Page:Swedenborg, Harbinger of the New Age of the Christian Church.djvu/117

 now positive knowledge, together with that other truth of the existence of a nexus between God and man in the Person of the only-begotten Son, so we may legitimately advance, not indeed to inquire into the nature or qualities of Deity, because He is infinite, and His qualities therefore we can never penetrate, but to inquire what there can be in man to lead to this primary end; what there can be in him that does not repugn the infinite and the nexus; how a confessedly infinite Deity may best be expressed in finite terms that shall not be repugnant to the occasion; what befitting worship consists in; what is the peculiar efficacy of faith proceeding from a true acknowledgment of God; with innumerable other subjects, which cannot be settled briefly, but require to be rationally deduced in a volume by themselves. And as by the grace of God we have all these matters revealed in Holy Scripture, so where reason is perplexed in its apprehensions we must at once have recourse to Revelation; and where we cannot discover from Revelation either what we should adopt or in what sense we should understand its declarations, we must then fly to the oracle of reason."