Page:Logic Taught by Love.djvu/140

136 Religious writers are expected to have something to say on the subject of Incarnation. The present writer mentions it here, only in order to show that she is not afraid of it.

Incarnation is, necessarily, phenomenalization; for it is the manifestation of somewhat. The Incarnation believed in by Christians is ecessarily one-sided; for it is the manifestation of Good—of those qualities, in a perfect form, which, in an imperfect condition, constitute what we call human goodness, without any admixture of the fierceness and lust which God created in brutes, but which, in man, are evil. Neither the existence nor the value of such a crowning of all phenomenalization has been denied by our great mathematical Logicians. Babbage and De Morgan, Gratry and Boole, concurred in thinking the subject of Singular Solution worthy their profoundest study. But its value is as a type-model for us, an intellectual and moral guide for our working-hours. The notion of substituting, on Sabbath, prostrate adoration of a Manifestation of one side of God, for meditation on the Ineffable and Inconceivable Union of polar attributes, is one which Logic cannot take seriously into account, and which Logicians can find no words to characterize.

The earliest Christians kept Sabbath as Jews, and consecrated the working-week by a First-day communion with Jesus; which shows that they took a logical and sane view of their relation to their Master. Whatever excuses priests may afterwards have made to the conscience for ignoring altogether the main purpose of Sabbath, the latent motive for it must have been the same which had prompted all similar perversions. As