such expressions are mere accommodations to human modes of speech, and are so far from being calculated to mislead our thoughts, that they afford our clearest glimpses of the omnipresent God? In like manner, the image of God in which our nature was created, and the face of God which Moses wished to see, are respectively and very frequently adverted to in scripture as designating in the one case the unclouded intellect and moral rectitude of man; and in the other the sensible manifestations of the Divine glory. Man bore his maker's image when his unclouded intellect and unfolding loveliness furnished a dim miniature of that boundless understanding and transcendent excellence that adorns the uncreated mind. And man then is said to see the face of God, when, apart from sense and all the things of sense, his spirit is brought into contact with the Infinite One, so as to perceive and apprehend him as spirit discerns spirit, and to commune with him as man, "face to face," holds converse with his friend.

But,

II. There is another error to which we are prone to betake ourselves, when convinced of the absurdity of imputing to the Deity a corporeal form. We figure to ourselves an ethereal substance, as some are pleased to call it, transfused throughout the universe-throughout unlimited space, and fraught with all the faculties and powers ascribable to the Supreme. Thus the Deity is assumed to be extended, as space is extended; and he is supposed to fill immensity, as ether or any still more subtil fluid might be said to fill it. But is this the God of Solomon, whom "heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain"? Does he transcend high heaven; does he spread abroad through the universe, as light is diffused from the surface of the

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sun, transcends the orbits of the planets, and urges its yel low tide to the uttermost bounds of the visible creation? No, this cannot be the meaning of our text. For,

1st. It would follow that if the Deity be thus diffusive in his essence, he could have no proper personality; he could not be said to be present to any place. A part of him would be here: a part of him on high, beyond the orbits of the planets: a part of him extended among the re motest stars: and the greater proportion lost in that immeasurable void that lies without the space through which creation sweeps. What a monstrous idea of personality is this! Who should endure to think of a part of God being in one place, and a part of him in another! Who sees not the absurdity of infinite power, infinite knowledge, infinite condescension extended through a subject; and a part of these in one place, and a part of them in another! Who does not feel that when the scriptures speak of God as pre sent in any place, he is to be regarded as being wholly though not exclusively there! But.

2dly. We have a still more conclusive argument against this fancy of extension. "God is a spirit:" and a spirit is not extended: it has no relation to space: nothing to do with parts. Extension, figure, divisibility, are properties of matter. And though you refine it as you please, though you put imagination on the rack to shape conceptions of an essence subtil-impalpable, beyond the powers of human speech, yet you have still the idea of BODY, extended, bounded, divisible without end. If you resume the proeess, you can effect nothing more than to imagine corporeal substance still more attenuated: its essence is still particles of insensate matter: and their activity is limited to combinations and movements. What is there in all this

Extension, figure, motion: Consciousness, perception, voWhat have they in com

fike intelligent perception, or like moral sentiment? What is there like thought or feeling? like judgment or volition? Of the essence of matter we nevertheless know nothing. We conceive of it only by its operations and properties. Judge of spirit by the same rule. Do not attempt to shape conceptions of its essence: attend only to its properties and operations. I feel, I think, I love, I abhor. Who is not conscious that these acts of mind have nothing in common with the operations of matter? -put these in the one scale. lition:place them in the other. mon? What can there be common to the substances in in which they are found to exist? All our difficulties and mistakes on this subject result from the strange fact that the Deity has united these amazing extremes in our own persons. We are immortal spirits wrapped in material organs: and almost all our perceptions and sensations are derived to us through the medium of sense, and from material objects. Hence we cannot separate, even in idea, between merely percipient and extended existence. It seems to us as if where body is not, there is nothing. The secret of this deception is to be found in a strong and perhaps unavoidable association of ideas. We contemplate an object near at hand. It is the immortal spirit that does so; but it does it through the medium of material organs, and by the aid of that material fluid which we denominate light. Now these material organs sustain various relations to the object contemplated, in common with all other matter: they have an adjustment in space with relation to it and to other bodes: they occupy a place nearer at hand or more remote from it: they must move in order to act upon it. And as it is the mind which perceives and oper

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ates through these organs, it identifies itself and its own energies, with the organs through which it acts, and by which it perceives; and consequently seems itself to be adjusted with surrounding bodies, and to move in space. Again, suppose the object to be very remote. Our only information is derived through the eye, which catches a few of the diverging rays. In order that the mind may perceive it more clearly, and much more, in order that it may operate upon it, we know that we must approach. In doing so we both occupy time and pass through space. Hence again, as it is the spirit that directs the process, and gathers its information during that process, we associate the ideas of space and place with the perceptions of spiritual beings, and attribute to them the relations which in truth are only sustained by the organs through which they act.

But suppose yourselves for a moment unembodied beings. If you have not that material organ which we call the eye, then you have no need of that fluid by which the eye is enabled to discern. You do not of course approach an object that your visual powers may catch more abundant rays. The spirit itself contemplates the object in its own peculiar way. Dimness has no place where light has no bearing; and, of course, every thing like distance, and intervening space, and change of situation, must be stricken out of the account. The mind perceiving objects without any regard to such process or relations may then glance "from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven," and from one extremity of the universe to the other, as thought now glances, without any thing like motion, and without that successive effort that succession in point of time, which marks progressive motion.

We by no means pretend to say that an unembodied spi rit must be insensible to the relations of bodies, or the pro gress of their movements. We only say that it can in no sense be affected by or implicated in these relations and adjustments. It may readily perceive their relations to one another, their existence in space, their progressive movement, without itself occupying space or sharing any of their relations. It may even share in the control of them, and call forth all its energies in relation to their movements, without involving the supposition that it occupies a place among them, or participates in their extension, or accompanies their movements. What are the attributes of spirit? what evinces its existence? what constitutes its activities?—It perceives: it reflects: it feels: it wills. But perception is not motion: reflection is not form: feeling is not extension; space and volition have nothing in common. Our perceptions and reflections, and feelings and volitions not only may be, but actually are often occupied without the remotest reference to materiality or any of its relations. They are employed about abstract truths, about moral sentiments, and about a variety of other objects which it were useless to specify. They might be thus oc cupied as readily, were it possible that we existed alone in the universe of God, and so had no conception of bodi ly forms, or extended spaces, or movements slow or rapid. These exercises do not change their nature when they change their object. As little does the being whose exercises they are, and whose nature they declare. Amid the expansive universe it exists unextended. Amid the move ments of all nature it operates without moving.

If all this be true of created intelligences, even of intel ligences immersed in matter, how much more clearly may