For this reason, also, is nature
orderly, complete, and permanent,--that it is conditioned not upon our
frail and faulty personalities, but upon our impersonal, universal human
nature, in which is transacted the miracle of God's incarnation, and
through which He forever shines.
Besides Creator and creature, nothing else can be; and whatever else seems
to be, must be only a seeming. Nature, therefore, is the shadow of a
shade, but it serves an indispensable use. For since there can be no
direct communication between finite and Infinite--God and man--a medium or
common ground is needed, where they may meet; and nature, the shadow which
the Infinite causes the finite to project, is just that medium. Man,
looking upon this shadow, mistakes it for real substance, serving him for
foothold and background, and assisting him to attain self-consciousness.
God, on the other hand, finds in nature the means of revealing Himself to
His creature without compromising the creature's freedom. Man supposes the
universe to be a physical structure made by God in space and time, and in
some region of which He resides, at a safe distance from us His creatures:
whereas, in truth, God is distant from us only so far as we remove
ourselves from our own inmost intuitions of truth and good.
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