Again, God is "before all things," he is the only Absolute Being, dependent on nothing outside himself; all that is not God is relative; that is to say, that God exists alone and is not necessarily related to anything else. The orthodox even believe that God did, at some former period (which is not a period, they say, because time then was not--however, at that hazy "time" he did), exist alone, _i e._, as what is called an _Absolute_ Being: this conception is necessary for all who, in any sense, believe in a _Creator_.
"Thou, in Thy far eternity, Didst live and love alone."
So sings a Christian minstrel; and one of the arguments put forward for a Trinity is that a plurality of persons is necessary in order that God may be able to love at the "time" when he was alone. Into this point, however, I do not now enter. But what does this Absolute imply? A simple impossibility of creation, just as does the Infinite; for creation implies that the relative is brought into existence, and thus the Absolute is destroyed. "Here again the Pantheistic hypothesis seems forced upon us. We can think of creation only as a change in the condition of that which already exists, and thus the creature is conceivable only as a phenomenal mode of the being of the Creator." Thus once more looms up the dreaded spectre of Pantheism, "the dreary desolation of a Pantheistic wilderness;" and who is the Moses who has led us into this desert? It is a leader of orthodoxy, a dignitary of the Church; it is Dean Mansel who stretches out his hand to the universe and says, "This is thy God, O Israel."