Beveridge.—On the Thirty-nine Articles, p. 16, Ed. 1846: “But seeing the properties of God do not so much denote what God is, as what we apprehend Him to be in Himself; when the properties of God are predicated one of another, one thing in God is not predicated of another, but our apprehensions of the same thing are predicated one of another.”
Leslie.—Method with the Deists, p. 63, Ed. 1745: “What we call faculties in the soul, we call Persons in the Godhead; because there are personal actions attributed to each of them.... And we have no other word whereby to express it; we speak it after the manner of men; nor could we understand if we heard any of those unspeakable words which express the Divine Nature in its proper essence; therefore we must make allowances, and great ones, when we apply words of our nature to the Infinite and Eternal Being.” Ibid., p. 64: “By the word Person, when applied to God (for want of a proper word whereby to express it), we must mean something infinitely different from personality among men.”
Bishop Pearson’s language is yet more explicit in another passage of the same work, which we give in the original Latin:—“Non dantur pro hoc statu nomina quæ Deum significant quidditative. Patet; quia nomina sunt conceptuum. Non autem dantur in hoc statu conceptus quidditativi de Deo.”—(P. 136.)
The system of theology represented by these extracts may, as we think, be fairly summed up as follows: We believe that God in His own nature is absolute and unconditioned; but we can only positively conceive Him by means of relations and conditions suggested by created things. We believe that His own nature is simple and uniform, admitting of no distinction between various attributes, nor between any attribute and its subject; but we can conceive Him only by means of various attributes, distinct from the subject and from each other.[I] We believe that in verum, aut bonum esse, aut omnino ipsum esse. His own nature He is exempt from all relations of time; but we can conceive Him only by means of ideas and terms which imply temporal relations, a past, a present, and a future.[J] Our thought, then, must not be taken as the measure and limit of our belief: we think by means of relations and conditions derived from created things; we believe in an Absolute Being, in whose nature these conditions and relations, in some manner unknown to us, disappear in a simple and indivisible unity.
This will be found most distinctly stated in the context of the extract from Beveridge, and in the citations from St. Augustine given in his notes; to which may be added the following from De Trinitate, vi. 7:—“Deus vero multipliciter quidem dicitur magnus, bonus, sapiens, beatus, verus, et quidquid aliud non indigne dici videtur; sed eadem magnitudo ejus est quæ sapientia, non enim mole magnus est, sed virtute; et eadem bonitas quæ sapientia et magnitudo, et eadem veritas quæ illa omnia: et non est ibi aliud beatum esse et aliud magnum, aut sapientem, aut verum, aut bonum esse, aut omnino ipsum esse.”
Compare the remarkable words of Bishop Beveridge, l.c., “And therefore, though I cannot apprehend His mercy to Abel in the beginning of the world, and His mercy to me now, but as two distinct expressions of His mercy, yet as they are in God, they are but one and the same act,—as they are in God, I say, who is not measured by time, as our apprehensions of Him are, but is Himself eternity; a centre without a circumference, eternity without time.”
The most important feature of this philosophical theology, and the one which exhibits most clearly the practical difference between reason and faith, is that, in dealing with theoretical difficulties, it does not appeal to our knowledge, but to our ignorance: it does not profess to offer a definite solution; it only tells us that we might find one if we knew all. It does not profess, for example, to solve the apparent contradiction between God’s foreknowledge and man’s free will; it does not say, “This is the way in which God foreknows, and in this way His foreknowledge is reconcileable with human freedom;” it only says, “The contradiction is apparent, but need not be real. Freedom is incompatible with God’s foreknowledge, only on the supposition that God’s foreknowledge is like man’s: if we knew exactly how the one differs from the other, we might be able to see that what is incompatible with the one is not so with the other. We cannot solve the difficulty, but we can believe that there is a solution.”