Page:Tracts for the Times Vol 3.djvu/186

38 the Deity sits enthroned, is a delusive one. God is everywhere..... The deity is the All-pervading Power, which lives and acts throughout the whole. He is not a separate existence, having a special habitation in a part of it.... The striking and beautiful metaphors of the Bible never were intended to give us this idea. God is a Spirit, it says, in its most emphatic tone. A Spirit; that is, he has no form, no place, no throne. Where He acts, there only can we see Him. He is the wide-spread omnipresent power, which is every where employed, but which we can never see, and never know, except so far as He shall manifest Himself by His doings.

"If we thus succeed in obtaining just conceptions of the Deity, as the invisible and universal power, pervading all space, and existing in all time, we shall at once perceive that the only way by which He can make Himself known to His creatures, is by acting Himself out, as it were, in His works; and of course the nature of the Manifestation which is made will depend upon the nature of the works. In the structure of a solar system, with its blazing centre and revolving worlds, the Deity, invisible itself, acts out its mighty power, and the unerring perfection of its intellectual skill. At the same time, while it is carrying on these mighty movements, it is exercising, in a very different scene, its untiring industry, and unrivalled taste, in clothing a mighty forest with verdure, &c. &c..... And so everywhere this unseen and universal essence acts out its various attributes by its different works. We can learn its nature only by the character of the effects which spring from it ...

"This universal essence, then, must display to us its nature, by acting itself out in a thousand places, by such manifestations of itself as it wishes us to understand. Does God desire to impress us with the idea of His power? He darts the lightning, &c. &c. Does He wish to beam upon us in love? What can be more expressive than the sweet summer sunset, &c..... How can He make us acquainted with His benevolence and skill? Why, by acting them out in some mechanism which exhibits them. He may construct an eye or a hand for man, &c. How can He give us some conception of His intellectual powers? He can plan the motiwis of the planets, &c. &c....... But the great question, after all, is to come. It is the one to which we have meant that all we have been saying should ultimately tend. How can such a Being exhibit the moral principle by which His mighty energies are all controlled?" pp. 6–14.

It is impossible to do justice to one's feelings of distress and dismay on studying this passage,—to explain what one thinks of it, and why,—to convince a careless reader that one's language about it is not extravagant. Nor is it necessary perhaps, as it does not directly bear upon the subject before us,—to which I will hasten on. I interrupt the course of his exposition merely to put in a protest against the doctrine of it, which, to speak