Why there is something, rather than nothing.

Our reflection, to be well-grounded, must begin with a certainty. That certainty is that creation must have answered to some necessity in God. There could not have been any necessity outside of God, acting upon Him, or He would cease to be God, to be All-in-All.

Within His own being, then, there must have been a need, to which creation was the response. But how can there have been a need in God; what could have been wanting in the perfect All-in-All?

The answer lies in the conception. The very fact that God is All-in-All contains, and is, an urgency of necessity – a coefficient of His perfection.

As we will demonstrate elsewhere, and as long understood by Christian reflection, it is eternally essential that God should be a Tri-Unity. But God needs something more than internal relation, something that His Tri-Unity cannot supply. This ‘something’ can only be intimated by words for its nature is beyond our thought, and we must be reverent as well. The best name our language supplies for it is ‘virtue.’

A strange thought, that God should lack virtue, until we consider what virtue is. God is all-good, is perfect goodness. But virtue is at once less and more than goodness. Goodness, in itself, is an untried state of being. It is not, in itself, in evidence. It is on trust. What it would prove to be, were it tested, has not been established.

Virtue is goodness tested, proved, and victorious, Goodness is subjective, virtue objective. Goodness is the potential, virtue is the actual. Virtue is goodness in manifestation; we may say, it is its incarnation.

God’s perfect goodness, then, for its expression and vindication, needed to be crowned with virtue. In its very perfection, there was an ache, because it had not been realized; a hunger, because it had not been fulfilled. Again with reverence, and straitened by the inadequacy of our language, we may say God lacked ‘glory,’ for there was none to prefer Him, nothing to prefer Him to. His perfect and absolute goodness wanted completeness, until it was put into action, proved, judged, and found transcendent.