Page:Vocation of Man (1848).djvu/178

178 race; and only by means of such a harmonious limitation do they become a race:”—thus answers the philosophy of mere knowledge, and here it must rest as its highest point. But what can set a limit to reason but reason itself?—what can limit all finite reason but the Infinite Reason? This universal agreement concerning a sensible world,—assumed and accepted by us as the foundation of all our other life, and as the sphere of our duty—which, strictly considered, is just as incomprehensible as our unanimity concerning the products of our reciprocal freedom,—this agreement is the result of the One Eternal Infinite Will. Our faith, of which we have spoken as faith in duty, is only faith in Him, in His reason, in His truth. What, then, is the peculiar and essential truth which we accept in the world of sense, and in which we believe? Only that from our faithful and impartial performance of our duty in this world, there will arise to us throughout all eternity a life in which our freedom and morality shall prolong their activity. If this be true, then indeed is there truth in our world, and the only truth possible for finite beings; and it must be true, for this world is the result of the Eternal Will in us,—and that Will, by the law of His own being, can have no other purpose with respect to finite beings, than that which we have set forth.

That Eternal Will is thus assuredly the Creator of the World, in the only way in which He can be so, and in the only way in which it needs a creation:—in the finite reason. Those who regard Him as building up a world from an everlasting inert matter, which must still remain inert and lifeless,—like a vessel made by human hands, not an eternal procession of His