hypocrisy of the one class, and the ignorance of the other, and troubling both, without being able to improve either by supplying anything more solid or satisfying. So far as I can see, the more advanced nations of modern Europe are to be saved from such an issue only by the active and earnest propagation of Scriptural light.

SECT. V.-ANTHROPOMORPHISM.

In avoiding pantheism it is not necessary to fall into anthropomorphism. The truth is, of all systems pantheism is the most apt, in our times, to land in anthropomorphism. For if God and his works be one, then we will be led to look on humanity as the highest manifestation of the Divinity, and the natural devoutness of the heart will find vent in hero-worship, or the foolish raving about great men, which has been so common amongst the eminent literary men of the age now passing away, the issue of the pantheism which rose like a vapour in Germany, and came over like a fog into Britain and America.

Anthropomorphism (like pantheism) has a truth, and it has an

error.

I. In believing in the existence of God, we are following the principles of reason to their logical consequences. But the same convictions which lead us to believe in God, also make us clothe him in perfect perfections. We ascribe to Him the attributes adequate to produce the results falling under our notice in the world and in the soul. In particular, our intuitions being native, constitutional, fundamental, have all the sanction of God, and we must hold that what they declare to be true and good must be true and good to the Divine comprehension. For all this we have the sanction, first of reason, and then, when we have found a good God, of the Divine veracity. Our sense of good and of responsibility to Him constrain us to believe that he approves of the good which he would lead us to love and practice, and that he must condemn the evil which he condemns in us.

In proceeding in this manner we are led by reason to believe that God must have qualities like those which we possess, or rather that we possess qualities in some degree resembling those

of the Divine Being; in other words, we reach the doctrine of which Plato had a glimpse, but which is fully revealed in the opening of our Bible, that man was made in the image of God. Hence the tendency-good and beneficent so far as not perverted -of our natures to assimilate the Divine Being to ourselves, and to bring him into a close relationship to us. Reason, speculative and practical, contemplates God as the Perfect Reason and the Perfect Righteousness, from which as a sun and centre proceed all the rays in which it rejoices. The heart craves for a Being compassionating distress, and sympathizing with the sufferers. Let it be added, that it has an instinctive feeling of fear towards a Being who hates the evil, and who is expected to punish it. It is only so far as we conceive God as clothed with some perfections, that our affections can be made to flow forth towards him; only so far as we conceive him as clothed with high perfections, that he can be an object of love on the one hand, or of holy fear on the other. The Deity of philosophic systems is felt on all hands to be powerless over the heart of man in the way of alluring it to what is good, of deterring it from evil, or comforting it in the time of trouble. The imagination and feelings of man never can be attracted or impressed except by a personal God, exhibited with living characteristics. Such a God can never be represented to us by general description or abstract doctrine, or indeed in any other way than by a concrete picture of purposes designed, and deeds performed by him. It is thus He is brought before us in nature, by powerful operations, by wise plans, by gracious gifts. It is thus He is presented to us in his Word: not by subtle speculations and concatenated ratiocinations, as in philosophic treatises; not by abstract statement and logical distinctions, as in books of divinity; but by a concrete representation of a living and loving Being displaying his nature by his acts. We may go a step further. The heart seems to crave for, or at least rejoices to hear of, a God still more closely allied to humanity. It is gratified to the full in the revelation of a God incarnate without being degraded-" Immanuel, God with us."

There are some who place the Divine Being so far above this world (like a star) that he cannot be regarded as feeling any

interest in it; who make him so incomprehensible that we cannot .contemplate, and therefore cannot love him. It is supposed to be an advantage of this view that it gives us a more elevated conception of the Divine character, as stripping it of all the imperfections of our nature. But I have yet to learn that consciousness, that personality and will, that feeling, that love, that approbation of moral good, are creature infirmities. The God who gave us these, our highest endowments, has done so in such a way that we are constrained to look upon them as transcripts of his own glorious perfections.

We can understand how some should represent the Divinity of the Bible as not sufficiently elevated; it arises from the meagre and unsatisfactory character of their own views. It is unworthy, they say, of the Divine Being, to represent him as having a plan, and taking steps to execute it; but it is because they have made him a mere process or principle of abstract reason. They object to the distinctiveness of character attributed to God in the Scriptures, to his holy and sovereign love, but it is because they have. sublimed him into metaphysical essence. They denounce the very language in which He is represented as pitying his creatures: it is because they have stript him of all emotion, and made him cold as a mathematical symbol or a logical formula. They wax wroth in characterizing the degradation involved in speaking of Him as angry with sinners: it is because they have divested him of all moral sentiment so as to make it impossible that he should do good or that he should do evil.

