confession of the co-equal Godhead of the Son and the Holy Ghost. We know much more accordingly of God in degree by this supernatural information, but our knowledge of Him remains the same in kind.

3. Supposing, however, that the Scriptures could dispense with our preliminary natural knowledge of divine things, we shall arrive at the same conclusion respecting the nature of their communications, from the fact alone, that they employ the instrumentality of language in conveying their instruction. For what is it to teach by language, but to teach by ideas which are already part of the stock of human knowledge? New, and otherwise undiscoverable, appropriations of our natural ideas may be suggested by language consecrated to the office of interpreting the counsels of the Most High; but still the original sense of the words employed must be the basis of the imposed theological sense. Thus the terms, by which our minds are led to the perception of unknown truths concerning God, are necessarily analogical: they express the ideas of which they are the signs, but those

ideas, at the same time, in a new and peculiar acceptation, derived from the subjects to which they are transferred. By this application of language we are made acquainted with facts concerning God, without any fundamental alteration of our original conceptions. By the employment of the terms in an authentic revelation we know assuredly that there must be real principles of the divine nature, and real acts of God, correspondent to the principles and acts of human life signified by the terms so adopted in the message from Heaven. We know, for instance, certainly, that there is that in the nature of God, which will prompt him to reward and punish mankind according to the rules of distributive justice, because we are assured of the fact, in terms which we fully understand; though the terms themselves impart to us no intimate knowledge of his nature. We know again, that there are three persons in the Godhead, as far as the existence of the fact so revealed is concerned, because we read the fact in the pages of Scripture; but we do not know that

the notion of personality, under which the

triune nature of God is revealed, is strictly appropriate, abstractedly from the circumstances of the human intellect, though it points to an indisputable truth, latent, as it were, under it, concerning the divine nature.

In this respect, indeed, it is with theology, as with all other sciences. All that any human science justly aspires to teach, is an accurate and comprehensive knowledge of the particular facts in that department of nature which is the field of its investigation, and not an acquaintance with the essential nature of the subjects. When Natural Philosophy instructs us in the existence of an universal law of gravitation, it furnishes us with a general fact, under which all the particular phenomena in the motions of bodies may be classed, but it does not attempt to explain to us the nature of the force of gravity*. So also theology, while discoursing to us

* “ Videmus tantum corporum figuras et colores; audimus tantum sonos; tangimus tantum superficies externas; olfacimus odores solos; et gustamus sapores; intimas substantias nullo sensu, nulla actione reflexa cognoscimus; et multo minus ideam habemus substantiæ Dei." Newt. Princip. III. Schol.

in human accents of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God, confines its intimations to a knowledge of the bare facts which it unfolds, leaving us to dwell with awful wonder, and faith, and piety, on the sacred mysteries, whose existence it satisfactorily vouches to us, but cannot explain.

The knowledge of God accordingly conveyed by the Scriptures, being of the same kind as that collected from nature, it follows that there must be some common principles of theology pervading the systems of grace and nature. This leads us to inquire more closely what these principles are.

Now the only conceivable end of instruction from God is the good of mankind. "He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good, for what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God ?" may be inscribed as its motto on any authentic record of the divine will. For it is plainly unreasonable to suppose, that religious doctrines can be revealed, to be held merely as credenda, as truths which ought to be received without reference to

conduct since a theoretic life is evidently not the perfect state of a being furnished with active principles; and a religion, accordingly, which provided us only with materials of intellectual enjoyment, would be insufficient for the purposes of human nature, and would carry its own condemnation in its manifest deficiency. The Scriptures of truth therefore will supply motives as well as convictions; not opinions only, but rules of duty. The sublimest doctrines contained in them will all have a practical tendency, bearing on the heart no less than on the understanding.

The fact is, there can be no knowledge merely speculative on the subjects of religion; whether obtained from the course of the world, or from the Scriptures. Relations to the Deity, and to the future invisible world, however made known to the mind of man, so far as they are really believed, must have their influence on human conduct. As we cannot learn under the natural tuition of experience, that God is our Creator and Governor, without an accompanying sense of duties resulting from this knowledge; so it is impossible for us to learn from the Scrip