" for
instance, is, I suppose, received by most readers as a magnificent
hyperbole, having reference to some peculiar and fearful manifestation
of God's power to the writer of the Psalm in which the words occur. But
the expression either has plain meaning, or it has _no_ meaning.
Understand by the term "Heavens" the compass of infinite space around
the earth, and the expression, "bowed the Heavens," however sublime, is
wholly without meaning; infinite space cannot be bent or bowed. But
understand by the "Heavens" the veil of clouds above the earth, and the
expression is neither hyperbolical nor obscure; it is pure, plain, and
accurate truth, and it describes God, not as revealing Himself in any
peculiar way to David, but doing what he is still doing before our own
eyes day by day. By accepting the words in their simple sense, we are
thus led to apprehend the immediate presence of the Deity, and His
purpose of manifesting Himself as near us whenever the storm-cloud
stoops upon its course; while by our vague and inaccurate acceptance of
the words we remove the idea of His presence far from us, into a region
which we can neither see nor know; and gradually, from the close
realization of a living God who "maketh the clouds his chariot," we
refine and explain ourselves into dim and distant suspicion of an
inactive God, inhabiting inconceivable places, and fading into the
multitudinous formalisms of the laws of Nature.

Sec. 7. All errors of this kind--and in the present day we are in constant
and grievous danger of falling into them--arise from the originally
mistaken idea that man can, "by searching, find out God--find out the
Almighty to perfection;" that is to say by help of courses of reasoning
and accumulations of science, apprehend the nature of the Deity in a
more exalted and more accurate manner than in a state of comparative
ignorance; whereas it is clearly necessary, from the beginning to the
end of time, that God's way of revealing Himself to His creatures should
be a _simple_ way, which _all_ those creatures may understand. Whether
taught or untaught, whether of mean capacity or enlarged, it is
necessary that communion with their Creator should be possible to all;
and the admission to such communion must be rested, not on their having
a knowledge of astronomy, but on their having a human soul. In order to
render this communion possible, the Deity has stooped from His throne,
and has not only, in the person of the