is our ruler, and father, with whom we can commune. His favour is our life, his loving-kindness better than life. This sublime revela- tion of God in his own nature and in his relation to us is not a delusion. It is not mere regulative truth, or it would be a deceit and mockery. It makes God known to us as He really is. We therefore know God, although no creature can understand the Almighty unto perfection.
Argument from the Manifestation of Grod in Christ.
7. Finally, God has revealed Himself in the person of his Son. No man knoweth the Father but the Son ; and he to whom the Son shall reveal Him. Jesus Christ is the true God. The revela- tion which He made of Himself was the manifestation of God. He and the Father are one. The words of Christ Avere the words of God. The works of Christ were the works of God. The love, mercy, tenderness, the forgiving grace, as well as the holiness, the severity and power manifested by Christ, were all manifestations of what God truly is. We see, therefore, as with our own eyes, what God is. We know that although infinite and absolute. He can think, act, and will ; that He can love and hate ; that He can hear prayer and forgive sin ; that we can have fellowship with Him, as one person can commune with another. Philosophy must A'eil her face in the presence of Jesus Christ, as God manifest in the flesh. She may not presume in that presence to say that God is not, and is not known to be, what Christ himself most clearly was. This doctrine that God is the object of certain and true knowledge lies at the foundation of all religion, and therefore must never be given up.
§ 2. Crod cannot he fully known.
The modern German philosophers take the ground that all sci- ence, all true philosophy, must be founded on the knowledge of being, and not of phenomena. They reject the authority of the senses and of consciousness, and teach that it is only by the imme- diate cognition of the Absolute that we arrive at any true or cer- tain knowledge. God, or rather, the Infinite, can be as thoroughly known and comprehended as the simplest object of sense or of consciousness ; He is, only so far as He is known.
It would seem impossible that the presumption of men should be so extreme that such a creature as man should pretend to under- stand the Almighty to perfection, when in fact he cannot under- stand himself or the simplest objects with which he is in daily contact. The assumption is that being, as such, Infinite and Ab-
346 PAET I. — THEOLOGY. [Ch. IV. — Can God be known ?
solute Being, can be known ; that is, that we can determine what it is, and the necessary laws by which it is developed into the phe- nomenal world. This knowledge is attained a priori ; not by any induction or deduction from our own nature or the facts of expei'i- ence, but by an immediate act of cognition, which transcends all consciousness. The great service rendered by Sir William Ham- ilton and Mr. Mansel to the cause of truth was to demonstrate the utter futility of this pretended philosophy of the Infinite, on the principles of its advocates. To the common mind it needed no refutation, being intuitively seen to be impossible and absurd.
Sir William Hamilton's Argument. Hamilton shows, in the first place, that the immediate intuition of Schelling, which Hegel ridiculed as a mere imagination, the dialectics of Hegel, which Schelling pronounced a mere play of words, and the impersonal reason of Cousin which enters into our consciousness but not into our personality, utterly fail to give us a knowledge of the Infinite. " Existence," he says, " is revealed to us only under specific modifications, and these are known only under the conditions of our faculties of knowledge. Things in themselves, matter, mind, God, all in short that is not finite, relative, and phenomenal, as bearing no analogy to our faculties, is beyond the verge of our knowledge." ^ In what sense Hamilton places God " beyond the verge of our knowledge *' will be seen in the sequel. It is, however, self-evident that our knowledge must be limited by our faculties of knowing. Other animals may have senses which we do not possess. It is utterly impossible that we should have the kind of knowledge due to the exercise of those senses. It is probable that there are faculties dormant in our nature which are not called into activity in our present state of being. It is clear that we cannot now attain the knowledge which those fac- ulties may hereafter enable us to attain. It is just as plain that we cannot cognize the Infinite, in the sense of these philosophers, as that we cannot see a spirit, or guide ourselves in • space, as does the carrier-pigeon or the migrating salmon.
Only the Infinite can know the Infinite. 2. In the second place, it is admitted that none but the Infinite can know the Infinite, and to know God in this sense, it is admit- ted that we must be God. " Schelling claimed for the mind of man, what Kant had demonstrated to be impossible, a faculty of intel-
1 Discussions, p. 23.