neither. As the maker of nature, he gave both nature's space and nature's time to be. He knows him also to be absolute, for he originated from himself those primal forces in which nature's substances began, and by which nature's causes and events commenced their flow. Nature's places and periods are wholly irrelevant to him, who determined them, in the bringing of nature itself to stand out in the void where nothing, not even the one common space and time, yet was. The reason, thus, overlooks both nature and nature's space and time, and finds the independent God, who has made them all to be. His infinity and absoluteness are without contradiction or absurdity, and reduce themselves to no negations by abstracting the conceivable from them, for he positively stands unbounded by any spacial and temporal limits, and unconditioned by any of nature's substances and causes. Here is left no room for scepticism, for there is here no conflicting thought. There is no place for pantheism, for a personal creator is found, and the cosmos is an origination from his agency, and not the mere development of God himself into another mode of being. Atheism also is wholly excluded, for a personal God, creator and governor, infinite and absolute, has been fully recognized.

In the presence of this Deity there is awakened the feeling of humility as a dependent creature, and of self-debasement as a sinner, which is consciously reasonable and salutary. But that factitious humility, urged upon us under the assumption of our weakness and limitation of faculties, but which is really the self-contradiction of the intellect, and the demand for faith which can be only credulity and superstition in such a mind, can never be morally wholesome. It is a feeling that irritates and corrodes the spirit, and sours the disposition. True humility before the true God covers the face in reverence and adoration, and to the sinner secures contrition and confession, and inspires hope and praise.

With this self-consistent and clear idea of God, we can also see that his revelation of himself, either by his works or his inspired word, can find no hindrance from the intellect

nor obstacles from conflicting thought to the full exercise of an enlightened and intelligent faith. It is manifestly our highest worthiness and blessedness to believe, obey and trust the accredited messages of such a God, for nothing tends to weaken but all we know tends to strengthen our confidence. Our thought and our faith accord with and reciprocally sustain each other.

And the true limits of religious thought are also fully found and fairly adjusted. We know how, completely, to correct the antinomies of the sense and the understanding, and to put their processes of constructing and connecting on each hand, that they may guide us through and out of nature's conditions, and the common space and time of nature, to the plainly apprehended infinite and absolute above them. Here the self-existent Jehovah dwells, limitless and relationless, so far as it regards all the measures and changes of nature. The phenomenal and the logical have no applicability to him, and only the inner principles of the rational direct his counsels. "He is a Spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth."

ARTICLE IV.

THE TWOFOLD LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST.

BY REV. J. T. TUCKER, HOLLISTON, MASS.

A COMPLETE human culture requires the true embodiment of the two great forms or modes of life to which we give the names of Godhead and Manhood. These are everywhere inseparably intertwined in moral and spiritual relations; and no advance can be made in fulfilling the designs of a rational existence except on the basis of a just understanding of what God is and man should be. The ideal

type of each must be made actual and visible in the world as the indispensable preliminary of the world's regeneration.

This demand has found its only adequate satisfaction in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. In him "the life was manifested," the double life embracing the entire circuit and significance of spiritual being in its normal state. The Son of God and Son of man united in himself these two revelations. On the one side, his character presents the heavenly, the divine likeness in distinct expression. On the other, it portrays, in equal clearness, the perfect man. These two requisites, then, of the reëstablishment of our race in the position for which its adaptations assure us it was made, are supplied by Christianity.

That this twofold representation is thus essential to human improvement upon the highest scale, is as undeniable as is the fact that it has never been produced from any other source than the history of Jesus Christ. By a remarkable accord of sentiment, the reflecting minds of all nations have pronounced the culture of the godlike to be the legitimate and noblest business of an intelligent being. It is felt as generally to be true, that the best model of manhood must come from a sphere of life above its own; that no earthly saint or hero has altogether filled out the symmetrical conception of a soul's progress in the knowledge and the power of goodness. Humanity has always looked to Divinity for its pattern of resemblance, its law of growth. Where its theology has been no better than that of the heathen, “gods many, and lords many," it has had no other resource from which to draw the form and the motive of its development. Ashamed of their deities, as conscientious idolators must have sometimes been, they could find no worthier models of character elsewhere. If disgusted with the sensualism of the "Immortals," still the instincts of the heart returned inevitably to their region of a higher, wider, nobler, if not adequately purer, existence, in search of (however unsuccessfully) the perfect in reason, will, emotion, conduct. This may be said, that, defective and vile as the false objects of the world's worship have generally been, human

