ment to an end, refer to him the issue upon which he is to determine. Either Jesus Christ is one with the Father, God, or he is not; either the Holy Ghost is one with the Father and the Son, God, or he is not. -On supposing that the negative side of this dilemma can be assumed, (and for argument's fake it must be supposed, however irksome) a confequence enfues, horrible to thought. The God of peace becomes a firebrand of contention; tenfold confufion proceeds from God, " who is not the author of confufion;" the Spirit of truth is a lyar; the simple and guileless zeal of the apostles, is crafty and designing duplicity; the wisdom of God, folly, beneath the foolishness of men; and the revelation of the God of truth, from end to end, scarce the word of designing falsehood, it must have proceeded from a dupe to his own artifices. I shudder while I write: but it is acknowledged that the fcriptures are the word of God, and the application of this description to them I will leave with men who can perfist in the denial of this great mystery: Whereas, on the other hand, three persons and one God being acknowledged, a fact is established concerning the things of God, incomprehenfible to us, who have not spiritual things to compare with spiritual, and which therefore, though it may transcend, can never contradict our reason. Our belief, which is all that is required, may be yielded to the evidence of the fact without any violence offered to our understanding; and therefore, however incomprehensible the object of the teftimony may be, there can be no difficulty in making the affirmative, which does not equally attend upon pronouncing the negative of the proposition, and one of the two we are under an absolute necessity of adopting. In In whatsoever God acts, he must condescend. The whole extent of created nature bears to him but a likę proportion as an atom; he is equally the God of a fraction as of the universe; and a fraction is as commenfurate to his infinity as the universe. But his love is infinite, and we have been the object of it, an object as obfervable by him as all worlds; for, little as we are, we bear the same proportion to him. Let us then lay aside that pride, which, in the pretence of humility, withdraws mankind from the eye of his Maker; from that microscopick eye, by which even the hairs of our head are numbered; that equal and all-pervading eye, which as accurately fees and marks the fall of a sparrow, as the crush of worlds, When we thus confider him, doubts will vanish; we shall see that we may possibly be within his contemplation, the objects of his favour; we shall acquiesce in a revelation of the benefits he has conferred upon us, and acknowledge that we have been the objects of his favour; our ignorance shall be diffipated, our pride deposed; and reason (rightly so called) affuming her proper dignity, conduct us with certainty so far as her own prescribed boundaries extend; inftruct us where to pause; teach us the limits of our own faculties, and the illimitable extent of our Maker's; put an end to idle speculation; point out God as our revealed Benefactor, not the subject of our inquifitive curiosity; dictate confidence and hope in him; and make us, because he has revealed it, " to acknowledge the mystery of God, and of the Father, and of Chrift," FINIS. TO THE TEXTS of SCRIPTURE quoted in the third Chapter, ac- cording to the Order in which they stand compared. |