305 319 SERMON I. THE MYSTERY OF THE TRINITY NO ARGUMENT AGAINST ITS CREDIBILITY. EXOD. III. 14. "I am that I am." You will remember that these were the words which the Deity made use of in characterizing his own incomprehensible and incommunicable nature, when he revealed himself to Moses in Mount Horeb; appointing him leader of the Israelites, in order that he might rescue them from the bondage of Egypt, and restore to them the lost government of Israel. I propose to consider from them, first, the incomprehensibleness of the Divine Nature ;secondly, that as under whatever mysteries it may be brought before us, it is uniformly incomprehensible, being, in every view of it whatever, equally beyond the reach of our reason we can, therefore, have no rational grounds for disbelief. B St. Paul, in his enumeration of the qualifications necessary for the different orders of the priesthood, requires that they should "hold fast the mystery of the faith in a pure conscience," clearly showing that though the Christian faith has its mysteries, we are, nevertheless, to "hold it fast without wavering "that is, to believe it implicitly. A pure apostolic faith, is not that which arises from an actual demonstration to the senses of what we are required to believe, but that which is realized within us, simply upon " the evidence of things not seen." We are, indeed, required to believe what we cannot understand; for whilst religion has its mysteries, until it shall please the Almighty to remove them, we must be content to believe what we cannot comprehend; since all mysteries must be unintelligible to the human understanding, for as soon as they are understood, they cease to be mysteries. That belief is the only test of a pure faith, which takes everything for true, upon the authority of God, that He has declared to us, without presuming to make our insufficient reason the touchstone by which his truth is to be tried. If in any one single instance our assent is accorded to a truth, which we cannot explain, there can be no reason why it should not be in another, especially when it comes to us authenticated by indubitable authority; and there are many mysteries in nature of which we do not, for a moment, pretend to question the existence, though we are altogether unable to explain them. Now, surely, if this be the case in the material world-a fact evident to our daily experience there can be nothing very extraordinary that it should be so in the spiritual. Indeed, mystery is essential to the Christian dispensation. The manner in which it was consummated, transcended even the conceptions of angels. "Without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness! God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory." But to come more immediately to the first division of the subject. We shall perceive, that in the words before us, there is no definite, no tangible idea, if I may so say, suggested of the nature of Deity. They convey, nevertheless, a veiled but stupendous notion of a something not to be expressed or defined, and buoy up the mind amid the very indistinctness of its conceptions to a sublime feeling of awe; our veneration rising the higher in proportion as we feel the object of our thoughts to be beyond their reach. The words were mysterious, not because the Almighty designed to perplex him whom he had chosen as the leader of his people, but only because he could not communicate or represent himself to an inferior being. It is the absence of all positive knowledge of God, save what we feel to be true of his infinity, that conveys to us such awful, but, nevertheless, exalted, notions of those stupendous attributes insepara ble from this unlimitedness of the Divine Nature. Our very defectiveness in knowledge forces the inquisitive and expansive mind into the boundless field of possibilities, where it busies itself in adapting ideas to the Deity, which, though they always end, as they ever must end, in insufficiency, still stimulate it to adopt new, and, if possible, more comprehensive notions of him, and to endeavour to measure His perfections who is so far removed beyond, the perceptive faculties of man. We are, forced, however, to come at length to the conclusion of the Psalmist: "Such knowledge is too excellent for me, I cannot attain unto it: whither shall I go from thy spirit, O God, or whither shall go from thy presence? if I climb up into Heaven, thou art there, and if I go down to Hell, thou art there also." I The more we reflect upon the immensity of the Divine Nature, the more sensible shall we feel that it could not be fully revealed to us. God could not evidence and communicate himself to man without first making man capable of conceiving him. This would be at once to alter the spiritual economy of the mere human being to something superhuman, which would be utterly incompatible with his present nature and condition. Nay, in order to render himself definitively intelligible to man, God must advance him to a level with his own omniscience, for nothing short of infinite can comprehend infinite. He, therefore, exhibits him |