(_b_) God is the creator of the universe. This is the purest expression of the Sublime itself. In other words we find that here for the first time all those fanciful conceptions of _generation_ and purely physical _procreation_ of external fact by God disappear. Each and all give place to the thought of creation by virtue of spiritual power and activity. "God spake: Let there be Light, and there was Light." A sentence dong ago cited, as a striking illustration of the Sublime by Longinus. And such indeed it is. The Lord of all, the One substance, proceeds, it is true, under the mode of self-expression; but the type of this bringing forth is the purest, nay, a mode of expression, aetherial so to speak, and without material form, the Word that is to say, the medium of thought as the ideal Power, in conjunction with whose mandate that it shall exist, the existing thing is veritably and immediately posited under the relation of tacit obedience. (_c_) Into this created world, however, God is not conceived to pass over as into His reality; rather He abides withdrawn behind Himself, albeit this opposition supplies no secure ground for a logically developed dualism. For that which has been brought into being is His work, possesses no self-consistency as apart from Him. It is solely a witness to _His_ Wisdom, Goodness, and Justice in general, just that and no more. The One is Lord over all; His dwelling is not in the facts of Nature. They are solely the accidents of His Greatness, without potency in themselves, which can indeed suffer the show of His essence to appear, but are unable to make the reality of it visible[75]. And this it is which constitutes the Sublime in its reference to the Divine. 2. Moreover, inasmuch as the one God is thus severed from the concreteness of the phenomenal world and posited in isolated fixity, while the externality of determinate existence is on its side defined and placed in subordination as the finite, both natural and human existence are now viewed under the novel aspect that they cannot be conceived as manifesting the Divine without at the same time making visible their essential finiteness.