In starting with a self-conscious, self-determining and personal God, then, as a first principle that accommodates and insures the immortality of the individual spirit, we are only beginning with what is implicit in the facts of nature and human life. Let it be clearly apprehended that the ground of the self-conscious, self-determining, personal God is thought. That the fundamental and first thing in this universe is mind. That the being of God is secondary to the mind, or thought of God. God has being, because he has thought, and not thought, because he has being. The trouble with the pantheistic system of Spinoza was that he looked upon God, first as infinite substance or being, while thought was only one of the modes of this being, and extension was the other. The root of all doubt and skepticism is to be traced to a confused notion of the nature of God. Many speak of God as the Supreme Being, and advertise by their language that in their esteem God is diffused nebulosity, or universally extended externality. There never was a skeptic in the world who had come to the rational and tenable position, that God is primarily, and fundamentally, and essentially thought. We may properly speak of his being, his wisdom, his justice, his truth, his love; but these are different determinations of his thought. God’s being is the externality of his thought. His wisdom is his thought devising means to ends. His justice is his thought balancing and regulating. His truth is his thought in realization. His love is his thought in sacrifice. “In the beginning was the Word.” A word is an expressed thought. “The Word was with God.” The realized thought or word was with God, the Eternal Thinker, or Thought. “God said, Let there be light, and there was light.” Light was thus the expression of thought. Nearly all materialism and pantheism look upon things as an emanation from something. Vapor emanates from the surface of a river, and is only the river in diffusion. But the universe does not emanate from God; it is the direct creation and expression of his thought. Potentially the universe was always in the thought of God. III.