PREF. NATURE OF DEITY ^ 



examines and investigates every detail. And why 

 should it not ? It feels that they are akin to itself. 

 Then contempt for the narrow limits of its former n 

 dwelling succeeds. For what after all is the space 

 that lies from India to the farthest shores of Spain ? 

 A few days journey if a prosperous wind waft the 

 vessel. But that heavenly region affords a route 

 during full thirty years to the swiftest of the planets, 

 rushing with untiring velocity, never once halting. 



Here at last the soul comes to learn what it has 

 long sought, it begins to know God. But what is 12 

 God ? The universal intelligence. What is God, 

 did I say ? All that you see and all that you 

 cannot see. His greatness exceeds the bounds of 

 thought. Render Him His true greatness and He 

 is all in all, He is at once within and without His 

 works. What, then, is the difference between the 

 divine nature and the human ? In us the better 13 

 part is spirit, in Him there is nothing except spirit. 

 He is wholly reason : though mortal eyes are so 

 sealed by error that men believe this frame of things 

 to be but a fortuitous concourse of atoms, the sport of 

 chance. And yet than this universe could aught be 

 fairer, more carefully adjusted, more consistent in 

 plan ? But men will have it that it is tossed about 

 at random in the confusion of thunder, cloud, and 

 storm, and the other forces by which the earth and 

 its purlieus are haunted. 



Nor is this merely the madness of vulgar error ; 

 even the philosophers are tainted by it. Men 14 

 there are who think that they themselves have a 

 mind, one, too, that foresees and orders events 

 in detail whether relating to themselves or to 

 others. But this frame of things, in which we 

 men along with the rest of creation are set, they 



