We may believe in "a God who hideth himself," but not in one who hideth himself forever. The Scriptures do, indeed, tell us that "God covereth himself with light as with a garment," but this is very different from being bound in an everlasting physical causation without interruption or suspension. This enrobing light is His supernatural glory, and finite eyes may see it, although they may never approach the direct vision of Him who dwelleth therein. But the thought of an endless nature is insupportable. Such an eternal future would seem to necessitate, in our thinking, a like eternal past of uninterrupted physical causation; and then, where are we? Every argument for the existence of God is gone; the very notion is gone. If, on the other hand, there have been beginnings and transitions in the past, then will there be again beginnings, and transitions, and interruptions, and suspensions in nature, in other words, displays of supernatural power. A little thinking shows us how much more rap

idly the shadow must move, or seem to move, over the plain of our magnified earthly history, than on “the dial plate of eternity," and so we rationally make allowance, in our estimate, for the chronological rates in the vast divine epochs as compared with our swiftly passing days. The immensely enlarging lens of our microscopic sense is all filled with the vision of the natural, but our reason cannot give up the thought of the higher movement. We cannot surrender the idea, that in this greater chronology there are truly

years of the right hand of the Most High," great transition periods wherein "things do not continue in all respects as they were,' but the scenes are shifted for the introduction of new acts in the drama of the ages. We cannot yield the thought of the supernatural, not only as having been in the days of our fathers when the world was new, but as expected still to be verified somehow, if not in our own individual experience, at least somewhere, and at some time, in the ex

perience of the slow, long-living race. In the evening, as in the morning and noon of humanity, there will be the supernatural light. It must come again before the career of earth is run, or surely then, at that great συντέλεια τοῦ αἰῶνος, or “ reckoning of the ages," when the natural, "which is first," shall be found to have been only a patient training, or a training of patience, for the higher spiritual experience. Is, then, the supernatural credible in any sense-that is, may the Infinite Mind and Power ever act out of the whole of nature, or manifest himself to the finite in any partial separate finite acts or forms, then is it credible that He may so manifest himself to the human soul, and thus converse with the human soul. Then is revelation credible, a revelation in language, a written revelation, a book revelation. If reason is not shocked at this, if reason demands it, though sense or the majority of experiences be against it, then is it also credible and rational, yea, demanded by this

higher law of the spirit, that such revelation should be in the language that is the most human, in words, figures, and representative phenomena, most obvious, most primary, to the universal human race.

CHAPTER V.

NO DIVINE KNOWLEDGE OF THE

THE OBJECTION MUST GO FARTHER FINITE - God cannot know our Knowledge-We are known only in the Total Idea The God of the Bible transcends this — He Thinks our Finite Thoughts as well as his own Eternal Thought— Feels Our Feelings -- Knows our Consciousness "In Him we

Live, and Move, and Are”—The Scripture Pantheism - The False Pantheism -The real Danger, the Denial of the Divine Personality -The Seclusion of the Soul - God knows it by a knowledge, not A Posteriori from Effects, or A Priori from Causes, but Present and Ever Knowing-Does God know our Sin as we know it?--The Great Mystery The Transcendental Objection itself Anthropopathic-Because We cannot ascend to God, therefore, it says, He cannot come down to us-- The New Platonic Essence, above Knowing as above Being Known - The Scientific theism Contrast of the Bible Language - Sublime Ascriptions of Personality.

BUT neither is there any stopping here. He who makes such denial of the anthropopathic, and hence of the supernatural, as being both of them impossible or irrational, must take another step. If God cannot so separate himself from nature as to make a revelation of the finite, and to the finite, then he cannot be truly said to know the finite as