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fail ; for this is the knowledge of the unknowable, it is looking 
into the impenetrable darkness of Infinite Light. And yet 
without such knowledge religion is a mere sentiment or instinct 
of faith, rather than a reasonable belief ; and however firm and 
im movable the conviction may be, producing implicit confi- 
dence in One of whom all that is known is that He is God, yet 
such conviction is unprolific, and cannot generate those concrete 
religious ideas which alone become living principles and 
powerful motives in the soul. Indeed, in all ages, the human 
mind has shown itself incapable of resting in an abstract or 
indefinite religion, but has felt after God if haply it might find 
some form in the darkness, and has struggled to rise from 
nature to some more defined knowledge of God. But the 
effort has been fruitless, and the result has only been supersti- 
tion and idolatry. This want of the human mind Christianity 
alone claims to have supplied, by its revelation of God made 
man, and of the mystery of the relation of God to the universe 
in Christ. It claims to have solved the problems which the 
preceding modes of thought suggest, but do not explain. And 
it must be observed that this, which for distinctness we may 
call the theosophic view, and which the Christian revelation 
opens to us, instead of carrying us further away from the 
universe as it is, on the contrary in that which is its central 
idea, the incarnation of the Word or Son of God, is connected 
with every other sphere of human thought, and gives a new 
reality to all. It is, for example, impossible to regard the 
sense view of the world and human life as an unreality if we 
believe in the Incarnation. The very foundation of the Reve- 
lation, as a manifestation of God in human nature, lies in the 
region of the senses (1 John i. 1, 2). Again law, in which, we 
have seen, moral law must be included as its highest form, has 
new light thrown on it by the history of this relation of God 
to man, whilst the morality which is superior to law finds here 
its noblest and its perfect type. The mode, therefore, of re- 
garding the universe which Christianity alone enables us to 
take does really complete the cycle of human thought, and 
leaves no space for any other mode, nor any possibility of some 
superior region of thought being attainable. And compre- 
hending, as it does, the whole range of human thought from 
the highest to the lowest, it appeals to all, and must needs be 
in harmony with all, and the reality in this sphere cannot bo 
contradictory to the reality in any other. But it must not be 
forgotten that each mode of thought has its own proper faculty 
which it addresses, and Christianity expressly demands a 
spiritual faculty in man, without which its truths are unintel- 
ligible. “ The natural man,” St. Paul says, “ receivetli not 
the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto 
