ing of them, as corporeal existences cast in mortal mould. This imperfection, not to call it by a stronger term, is inseparable from human language, and probably, during the continuance of our present mode of existence, from human thought itself. It is not therefore strange, however lam. entable it be, that the same misapprehension should lead us astray in our attempts to form conceptions of that Eternal and Infinite Spirit who presides over the affairs of men. We know well that the Deity has sometimes been regarded in that very light: as a being extended, moulded in human form, actually seated on a splendid throne, and arrayed in all the habiliments of material existences. And we know that the time has been, when unholy superstition sanctioned and extended this enormous error by pictures -by pictures of the Infinite One!-planted in churches for the adoration of Christian worshippers!! It is not therefore a needless caution to bid you beware of conceiving of the Deity as if he existed in human form, or indeed under any form. Infinite wisdom has deemed this caution profitable to men of various ages. We find Moses the man of God, warning Israel on that subject in that long and most interesting address with which he closed his ministry. "On the day," says he, "that thou stoodest before the Lord thy God in Horeb-the mountain burned with fire unto the midst of heaven with darkness, clouds, and thick darkAnd the Lord spake unto you out of the midst of the fire: ye heard the voice of the words, but saw no similitude; only ye heard a voice." And again he bids them beware, "lest they should corrupt themselves, and make a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female." "For ye saw," he says, "no manner of similitude on the day that the Lord spake unto you in Ho- ́

ness.

reb, out of the midst of the fire." God was there: He saw you; he spoke to you: for he is the omnipresent God. But ye saw no "similitude," no shape, no substance distinguished and defined by surfaces. He is a Spirit, the Infinite Spirit. To attempt resemblances of him, is only to misrepresent him and to corrupt yourselves.

The apostle Paul, in like manner, did not deem it a waste of words to warn the learned Greeks, the inhabitants of Athens the famous seat of science, against the indulgence of these gross conceptions. In his discourse on the altar which they had erected "to the unknown God," he deemed it needful to instruct them that "God that made the world and all things therein-dwelleth not in temples made with hands." He confirmed the suggestion by adverting to the doctrine of my text, the doctrine of the omnipresence of God. "He is not far from every one of us," says Paul, "for in him we live and move and have our being." God is the underived existence, the immense reality, and creation does not merely owe its origin to him; in him, as well as from him, all living things have life and motion; and in him all things, animate and inanimate, subsist. "We ought not" then, he concludes, "to think that the Godhead is like to gold or silver or stone, graven by art and man's device:" that is, 'we ought not to think that the Deity exists in human form, like those pretended re-semblances of him which men in their ignorance and impiety prepare from metals or from marble. God is immense: all creation lives in him: he is the omnipresent God.' "To whom then will ye liken God, or what likeness will ye compare unto him?" "It is high as heaven, what canst thou know? Deeper than hell, what canst thou

do? The measure thereof is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea."

We might adduce still stronger instances to prove that infinite wisdom does not deem this caution needless. Wit ness the reiterated complaints of the psalmist David, that the men of Israel themselves, multitudes who had their allotment in the congregation of the Most High, neverthe less conceived of him as of a being altogether like themselves: undertook to assert that he had changed the place of his abode; that "the Lord had forsaken the earth, neither did the God of Jacob any more regard it." Witness also the challenge of the Most High in relation to his own corrupted priesthood. During the solemnities of public worship, during the two weeks in which they served by rotation in the temple of the Lord, they cautiously abstained from their criminal courses. Wherefore? They were in the temple. There was the holy of holies! there, within it, stood the ark of the covenant and the Mercy seat! there, upon the Mercy seat, and between the cherubim, dwelt the shekinah, that inexplicable, that transcendant, that awe-inspiring brightness by which, like the pillar of fire in the wilderness, the Deity symbolized his presence in the temple. In that awful place, before the presence of that glory, the most licencious of the priesthood dared not indulge in their enormities. But the moment they gave place to their successors in the service, and, leaving the city and the temple and the shekinah, retired to their respective houses, all those considerations which served only to repress but not to annihilate their propensities, immediately gave way. "Am I," said the Most High in his message to those unhallowed ministers, "Am I a God at hand, and not a God afar off?" Is it only from the mercy

seat I can take notice of your conduct, should you commit your shameful deeds within the area of my temple and before my flaming altars? Is it only in the light of the shekinah, whose glory illumes the recesses of the temple, that your consciences shrink from the perpetration of enormities? Am I not God afar off from the temple, as well as beside its altars? Am I not there, where no shekinah darts its splen dours, the unseen spectator of your most hidden deeds? "Can any hide himself in secret places that I cannot see him? saith the Lord: do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the Lord."* The shekinah attested God's presence in the temple: it spoke to the senses in a way not to be controverted. But it did not tell the worshipper that he is therefore absent, where he does not address the senses. The shekinah was an emanation from the "light that is inaccessible;" and like the hoarse billow that lifts its awful voice to tell of the granduer of the "vasty deep," but is not itself the ocean, the shekinah witnessed the reality of the uncreated light, but was by no means to be regarded as the fullness of its glory.

God is not in human form: no circumference bounds his incomparable essence: He is every where.

In proving to you that the correction of this error is not needless, we have also endeavoured to interweave sufficient proof that it really is an error-an enormous error: an error which not only fastens upon those who adopt it the guilt of gross idolatry, but which also fosters in them the worst dispositions of the human heart.

Do not now think of telling us, in the face of all these proofs, that still the scriptures seem to countenance the er

*Jer. xxiii. 23, 24,

ror we are combatting: that they speak often and familiar, ly of the hands, the feet, the eyes, the ears of God; and, in one word, array him in all the attributes and habiliments common or appropriate to human form. Do not suppose you have found a contradiction to our text, when you read that man was created in the image of his maker; and that Moses, who must have well understood his nature, petitioned to see his face. You are too well acquainted with the nature of human language and of human thought to regard it as a novel suggestion when we tell you that we both speak and think in a highly figurative style; and that if deprived of this resource, we should be unable to form any conception of many interesting objects, and be entirely destitute of expressions to convey ideas which we could clearly frame. Of course a revelation from God, if adapted, to instruct us, must be made to us in language we are accustomed to employ, and his thoughts must be couched in figures which we are accustomed to decypher.-But let the scriptural use of these expressions be called in to correct the abuse to which you would subject them. 'God has hands:-What then? 'He of course subsists in human form.' But they are hands in the hollow of which he holds the ocean: they are fingers with which he grasps the sun and stars, "and taketh up the isles as a very little thing." God has eyes: but they scan immeasurable distances. They do more: they survey all spiritual existences. They do more still: they search the very hearts, and try the thoughts of the children of men, and indeed of all intelligences. God has ears: but they hear when no sound is uttered; they hear the very groaning of the heart.-God has feet: but they reach to earth, while he fills heaven as his throne. What other proof would you demand that all