300 
whom angels veil their faces. The angels are spirits : they are 
never spoken of as co-equal with God ; far less is man, who, 
though endowed with a spiritual nature, in which he can be 
rendered capable of communion with God, is never called 
spirit, and only under certain conditions is spoken of as 
spiritual. His fall from God has rendered him sensual, carnal, 
and, with all his powerful intellect, incapable, till renewed, of 
communion with God. 
There can be no compromise. Either the above is true, cr 
Matter alone is eternal and divine, * — bv matter under- 
standing all those forces which are either inherent in or 
immanent on what we roughly call the materia of the 
universe. 
IV. — The Cause of all Being. 
We need not be ashamed of our knowledge of God. It is 
God-given, and not the result of our own superior faculties, 
nor of the “ genius of Moses, nor of the gradual growth 
of the universal mind of humanity,^^ as asserted by some philo- 
sophers. Hence there is a Divine certainty about it which we 
cannot impart to the agnostic, but which we cannot and ought 
not to conceal. 
And here we arrive at the real substance of the universe, — 
that which stands under all its manifestations. That is 
God Himself, the I am that I am,^^ as revealed to Moses. 
Having thus established the Causa causansj-f I am not 
ashamed to confess immense ignorance in very many cases as 
to the causa causata. Why may we not be permitted to 
enjoy the luxury of saying, I do not know ? 
It is, at all events, a real luxury to turn from attempted 
explanations of laws of nature and from eloquent periods in 
public addresses, which probably do not even satisfy the 
intellect of the preacher himself, and refresh ourselves with 
the grand and simple language of the Psalms and the Old 
Testament generally; where we see everywhere the omnipresent 
Jehovah ; or in the New, where we behold the Son of God 
upholding all things by the word of His power. 
V. — Organised Nature. 
He, “ binding Nature fast in Fate, 
Left free the human will.” 
Pope’s Universal Prayer. 
I have thus far been considering only matter in its in- 
* Page 35, quoted by the author. 
t See Boyle’s Free Inquiry, quoted in Johnson’s Dictionary, sub voce. 
“ Nature.” 
