MEDITATIONS AND CRITICISMS 193 



ter, a holier man ? The great point is to have 

 faith. Truly faith can work ■wonders. The early 

 Christians, the apostles, and prohably Christ him- 

 self labored under the delusion that the end of 

 the world was near at hand. It was a false idea, 

 but it added solemnity and power to their lives. 

 " As long as this error," says Gibbon, " was per- 

 mitted to subsist in the church, it was productive of 

 the most salutary effects on the faith and practice of 

 Christians, who lived in the awful expectation of 

 that moment when the globe itself and all the vari- 

 ous races of mankind should tremble at the approach 

 of their divine Judge." 



It is easy enough to say what God is not, but, 

 ah ! who can say what he is ? Can he be named or 

 defined to the intellect at all ? Probably not. The 

 burden of the old prophets' songs was that God is 

 past finding out, — past finding out by the intellect, 

 by the understanding. We call him an infinite and 

 eternal Being, but in doing so we commit a solecism, 

 we trip up our own minds. The only notion of be- 

 ing we can form is derived from our knowledge qf 

 man ; God as a being is only an enlarged man, and 

 to make him infinite and eternal is to contradict 

 the fundamental idea with which we start. A be- 

 ing is finite ; add infinity and omnipotence, and all 

 idea of being disappears. Can we conceive of an 

 infinite house or of an infinite inclosure of any 

 kind ? Ko more can we conceive of an infinite be- 



