"We have no wish to deny that he does make such a confusion. To one who holds that 'to the operation of reason no objective reality is necessary, and that such reality can never be established,' this kind of subjective activity of the will, which seems so nearly to resemble passivity--these pure acts, or volitions, which never pass out of the sphere of the will into causation--may be satisfactory; but to one who believes that God is not a scholastic abstraction--to one who worships the 'living God' of the Scriptures--it will sound like a pitiful jugglery with words thinly veiling a lamentable confusion of ideas. God is a person, and he acts as a person. The divine will is no otherwise conceivable by us than as of the same nature as man's will; it differs from it only in the mode of its operation--for with him this is always immediate, and no deliberation or choice is possible--and it is as absurd to speak of the activity of his will, the eminently active force, never extending 'out of the circle of his own infinite being,' as it would be to call a man eminently an active person whose activity was all merely purpose or volition, never passing into the creative act _ad extra_, or out of the circle of his own finite being. "If St. Anselm is right, that, to be _in re_ is greater than to be _in intellectu_, then has the creature man, according to the critic, a higher faculty than his Creator _essentially and necessarily_ has. For his will is by nature causative, creative, productive _ad extra_, and it is nothing unless its activity be called forth into act external to his personality, while the pure acts of the divine will may remain for ever enclosed in the circle of the divine consciousness without realizing themselves _ad extra_!" (Pp. 540, 541.) We do not like to tell a man to his face, especially when he assumes the lofty airs and makes the large pretensions of our reviewer, that he does not know what he is talking about, or understand the ordinary terms and distinctions of the science he professes to have mastered, for that, in our judgment, would be uncivil; but what better is to be said of the philosopher who sees nothing more in the distinction between the divine act _ad intra_, whence the eternal generation of the Son and the eternal procession of the Holy Ghost, and the divine act _ad extra_, whence man and nature, the universe, and all things visible and invisible, distinguishable from the one necessary, universal, immutable, and eternal being, than in "the distinction between the southern and south-eastern sides of the hair"? The Episcopalian journals were right in calling the _Church Review's_ criticism on us "racy," "rasping," "scathing;" it is certainly astounding, such as no mortal man could foresee, or be prepared to answer to the satisfaction of its author.