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or defect herein involving a manifest absurdity. Again, 
“ God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship 
Him in spirit ; ” surely, a self-evident truth — the highest to 
receive the highest homage, as man is more honoured who 
receives honour of his fellows than of inferior natures, and 
most honoured who receives it of the most honourable. And 
yet again, the spirit witnesseth with our spirit,” as essential 
a verity in true Theology, as in mental philosophy, that 
intellect acts upon intellect, or, in moral philosophy, that the 
moral sense vibrates to the touch of moral inspiration. 
How, in these enumerations, the suggested definitions, 
postulates, and axioms of a Theological science, I beg to be 
distinctly understood as submitting them, not as the only, nor 
perhaps as the highest or best examples tha.t could be 
adduced, but merely as indicating the kind of apparatus at 
hand, and the exhaustless mine whence it can, almost without 
limit, be evolved ; and with such materials, these and kindred 
data, it is quite possible to build up a system of Theology in 
full accordance with scientific processes and modes of thought 
— in one word, an exact science. 
But here, perhaps, demurrers may be put in, or even pro- 
tests entered, which it will be well at once to meet. I may be 
charged with (1) employing an apparatus in itself defective or 
inexact, or (2) of applying it in a case wherein it is inadmissible, 
or (3) of importing into a scientific investigation an element or 
elements which science ignores or repudiates. Let me devote 
a few remarks to each of these points. And, first, as to the 
defective or inexact character of the apparatus. I presume 
that every scientific man is content to accept mathematical 
science upon its merits ; that he admits, in any given branch, 
that the basis suffices for the superstructure. Thus, as the 
branch which I have had more especially in view in this paper, 
that the definitions, axioms, and postulates of geometry are 
scientific, or at least are neither so defective nor inexact as to 
endanger the claim of geometry to be a legitimate science. If 
so, I ask what is the first definition of plane geometry, the 
initial letter of the scientific alphabet, but a bare idea ? and 
this idea, moreover, defined negatively, and only negatively. 
“ A point is that which hath no parts and no magnitude.” 
In other words, the fundamental definition — so exact a de- 
scription as to leave no room to confound the thing defined 
with any other thing — merely tells us what that thing has not. 
We call it a point, but it is exactly nothing; and if we seek to 
locate it, or to present it to the eye, its very location overleaps, 
and its visibility is destructive of the definition itself. And if 
we pass to other branches or to general analysis, the same 
