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him. His name needs no interpreter when they say "God created." Boundless and incomprehensible, yet indisputable, the key of all mystery, without form, without centre or circumference, beginning or end, the life, space, and atmosphere wherein all being dwells, words were not made to present him; we cannot show him to another, nor another to us; yet in the human soul he has said immemorially, "I am! and there is none beside me!"


It is queried whether God is self-conscious.—If the heavens should burst in thunder and say aye I what were we the wiser? We cannot conceive universal consciousness; we cannot receive an answer though it were given. Think not because our language contains the word universal that the word must convey to us an idea. It is but the symbol of an inconceivable thought, useful to the finitude of the soul when it would acknowledge a greater than itself.

We delight to fancy a lone and glorious self-love in the Almighty; yet from this method has grown some of the worst of our theological discourse. It has made God in man's image. It has invested him with error, confusion, repentence, and worse than all, anger. It has made folly, sin; it has made policy, duty; it has made pain a judgment and a punishment; it has given to God all the frailties of man, and made man confound himself in efforts to prove—made him stultify himself in professions of faith in proof—that justice is lashing us solely for having opposed the will and thwarted the wishes

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