p. 71. A.
This is the difference between God's mercy and his judgments, that sometimes his judgments may he plural, complicated, enwrapped in one another; but his mercies are always so, and cannot be otherwise.
A just sentiment beautifully expressed.
Ib.
C.
Whereas the Christian religion is, as Gregory Nazianzen says, simplex et nuda, nisi prave in artem difficillimam converteretur: it is a plain, an easy, a perspicuous truth.
A religion of ideas, spiritual truths, or truth-powers, — not of notions and conceptions, the manufacture of the understanding, — is therefore
simplex et nuda
, that is, immediate; like the clear blue heaven of Italy, deep and transparent, an ocean unfathomable in its depth, and yet ground all the way. Still as meditation soars upwards, it meets the arched firmament with all its suspended lamps of light. O, let not the
simplex et nuda