ngs be true, to
enter upon all such subjects with the seriousness befitting their
importance, and with the restraining thought that in fact they may be
sacred.

Let us then consider, antecedently to all experience, with what sort of
deity pure reason would have been satisfied. It has already arrived at
Unity, and the foregoing attributes. But what kind of Unity is probable?
Unity of Person, or unity of Essence? A sterile solitariness, easily
understandable, and presumably incommunicative? or an absolute oneness,
which yet relatively involves several mysterious phases of its own
expansive love? Will you think it a foregone conclusion, if I assert the
superior likelihoods of the latter, and not of the former? Let us come
then to a few of many reasons. First: it was by no means probable to be
supposed anteriorly, that the God should be clearly comprehensible: yet
he must be one: and oneness is the idea most easily apprehended of all
possible ideas. The meanest of intellectual creatures could comprehend
his Maker, and in so far top his heights, if God, being truly one in one
view, were yet only one in every view: if, that is to say, there existed
no mystery incidental to his nature: nay, if that mystery did not
amount to the difficulty of a seeming contradiction. I judge it likely,
and with confidence, that Reason would prerequire for his God, a Being,
at once infinitely easy to be apprehended by the lowest of His spiritual
children, and infinitely difficult to be comprehended by the highest of
His seraphim. Now, there can be guessed only two ways of compassing such
a prerequirement: one, a moral way; such as inventing a deity who could
be at once just and unjust, every where and no where, good and evil,
powerful and weak; this is the heathen phase of Numen's character, and
is obviously most objectionable in every point of view: the other would
be a physical way; such as requiring a God who should be at once
material and immaterial, abstraction and concretion; or, for a still
more confounding paradox to Reason (considered as antagonist to Faith,
in lieu of being strictly its ally), an arithmetical contradiction, an
algebraic mystery, such as would be included in the idea of Composite
Unity; one involving many, and many collapsed into one. Some such enigma
was probable in Reason's guess at the nature of his God. It is the
Christian way; and one entirely unobjectionable: because it is the only
insuperable difficulty as to His