Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/33

 where, to the utmost borders of the material universe; but these affirmations of a universal truth are advanced in apposition to a truth which is more affecting, or which is of more intimate concernment to the devout spirit:—this spirit, its faults, its terrors, its aspirations; and this animal frame, of which it is the tenant, is in the hand of God, and is dependent upon His bounty, and is cared for in whatever relates to its precarious welfare; and thus is so great a theme—the Divine omniscience—brought home to its due culmination in an outburst of religious feeling: "How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: when I awake, I am still with Thee."

A problem absolutely insoluble, as an abstraction, and which in fact is not susceptible of any verbal enunciation in a scientific form, is that of the Divine Eternity;—or, as we are wont to say—using terms to which perhaps an attenuated meaning may be attached—the non-relationship of God to Time, and His existence otherwise than through successive instants. This is a belief which the human mind demands as a necessary condition of religious thought, and of which it finds the need at every step of the way in systematic theism, which yet is equally inconceivable, and inexpressible. In the Mosaic Ode (the 90th Psalm) the theistic axiom is so placed in apposition with the brevity and the precarious tenure of human life that the inconceivable belief becomes,