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they avowedly proceed on his theory, and may seek to carry 
out his principles. The unconditioned and unknowable God, 
our authors say, holds the place as of the Divine 
10&2E; Father in the Christian Trinity. The “ conditioned ” 
ences. God, who alone communicates with the Universe, 
is to them a Christ, who always must have been conditioned 
“ Energy,” or He could not, as Philo said, have made the 
worlds. * He, it is said, was eternally “ conditioned ! ” 
45. But, completing the outline of this supposed orthodoxy, 
they continue: “Life” and “Energy” are not the same ; Life 
can never create energy, nor energy life ” ; so they say there 
must be another Being, viz. the Holy all-pervading Spirit, the 
“ Giver of Life ” ; and thus they obtain a “ Trinity,” partly 
resembling Swedenborg’s perhaps, but not that known to the 
Christian Church. 
The Eternal Father, “Whom to know,” we think, is “life 
eternal,” (and Whom we do “know by faith, ^ even now), is 
placed, as they observe, “ as far off as possible/ at the remote 
end of an “illimitable avenue” of duly conditioned Universes. 
Unto Him the Son, as conditioned, seems to have no access. 
But the Son, the real Creator, was always God “ conditioned 
as an “ Energy ” forming the worlds. The Spirit is the “ Life- 
giving ” conditioned Being, Who co-operates with the Creatoi 
of matter, or Son; — unless, possibly, “matter” be eternal, and 
only “ energy ” were created, or developed. 
Few Christians— believers that the Incarnation began at the 
“Conception by the Holy Ghost”— will accept this account of 
their faith, if nakedly put before them. 
46. The foundation of the position of these gifted and re- 
spected writers, and, from our Christian point of view, their 
fundamental error, is their ignoring the “ unconditioned.” 
They fail to see that “ the conditioned,” ex vi termini, implies 
the unconditioned, and that some relation between them 
is demanded by the fact of rationality, nationality, limited 
by the phenomenal, is inconceivable. Various beings are 
variously conditioned, no doubt; and conscious finite beings 
are aware of this, and compare these varieties and their 
differentiations. The conditioned finite conscious being is 
always comparing what he thinks, says, and does, with some ex- 
terior standard, which ultimately is absolute and unconditioned ; 
and that, whether in physics, or morals, or thought. 
Finite rationality, and finite moral agency, cannot be even 
imagined apart from the “ true always,” that is the absolute, 
or uncouditioned. To stop short, as our authors, on ap- 
proaching the “ unconditioned,” and regard it as an impassable 
