This, it seems to me, is very strange and worthless reasoning. According to it, the ability of God to form and execute a purpose is evidence not of power but of weakness. I wonder if Mr Mill imagined that the inability of God to form and carry out a purpose would have been evidence not of His weakness but of His power. Or did he suppose, perhaps, that both ability and inability were signs of weakness, and that, consequently, for once opposites were identical? Or did he not think on the subject at all, and so reasoned very much at random? I confess I cannot see how ability to contrive things is weakness, or inability to contrive them power. I hold to Bacon's maxim that "knowledge is power," and refuse to admit that wisdom is weakness. But God, if omnipotent, it is said, did not need to contrive: His mere word must have been sufficient. Yes, is the obvious answer; His mere word, His mere will, was sufficient to produce all His contrivances, and has produced them all. There is no shadow of reason for suspecting that anything was difficult to Him or for Him. No such suspicion is entertained by those who employ the design argument; and those who would rationally object to that argument must find something else to insist on than the power of God's mere will. The will of God is everywhere as efficacious as He in His omnipotence and omniscience chooses that it should be. At the same time, if He desire certain ends, His will cannot remain mere will and dispense with the contrivance of appropriate means. If He wish to bestow happiness on human beings, He must create human beings, and contrive their bodies and minds. To speak of His will as able to "bestow the same efficacy on any means" is no less contrary to reason than it would be to speak of it as able to make the part greater than the whole. It is only in the world imagined by Mr Mill--one in which two and two might be five--that a sunbeam could serve the same purpose as a granite pillar or a steam-engine; and such a world, most people will assuredly hold, even omnipotence could not create. Infinite power and wisdom must necessarily work "under limitations" when they originate and control finite things; but the limitations are not in the infinite power and wisdom themselves--they are in their operations and effects. According to Mr Mill's argument, infinite power could not create a finite world at all: only a finite power could do so. That surely means that a finite power must be mightier than an infinite power; and that, again, is surely a plain self-contradiction, a manifest absurdity.