can be incompatible with His character. He is throughout a mystery; consequently, everything belonging to Him, and all that He is concerned in, must naturally partake of mystery. To disbelieve, therefore, anything concerning Him, only because it is unintelligible, would be just as unreasonable as to disbelieve that the rational man is composed of body and soul, merely because we cannot understand how this mysterious union is carried on. Do we understand even that process of vegetation, by which the oak towers into life and beauty from the small and homely acorn? Are there not everywhere mysteries in the animal and vegetable economy, which the most subtle skill of human wisdom has never been able to unravel? We talk of the mystery of the Trinity, but is it really more a mystery than Deity ever is, however we consider it? I ask again, how can we imagine any being never to have had a beginning? We do not, indeed, question the fact, still it transcends our conceptions. Let us go back how we will, the mind unavoidably pauses at some imagined beginning; let us go forward as we may, it alike rests at some imagined end. When we think of the Almighty, we are lost in the immensity of the object. "The thunder of his power, who can understand!" Eternity we can have no conception of; ubiquity we cannot the better conceive; infinity is an idea which all the faculties of the mind are employed in vain to grasp. And why is this?

Because we derive all our ideas from experience, either direct or analogous, and experience cannot approach the skies, because they are beyond the limits of its operation.

By analogous experience, I mean what we obtain by similarity of knowledge. That I may be the better understood, I will illustrate my meaning by a familiar example. For instance; though I never had an arm cut off, I have some knowledge of the pain which such an operation must induce, from experience of the pain I suffered when that arm sustained some trifling injury. This may suffice as an example of what I desire to be understood by analogous experience. And thus it is that we have, if not a proximate and direct, at least an indirect and remote experience of every thing in nature. Of the Deity, in his essence and perfections, we can have no experience, either positive or analogous, and consequently can form no adequate conceptions of Him. The mystery and incomprehensibleness of the Trinity, are, therefore, no argument against its credibility. To doubt its truth, only because we cannot understand it, is just as unreasonable as to question the presence of a shadow, merely because we cannot grasp it. Its being contrary to reason, can be nothing against it, because with it reason can have nothing to do, further than as it is the medium through which our minds are elevated to the contemplation of divine things. It transcends reason;

it cannot be estimated by reason; it is a subject with which reason cannot grapple, because reason can only define justly or probably upon the presumptions of experience; and with respect to the character of the Deity, experience must be altogether out of the question.

We see, then, that whether we regard Him simply in his abstract unity, or as combining three persons in the one Godhead, he is alike inaccessible to our understandings. There is, therefore, no more difficulty, no more incongruity, in "putting our whole trust and confidence in Him," as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, one God, than in believing Him to exist under any other character of Divinity, since, as I have already shown, under whatever character, in whatever position we contemplate Him however constituted, however acting-He is equally mysterious, equally beyond the reach of our understandings. We can have no excuse where we have no reason for denying; and if reason only is to decide for us, we have just as strong grounds for disbelieving the existence of a Being infinite and eternal, as for discrediting that hypostatical union of three in one, the foundation upon which the grand edifice of the Christian Religion has been reared. In everything that regards our faith, we must be guided, not by the demurs of an overweening and captious reason, but solely and unremittingly by the word of God. That we can have no rational grounds for disbelief, will be evi

dent; because, if we can conceive the nature of the Divinity in no way whatever, what ground from reason can we have for rejecting the belief of Him, under any form of revelation which He, in His ineffable wisdom, may think fit to deliver to us, merely because we cannot, by any process of our mental faculties, unravel the mystery? What really is there, I will again ask, more repugnant to the understanding in a Trinity of persons, uniting in and constituting the single uncompounded Godhead, than in an infinite nature, under any view whatever of its immensity? Absolutely nothing! Is it more difficult to conceive the Trinity than the God of the Deists, who is just as unapproachable by their understandings, as a triune God is by ours? What can there be incredible that a God, of whom we can form no proportionable, no distinct conception, should be such as only makes Him what He must be, however we contemplate his attributes and perfections—namely, unintelligible? And, therefore, whether as three persons in one God, or as one God subsisting without such an union, He is still uniformly and only incomprehensible. "As the Heavens are higher than the earth, so are His ways than our ways, and His thoughts than our thoughts."

Now, although we can comprehend so little of the Divine Nature here, it is readily supposable that we may arrive at a much more enlarged knowledge of Him hereafter. If we would only take time to

reflect, we might easily imagine that what appears to us above the investigation of human intellect, in the present confined state of our mental perceptions, may be clearly understood, when their powers shall be enlarged in a future condition of things. If we were only to fancy that, in the resurrection, the soul were to have an additional sense of perception* bestowed upon it, only equal, for instance, to the sense of sight, what a prodigious capacity would be thus given to it, of receiving an accession of divine light, of which we can neither now ima

* This is offered merely as an illustration, not as assuming a fact. On the contrary, I do not conceive it at all necessary, that any additional faculty should be imparted to us in the world of spirits, where the perceptions will be so infinitely enlarged as to supersede such a necessity. "We now see through a glass darkly;" we shall then look through no opposing medium. The Scripture expressly refers to our being clothed upon, that is, to an improvement of our present faculties to an extent as unlimited as our souls shall be capable of, in a state of unqualified fruition. The difference in the powers of human perception, are sufficiently great to afford us some notion of what that perception may be, when the spirit is released from the shackles of the flesh, and enrolled among the glorious company of Heaven. Take a rude untutored countryman and compare him with Sir Isaac Newton; we shall then see what exists even in this life. The condition of the human soul is at all times an awful subject of contemplation. Gambold has a fine thought, which may be applied here. "A tame and feeble bird, which has accidentally hatched an eagle's egg, and is afterwards affrighted at the strength and impetuosity of what has been fostered under its own wings, cannot find itself in a more critical case, than a man, when holding dialogue, like Adrian, with his own soul."