nature would have sunk to immeasurably deeper abysses of brutality with no conceptions of deity at all. With an utter negation of the thought of God in any shape of personal activity and superintendence, nothing could have restrained the race from fatal and total demoralization. A simple belief in the invisible spiritual realm, though peopled only with the progeny of a Jove or a Brahma, has exerted an incalculable power to hold up mankind from gravitating to the lowest possible degree of mental and moral grossness.

But it is not enough to save men from becoming as bad as they can be. Both religion and philanthropy profess it to be their errand to make society as pure as is practicable with the very best helps to the comprehension and attainment of its right position. These helps centre in Christ as the only competent interpreter of truth upon this subject, the only supplier of aid to realize that truth in actual experience. This is asserted. If it be denied, we then affirm that there is no help in the case; that neither God nor man has ever found a full manifestation; that the life of neither is yet in the world's possession in its just conception; that, on this ground of the challenger, the world still waits in more than the heart-sickness of hope deferred-in the sombre gloom of a deepening despair-his advent who shall embody to the eye the divine and the human ideals in their perfectness, and shall declare the method through which their spirit shall enter into, and assimilate to itself, the advancing civilization of our earth.

Concerning the Supreme Being it is to be noted, that he is partly revealed to creatures as an object of wonder and adoration; but that another phase is shown us as a subject of intelligible study and hopeful imitation. What are

classed as the natural attributes of Deity, can neither be entirely understood, or at all reproduced by the finite. Thus, absolute past eternity, infinite power, knowledge, diffusibility or omnipresence, are facts to be accepted as necessary to a proper Divine existence; and so we find the pagans made their father of the gods almighty. But we vainly grapple with that thought of infinitude in any of its forms; and to VOL XVII. No. 65.

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think to share it one's self is the dream of insanity. The moral qualities of God, on the other hand, address us differently. They too, indeed, run into the illimitable; and, on that side of their extension, consequently, far outreach our range of sight. It is no more within our ability fully to conceive what infinite holiness is, than infinite strength. But, on the side nearest us, these perfections present aspects which we rationally grasp and approve; which we can and should reproduce in our lives; which we must, or never really live. The divine purity, benevolence, truthfulness, justice, in a word, goodness, are characteristic of his nature. We know what these terms convey. Our eye takes in their beauty, as we gaze up into the sapphire sky and revel in its mild splendor. We do not pierce that arching vault of light to its deepest source of brilliance; nor do we compass, in spiritual vision, all that is meant by that "goodness" of the Uncreated. But we seize and hold a part of each revelation. We are conscious that our souls are capable of the culture of these virtues which glow down upon us from the celestial throne; that they may be one in their essential temper, if not to the superhuman measure of their full expression. This the spirit within, on which its Author stamped his image in Eden, tells us.

God, thus, is both incomprehensible and comprehensible. Reason cannot enfold his idea as the infinite; but moral sense can know him as the purely right and good. We shrink from the thought of omniscience as an unresolvable mystery. But we do not ask any one to tell us what love is, when God even calls himself by this benignant name. And so the scriptures are harmonized, in our own consciousness, which demand in bold challenge: "Who, by searching, can find out God? Who can find out the Almighty to perfection?" - and which command in positive terms: "Acquaint, now, thyself with Him and be at peace."

While the Godhead is beyond our grasp of apprehension, in its infinite capacities of being and acting, these facts of its constitution are indispensable as the ground-work of

'We cannot well avoid using a human phraseology, but not of course as intimating that Deity was ever constituted, ab extra aut infra.