doubts insoluble by our present faculties, while at the same time it inculcates the true spirit in which doubt should be dealt with by warning us that our knowledge of God, though revealed by himself, is revealed in relation to human faculties, and subject to the limitations and imperfections inseparable from the constitution of the human mind.(1) We need not, of course, point out that the reality of revelation is here assumed. Elsewhere, Dr. Mansel maintains that philosophy, by its own incongruities, has no claim to be accepted as a competent witness; and, on the other hand, human personality cannot be assumed as an exact copy of the Divine, but only as that which is most nearly analogous to it among finite things.(2) As we are, therefore, incapable on the one hand of a clear conception of the Divine Being, and have only analogy to guide us in conceiving his attributes, we have no criterion of religious truth or falsehood, enabling us to judge of the ways of God, represented by revelation,(3) and have no right to judge of his justice, or mercy, or goodness, by the standard of human morality.
It is impossible to conceive an argument more vicious, or more obviously warped to favour already accepted
conclusions of revelation:—As finite beings we are not only incapable of proving the existence of God, but even of conceiving him as he is; therefore we may conceive him as he is not. To attribute personality to him is a limitation totally incompatible with the idea of an Absolute and Infinite Being, in which "we are compelled by the constitution of our minds to believe;" and to speak of him as a personality is "to use language to which no mode of human thought can possibly attach itself;" but, nevertheless, to satisfy supposed demands of our moral consciousness, we are to conceive him as a personality. Although we must define the Supreme Being as a personality to satisfy our moral consciousness, we must not, we are told, make the same moral consciousness the criterion of the attributes of that personality. We must not suppose him to be endowed, for instance, with the perfection of morality according to our ideas of it; but, on the contrary, we must hold that his moral perfections are at best only analogous, and often contradictory, to our standard of morality.1 As soon as we conceive a Personal Deity to satisfy our moral consciousness, we have to abandon the personality which satisfies that consciousness, in order to accept the characteristics of a supposed Revelation, to reconcile certain statements of which we must admit that we have no criterion of truth or falsehood enabling us to judge of the ways of God.
Now, in reference to the assumption of a Personal Deity as a preliminary to the proof of miracles, it must be clearly remembered that the contents of the revelation which miracles are to authenticate cannot
have any weight. Antecedently, then, it is admitted that personality is a limitation which is absolutely excluded by the ideas of the Deity, which, it is asserted, the constitution of our minds compete us to form. It cannot, therefore, be rationally assumed. To admit that such a conception is false, and then to base conclusions upon it, as though it were true, is absurd. It is child's play to satisfy our feeling and imagination by the conscious sacrifice of our reason. Moreover, Dr. Mansel admits that the conception of a Personal Deity is really derived from the revelation, which has to be rendered credible by miracles; therefore the consequence already pointed out ensues, that the assumption cannot be used to prove miracles. "It must be allowed that it is not through reasoning that men obtain the first intimation of their relation to the Deity; and that, had they been left to the guidance of their intellectual faculties alone, it is possible that no such intimation might have taken place; or at best, that it would have been but as one guess, out of many equally plausible and equally natural."(1) The vicious circle of the argument is here again apparent, and the singular reasoning by which the late Dean of St. Paul's seeks to drive us into an acceptance of Revelation is really the strongest argument against it. The impossibility of conceiving God as he is,(2) which is insisted upon, instead of being a
reason for assuming his personality, or for accepting Jewish conceptions of him, totally excludes such an assumption.
This "great religious assumption"(1) is not suggested by any antecedent considerations, but is required to account for miracles, and is derived from the very Revelation which miracles are to attest. "In nature and from nature," to quote Words of Professor Baden Powell, "by science and by reason, we neither have nor can possibly have any evidence of a Deity working miracles;—for that we must go out of nature and beyond science. If we could have any such evidence from nature, it could only prove extraordinary natural effects, which would not be miracles in the old theological sense, as isolated, unrelated, and uncaused; whereas no physical fact can be conceived as unique, or without analogy and relation to others, and to the whole system of natural causes."(2) Being, therefore, limited to Reason for any feeble conception of a Divine Being of which we may be capable, and Reason being totally opposed to the idea of an order of nature so imperfect as to require or permit repeated interference, and rejecting the supposition of arbitrary