We must not wonder things away into nonentity, but try to present them to ourselves after what fashion we are able--our shadows of the heavenly. For our very beings and understandings and consciousnesses, though but shadows in regard to any perfection either of outline or operation, are yet shadows of his being, his understanding, his consciousness, and he has cast those shadows; they are no more causally our own than his power of creation is ours. In our shadow-speech then, and following with my shadow-understanding as best I can the words of the evangelist, I say, The Father, in bringing out of the unseen the things that are seen, made essential use of the Son, so that all that exists was created _through_ him. What the difference between the part in creation of the Father and the part of the Son may be, who can understand?--but perhaps we may one day come to see into it a little; for I dare hope that, through our willed sonship, we shall come far nearer ourselves to creating. The word _creation_ applied to the loftiest success of human genius, seems to me a mockery of humanity, itself in process of creation.
Let us read the text again: 'All things were made _through_ him, and without him was made not one thing. That which was made _in_ him was life.' You begin to see it? The power by which he created the worlds was given him by his father; he had in himself a greater power than that by which he made the worlds. There was something made, not _through_ but _in_ him; something brought into being by himself. Here he creates in his grand way, in himself, as did the Father. 'That which was made _in_ him was _life_'
What does this mean? What is the _life_ the apostle intends? Many forms of life have come to being through the Son, but those were results, not forms of the life that was brought to existence _in_ him. He could not have been employed by the Father in creating, save in virtue of the life that was _in_ him.
As to what the life of God is to himself, we can only know that we cannot know it--even that not being absolute ignorance, for no one can see that, from its very nature, he cannot understand a thing without therein approaching that thing in a most genuine manner. As to what the life of God is in relation to us, we know that it is the causing life of everything that we call life--of everything that is; and in knowing this, we know something of that life, by the very forms of its force. But the one interminable mystery, for I presume the two make but one mystery--a mystery that must be a mystery to us for ever, not because God will not explain it, but because God himself could not make us understand it--is first, how he can be self-existent, and next, how he can make other beings exist: self-existence and creation no man will ever understand. Again, regarding the matter from the side of the creature--the cause of his being is antecedent to that being; he can therefore have no knowledge of his own creation; neither could he understand that which he can do nothing like. If we could make ourselves, we should understand our creation, but to do that we must be God. And of all ideas this--that, with the self-dissatisfied, painfully circumscribed consciousness I possess, I could in any way have caused myself, is the most dismal and hopeless. Nevertheless, if I be a child of God, I must be _like_ him, like him even in the matter of this creative energy. There must be something in me that corresponds in its childish way to the eternal might in him. But I am forestalling. The question now is: What was that life, the thing made _in_ the Son--made by him inside himself, not outside him--made not _through_ but _in him_--the life that was his own, as God's is his own?