, should will to be
better known to and more aptly conceived by such His admiring creatures,
in some usual glorious form, and some wonted sacred place. Not that any
should see God, as purely God; but, as God relatively to them, in the
capacity of King, Creator, and the Object of all reasonable worship. It
seems anteriorly probable that one at least of the Persons in the
Godhead should for this purpose assume a visibility; and should hold His
court of adoration in some central world, such as now we call
indefinitely Heaven. That such probability did exist in the human
forecast, as concerns a heaven and the form of God, let the testimony of
all nations now be admitted to corroborate. Every shape from a cloud to
a crocodile, and every place from AEther to Tartarus, have been peopled
by man's not quite irrational device with their so-called gods. But we
must not lapse into the after-argument: previous likelihood is our
harder theme. Neither, in this section, will we attempt the
probabilities of the place of heaven: that will be found at a more
distant page. We have here to speak of the antecedent credibility that
there should be some visible phase of God; and of the shape wherein he
would be most likely, as soon as a creation was, to appear to such his
creatures. With respect, then, to the former. Creatures, being finite,
can only comprehend the infinite in his attribute of unity: the other
attributes being apprehended (or comprehended partially) in finite
phases. But, unity being a purely intellectual thought, one high and dry
beyond the moral feelings, involves none of the requisites of a
spiritual, that is an affectionate, worship; such worship as it was
likely that a beneficent Being would, for his creatures' own elevation
in happiness, command and inspire towards Himself. In order, therefore,
to such worship and such inspiration acting through reason, it would
appear fitting that the Deity should manifest Himself especially with
reference to that heavenly Exemplar, the Three Divine Persons of the
One Supreme Essence already shown to have been probable. And it seems
likeliest and discreetest to my thinking, that, with this view, the
secondary phase, loving Obedience, under the dictate of the primary
phase, a loving Will, and energized by the tertiary or conjoining phase
a loving Quickening Entity, should assume the visible type of Godhead,
and thus concentrate unto Himself the worship of all worlds. I can
conceive no sch