Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/32

 No alternative that is at once intelligible and admissible has ever yet been brought forward. God may be known and His attributes may be discoursed of, as related to the needs of the human spirit;—but not otherwise:—not a span beyond this limit has ever been attained.

"Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the Lord. Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him? Am I a God nigh at hand, and not a God afar off?" We may read the 139th Psalm throughout, and be convinced that what is inconceivable as an abstraction, or as an axiom in speculative theism, has, by the Hebrew writers, been firmly lodged in the beliefs of men in the only mode in which such a lodgment could be possible. This element of the Infinite finds a coalescent surface—a point of adhesion in the individual consciousness; a consciousness towards God which removes all other beings from our view, and which leaves us, each for himself, alone with his Creator and Judge.

In the place of interminable and abstruse definitions—defining nothing, propounding doubts and solving none—in the place of this laborious emptiness, the writer of the ode above referred to so affirms the doctrine of the omniscience and the omnipresence of God as at once to expand our belief of it to the utmost, and to concentrate it also upon the experiences of the spiritual life. God is everywhere present—in the vastness of the upper heavens—in the remotest recesses of Sheol (not Gehenna) every-