Finally, consider _creative power_ by which human beings project
themselves into the future, and, with masterful ideals in mind, lay
hold on circumstance and bend it to their will. As if he shared
creative power with the Eternal, an engineer summons nature's forces
to his bidding and lays his will upon them, until where nothing was a
structure stands that mankind may use for centuries. Nothing in all
the universe can so create except persons. In that essentially
creative act where deathless ideas and harmonies are given being by
poets and musicians, so that something out of nothing is brought to
pass by personality, man faces a mystery as abysmal as God's making of
the world. "Paradise Lost" is wonderful; but not half as wonderful as
the creative personality itself who years before projected it. "An
inward prompting," Milton says, "which now grew daily upon me, that by
labor and intense study, joined with the strong propensity of nature,
I might perhaps leave something so written to after times as they
should not willingly let it die." Nothing can so create save
personality.
Personality is not so limited that we should be ashamed to think of
God in terms of it. Rather, of all realities with which we deal,
personality alone, invisible, reaching back in memory, reaching out in
imagination, expanding itself in love, and laying hold upon the future
with creative power, is a worthy symbol of the Eternal Spirit.
Even when the meaning of personality has been so enlarged and
elevated, we should not leave our statement of belief in God as though
our experience of personality were a mould into which our thought of
him is poured and so delimited. We are not presumptuous Lilliputians,
running out with verbal stakes and threads, to pin down the tall,
majestic Gulliver of the Eternal and dance in theological exultation
round our capture. We know better than that. We understand how
insufficient is every human name for God. We know that when we have
said our best--"How unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past
tracing out!" (Rom. 11:33).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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