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reconcile both the doctrine of a Special Providence and the efficacy of prayer with the constancy of visible nature. It is well to evince, not the success only, but the shortcomings of Natural Theology; and thus to make palpable at the same time both her helplessness and her usefulness-helpless if trusted to as a guide or an informer on the way to heaven; but most useful if, under a sense of her felt deficiency, we seek for a place of enlargement and are led onward to the higher manifestations of Christianity.

EDINBURGH, 15th Dec., 1835.

BOOK I.

PRELIMINARY VIEWS.

CHAPTER I.

On the Distinction between the Ethics of Theology and the Objects of Theology.

1. OUR first remark on the science of Theology is, that the objects of it, by their remoteness, and by their elevation, seem to be inaccessible. The objects of the other sciences are either placed, as those of matter, within the ken of our senses; or, as in the science of mind, they come under a nearer and more direct recognition still, by the faculty of consciousness. But no man hath seen God at any

time. We "have neither heard His voice nor seen His shape." And neither do the felt operations of our own busy and ever-thinking spirits immediately announce themselves to be the stirrings of the divinity within us. So that the knowledge of that Being, whose existence, and whose character, and whose ways, it is the business of Theology to investigate, and the high purpose of Theology to ascertain, stands distinguished from all other knowledge by the peculiar avenues through which it is conveyed to us. We feel Him not. We behold Him And however palpably He may stand forth

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to our convictions, in the strength of those appropriate evidences which it is the province of this science to unfold-certain it is, that we can take no direct cognizance of Him by our faculties whether of external or internal observation.

2. And while the spirituality of His nature places Him beyond the reach of our direct cognizance, there are certain other essential properties of His nature which place Him beyond the reach of our possible comprehension. Let me instance the past eternity of the Godhead. One might figure a futurity that never ceases to flow, and which has no termination; but who can climb his ascending way among the obscurities of that infinite which is behind him? Who can travel in thought along the track of generations gone by, till he has overtaken the eternity which lies in that direction? Who can look across the millions of ages which have elapsed, and from an ulterior post of observation look again to another and another succession of centuries; and at each further extremity in this series of retrospects, stretch backward his regards on an antiquity as remote and indefinite as ever? Could we by any number of successive strides over these mighty intervals, at length reach the fountain-head of duration, our spirits might be at rest. But to think of

duration as having no fountain-head; to think of time with no beginning; to uplift the imagination along the heights of an antiquity which hath positively no summit; to soar these upward steeps till dizzied by the altitude we can keep no longer on the wing; for the mind to make these repeated flights from one pinnacle to another, and instead

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