whose
purposes toward it are ever kind, and who will order everything for
its best good. It submitteth itself wholly, with body and soul, to thy
beneficent decrees. Do with me as thou wilt, it saith, I know that it
shall be good, so surely as it is thou that dost it. The speculative
understanding, which has only heard of thee but has never seen thee,
would teach us to know thy being in itself, and sets before us an
inconsistent monster which it gives out for thine image, ridiculous to
the merely knowing, hateful and detestable to the wise and good.

I veil my face before thee and lay my hand upon my mouth. How thou art
in thyself, and how thou appearest to thyself, I can never know,
as surely as I can never be thou. After thousand times thousand
spirit-lives lived through, I shall no more be able to comprehend thee
than now, in this hut of earth. That which I comprehend becomes, by my
comprehension of it, finite; and this can never, by an endless process
of magnifying and exalting, be changed into infinite. Thou differest
from the finite, not only in degree but in kind. By that magnifying
process they make thee only a greater and still greater man, but never
God, the Infinite, incapable of measure.

* * * * *

I will not attempt that which is denied to me by my finite nature,
and which could avail me nothing. I desire not to know how thou art
in thyself. But thy relations and connections with me, the finite,
and with all finite beings, lie open to mine eye, when I become what
I should be. They encompass me with a more luminous clearness than the
consciousness of my own being. Thou workest in me the knowledge of my
duty, of my destination in the series of rational beings. How? I know
not, and need not to know. Thou knowest and perceivest what I think
and will. How thou canst know it--by what act thou bringest this
consciousness to pass--on that point I comprehend nothing. Yea, I know
very well that the idea of an act, of a special act of consciousness,
applies only to me but not to thee, the Infinite. Thou willest,
because thou willest, that my free obedience shall have consequences
in all eternity. The act of thy will I cannot comprehend; I only know
that it is not like to mine. Thou _doest_, and thy will itself is
deed. But thy method of action is directly contrary to that of which,
alone, I can form a conception. Thou _livest_ and _art_, for thou
knowest, and willest, and workest, om