We

II. But we are not constrained by the principles which we follow to attribute to God every quality possessed by man. are sure that our fellow-men have certain properties which make them like ourselves, but we do not ascribe to them all our personal characteristics; we allot to them only those of which we discover traces in their acts. In like manner, we attribute to Deity only the qualities which are manifested in his works, including always our intuitions. It does not follow because we have a body that we should suppose our Maker to be an organism; or because we have a peculiar pleasurable sensation when we see harmonious colours, or because we are affected with a sense of the ludicrous

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when we notice incongruities, that we should suppose God to be similarly affected. All that we can legitimately infer is that He must have had the power and benevolence which led him to impart these qualities to us. The native tendency towards the apprehension of the Perfect which points and leads to God, forbid us to ascribe to him anything that is not high and holy.

The error of anthropomorphism consists first in attributing to God all the properties of man, including, it may be, creature infirmities, sinless or sinful: "Thou thoughtest I was altogether such an one as thyself." We might be inclined to think that there can be little risk of persons falling into this particular error in our day; but we have the fact staring us in the face that the only new religion springing up in these latter ages which has gained the assent of multitudes is Mormonism, according to which Deity has a human figure, and is of a measurable size. So deep is the tendency to bring God down to our own level, that professing Christians fall into it, and are apt to picture God as a petty tyrant, resenting personal neglect, or with a weak favouritism lavishing favours on those who succeed in pleasing him by acts of willworship.

There may also be anthropomorphism in supposing God to be possessed of no other qualities than those which belong to humanity. All are prepared to acknowledge that the attributes of God, even when the same in kind as those possessed by man, are infinitely higher in degree. But we must be ready to admit that some of the attributes common to the Creator and creature are in the former after a mode or manner different from what they are in the latter-quite as different as vital force is from mechanical. Not only so, there is reason to believe that God has perfections differing not only in degree but in kind from those possessed by humar beings as different it may be as mind is from body. As these qualities are not in our nature, and do not fall under our experience, external or internal, so we cannot so much as conceive of them, and still less can we describe them, or suggest any intimation of their nature. We are constrained by what we know of God to believe that there is vastly more which we do not and cannot know, so that we may say with Heraclitus that "God wills and wills

not to be known," and with Scripture, "Thou art a God that hidest thyself." We should ever join an apprehension of our own incapacity with our apprehension of the Divine greatness. It will tend to raise in our minds a salutary awe; and it will prepare us to believe that as we cannot comprehend His nature, so there may be parts of his procedure the originating principles of which we cannot conceive, and of which therefore we should judge in a spirit of lowliness and of diffidence. This unknown region is no doubt the locus of the "things which belong unto the Lord our God," of the mysteries of the Divine nature, such as of the relations of the Persons of the Godhead, and of the reasons of those actings which we ascribe to the Divine decrees, which we regard as sovereign, but cannot allow to be arbitrary. The boy who knows only the rules of the father's outgoings and incomings in the family, does not presume to judge of the procedure determined by his unknown (to the child) relations as a merchant or statesman; and still less should we with the evidence of the goodness of God in the region known, presume to utter opinions as to what comes from the region beyond.

SECT. VI.-CHRISTIAN DIVINITY.

It has been found in all ages that there are intimate points of affinity between Metaphysics (that is, our generalized intuitions) and Theology (that is, the systematized expression of the concrete and scattered truths of revelation). In the first speculations of mankind, theology and philosophy are indissolubly intertwined in what has been called Theosophy. At a very early age of the Church of Christ, the Eastern theosophies and certain forms of Platonism became associated with Bible doctrine. This arose

partly from the circumstance that a number of eminent Christian Fathers had, prior to their conversion to Christianity, been attached to philosophy, Asiatic or Grecian; and partly, I am convinced, by the fact that there had been wrought, even into the Pagan philosophic systems, a large body of truth, either springing from the native convictions systematized by the inherent sagacity of the mind, or derived from a tradition which had kept afloat a remnant of primitive truth. Platonism, in particular, had many interesting