Universe, and fix it on this planet of ours, when organic life first began to appear upon it. The spiritual and material world might, before this, have been going on, each apart, through countless ages; but a moment came when the spiritual and the material were wondrously blended, and life began upon the earth. Different orders of being succeeded each other, and fresh forces came into play. We may suppose that God sympathised with all His creation, and that the qualities that appeared in it reflected something in Himself. God may have rejoiced in seeing the animal creation happy. The animals were in a degree free, but they were not self-conscious; they did not know that they were happy, or that they were loved, and God may have required for the full unfolding of His infinite capacity for sympathy and love, to be in relation with beings who could know Him and love Him, and know that they loved Him. Mr Erskine of Linlathen, in his excellent book on the Spiritual Order, says “Is there not a comfort in the doctrine of the eternal Sonship, as a deliverance from the thought of a God, whose very nature is Love, dwelling in absolute solitude from all eternity without an object of love?” We may extend this observation to other qualities besides love, from the exercise of which, a being who is alone in the world is necessarily debarred. Is it not likely that a God of mercy, truth and justice would frame a world of beings, in His dealing with whom all these qualities should find scope and exercise? Without self-conscious beings having free wills, how could this be done?