from all that is man's; a gulf teeming with infinite revelations, but a
gulf over which no man can pass to find out God, although God needs not
to pass over it to find man; the gulf between that which calls, and that
which is thus called into being; between that which makes in its own
image and that which is made in that image. It is better to keep the
word _creation_ for that calling out of nothing which is the imagination
of God; except it be as an occasional symbolic expression, whose daring
is fully recognized, of the likeness of man's work to the work of his
maker. The necessary unlikeness between the creator and the created
holds within it the equally necessary likeness of the thing made to him
who makes it, and so of the work of the made to the work of the maker.
When therefore, refusing to employ the word _creation_ of the work of
man, we yet use the word _imagination_ of the work of God, we cannot be
said to dare at all. It is only to give the name of man's faculty to
that power after which and by which it was fashioned. The imagination of
man is made in the image of the imagination of God. Everything of man
must have been of God first; and it will help much towards our
understanding of the imagination and its functions in man if we first
succeed in regarding aright the imagination of God, in which the
imagination of man lives and moves and has its being.

As to _what_ thought is in the mind of God ere it takes form, or what
the form is to him ere he utters it; in a word, what the consciousness
of God is in either case, all we can say is, that our consciousness in
the resembling conditions must, afar off, resemble his. But when we come
to consider the acts embodying the Divine thought (if indeed thought and
act be not with him one and the same), then we enter a region of large
difference. We discover at once, for instance, that where a man would
make a machine, or a picture, or a book, God makes the man that makes
the book, or the picture, or the machine. Would God give us a drama? He