ycles or customs of sensations, and
fellow-travelling circumstances (as the ship to the mariner), which make
up our empirical self: thence to bring myself to apprehend livelily the
exceeding mercifulness and love of the act of the Son of God, in
descending to seek after the prodigal children, and to house with them
in the sty. Likewise by the relation of my own understanding to the
light of reason, and (the most important of all the truths that have
been vouchsafed to me!) to the will which is the reason,--will in the
form of reason--I can form a sufficient gleam of the possibility of the
subsistence of the human soul in Jesus to the Eternal Word, and how it
might perfect itself so as to merit glorification and abiding union with
the Divinity; and how this gave a humanity to our Lord's righteousness
no less than to his sufferings. Doubtless, as God, as the absolute
Alterity of the Absolute, he could not suffer; but that he could not lay
aside the absolute, and by union with the creaturely become affectible,
and a second, but spiritual Adam, and so as afterwards to be partaker of
the absolute in the Absolute, even as the Absolute had partaken of
passion ([Greek: tou paschein]) and infirmity in it, that is, the finite
and fallen creature;--this can be asserted only by one who
(unconsciously perhaps), has accustomed himself to think of God as a
thing,--having a necessity of constitution, that wills, or rather tends
and inclines to this or that, because it is this or that, not as being
that, which is that which it wills to be. Such a necessity is truly
compulsion; nor is it in the least altered in its nature by being
assumed to be eternal, in virtue of an endless remotion or retrusion of
the constituent cause, which being manifested by the understanding
becomes a foreseen despair of a cause.

Sunday 11th February, 1826.

One argument strikes me in favour of the tenet of Apostolic succession,
in the ordination of Bishops and Presbyters, as taught by the Church of
Rome, and by the larger part of the earlier divines of the Church of
England, which I have not seen in any of the books on this subject;
namely, that in strict analogy with other parts of Christian history,
the miracle itself contained a check upon the inconvenient consequences
necessarily attached to all miracles, as miracles, narrowing the
possible claims to any rights not proveable at the bar of universal
reason and experience. Every man among the Sectaries, h