INCOMPREHENSIBLE NATURE OF GOD. 377 



the world." We may be permitted to observe 

 here, that, when Bacon has thus to speak of 

 God's dealings with his moral creatures, he does 

 not take his phraseology from those sciences 

 which can offer none but false and delusive 

 analogies; but helps out the inevitable scantiness 

 of our human knowledge, by words borrowed 

 from a source more fitted to supply our imper- 

 fections. Our natural speculations cannot carry 

 us to the ideas of * grace' and ' redemption ;' but 

 in the wide blank which they leave, of all that 

 concerns our hopes of the Divine support and 

 favour, the inestimable knowledge which revela- 

 tion, as we conceive, gives us, finds ample room 

 and appropriate place. 



7. Yet even in the view of our moral constitu- 

 tion which natural reason gives, we may trace 

 laws that imply a personal relation to our Creator. 

 How can we avoid considering that as a true 

 view of man's being and place, without which, 

 his best faculties are never fully developed, his 

 noblest energies never called out, his highest point 

 of perfection never reached ? Without the thought 

 of a God over all, superintending our actions, 

 approving our virtues, transcending our highest 

 conceptions of good, man would never rise to 

 those higher regions of moral excellence which 

 we know him to be capable of attaining. " To 

 deny a God," again says the great philosopher, 

 " destroys magnanimity and the raising of human 



