Son, taken upon Him the veil of
our human _flesh_, but, in the person of the Father, taken upon Him the
veil of our human _thoughts_, and permitted us, by His own spoken
authority, to conceive Him simply and clearly as a loving Father and
Friend;--a being to be walked with and reasoned with; to be moved by our
entreaties, angered by our rebellion, alienated by our coldness, pleased
by our love, and glorified by our labor; and, finally, to be beheld in
immediate and active presence in all the powers and changes of creation.
This conception of God, which is the child's, is evidently the only one
which can be universal, and therefore the only one which _for us_ can be
true. The moment that, in our pride of heart, we refuse to accept the
condescension of the Almighty, and desire Him, instead of stooping to
hold our hands, to rise up before us into His glory,--we hoping that by
standing on a grain of dust or two of human knowledge higher than our
fellows, we may behold the Creator as He rises,--God takes us at our
word; He rises, into His own invisible and inconceivable majesty; He
goes forth upon the ways which are not our ways, and retires into the
thoughts which are not our thoughts; and we are left alone. And
presently we say in our vain hearts, "There is no God."

Sec. 8. I would desire, therefore, to receive God's account of His own
creation as under the ordinary limits of human knowledge and imagination
it would be received by a simply minded man; and finding that the
"heavens and the earth" are spoken of always as having something like
equal relation to each other ("thus the heavens and the earth were
finished, and all the host of them"), I reject at once all idea of the
term "Heavens" being intended to signify the infinity of space inhabited
by countless worlds; for between those infinite heavens and the particle
of sand, which not the earth only, but the sun itself, with all the
solar system, is in relation to them, no relation of equality or
comparison could be inferred. But I suppose the heavens to mean that
part of creation which holds equal companionship with our globe; I
understand the "rolling of those heavens together as a scroll" to be an
equal and relative destruction with the "melting of the elements in
fervent heat;"[39] and I understand the making the firmament to signify
that, so far as man is concerned, most magnificent ordinance of the
clouds;--the ordinance, that as the great plain of waters was for