It belongs to the _idea of God_, that we have to think of the sublimity of God over time and space, of his eternity and omnipresence, in such a way that God, in his being, life, and activity, does not stand _in_ time nor within any limits or differences of space, but absolutely above time and above all limits and differences of space; that he is _present_ in his world everywhere and at any time. He who objects to this, can only do it with weapons to which we have to oppose the objection which the adversaries of the Christian idea of God so often raise against it--namely, the objection of a rejectable _anthropomorphism_. In contesting the possibility of the idea of an uninterrupted presence of a personal and living God in the entire realm of the universe, the adversaries seem to permit themselves to be daunted by the difficulty which is offered to man in controlling the realms of his own activity. The greater such a realm, the more difficult becomes a comprehensive survey, the more the human influence has to restrict itself to the greater and more common and to neglect the little and single. The more removed is the past which helps to constitute the circumstances of the present, the greater is the human ignorance and oblivion; the more removed is the future, the greater is the human incapability of {350} influencing it decisively. Such measures ought to disappear, even in their last traces, when we reflect on God and divine activity. If once the idea is established for us of a living God, who is always present in the world created by him, and in whose "sight a thousand years are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night," the final causal chain of causes and effects may be ever so long, and stretching over this course of the world from its beginning to its end; the single phenomena may be woven together of ever so many thousands and thousands of millions of different causal chains: we nevertheless see above them all the regulating hand of God from whom they all come, and who not only surveys and controls their texture in all its threads, but who himself arranged, wove, and made it. Such a view is not only more satisfactory to the religious need of man, but it also seems to us more scientific, than a view which traces everything back to a blind and dead cause, or even to no ultimate cause at all, and thinks it has entirely removed the last veil, if it pronounces the great word "causal law."