sun. ther, I say, not meaning that there are two Gods, but as light of light, or as water flowing out of its fountain, or as a ray from the For there is but one power which proceedeth from the whole (ix Tou Tavròs), and the whole is the Father, from whom proceedeth this Power, the Word. This is the reason which came forth in the world, and was manifested the Son of God (ai). All things exist by him, and he alone is of the Father. Who then introduces a multitude of God's increasing through the ages? For all, however unwilling, are shut up to this creed, that the whole runs up to one. (rò tãv šis eva àvargée). If, therefore, all things run up into one, even according to Valentinus, and Marcion, and Cerinthus, and all their silly talk, they are forced unwillingly to confess that the one is the cause of all, and thus bear their extorted testimony to the truth that one God made all things according to his own will. And the same gave the law and the prophets; and gifting them with the Holy Spirit, he caused them so to speak that, receiving the inspiration of the Father's power, they should declare the counsel and will of the Father." What these fathers held was not Sabellianism, for they maintained the distinction of the persons; neither was it Arianism, for they maintained the sameness of the essence; but neither was it the orthodox doctrine, for they held that the generation or the prolation of the Son was contingent on the purpose of God to create, and that while he was, as the word or reason of the Father, co-eternal with him, he was only subsequently to the purpose and will of the Father sent forth as a personal agent. In fact, they felt the difficulty involved in their position. They must have seen that it was something very like a contradiction to maintain the existence of a person possessed of the eternal divine substance, uncreated, and yet who does not come forth till a period that at least bears relation to time. They saw that to the Son two things were to be attributed, eternal divine nature and personal genesis; but how these two were to be reconciled, Origen was the first to see. His philosophical mind gave the solution which does not lose the eternity in the genesis, nor the personality in the one divine essence, but seeing God, the eternal Father, sees the Son as therefore thus sent forth by the Father to create. Bull feels that some defence of this passage is needed, and says (Defensio Fid. Nic., 2d Ed., p. 368) :-" Agnosco quidem hic ab Hippolyto generationem quandam Verbo, sive Filio Dei tribui, quae mundi creationem proxime antecesserit. Sed omnino nego de generatione loqui Hippolytum proprie dicta, quae scilicet Verbi fuerit productio, quave Verbum ipsum, cum prius non existeret, existere cœperit." This defence is invalid. The generation here spoken of is the only generation Hippolytus knows anything about, and is that generation whereby the Son "becomes the first-begotten of the Father," (v. c. 15). At all events, if he and the others who use similar language intend to intimate that before this manifestation or prolation the Word existed as a person eternally in the Father, they are, as Goode has convincingly shewn, equally heterodox. eternal, though begotten, and as therefore divine, though distinct. These remarks may help to an understanding of some of the statements which occur in the homily. ART. III.—The Philosophy of the Unconditioned Examined. IT has been affirmed by Sir William Hamilton, that the Unconditioned, the Infinite, the Absolute, the First Cause, is inconceivable and incognisable. And as the Being thus designated has been at the same time identified with God, we seem to be hurried by this formidable dictum to the disastrous conclusion, that the Creator of all things is equally, that is, absolutely inconceivable and incognisable. This conclusion is indeed avowed by Hamilton, and carried out with the most painful elaboration by Mansel in his recent work on the limits of religious thought. To relieve the aching sense of separation from God, which is awakened in the mind by this. sweeping asseveration, we are constrained to examine the grounds on which it rests. 2. If it were merely meant that a being barely defined by a negative, by the absence of a definite quality, that is, in fact, not yet defined at all, is so far inconceivable and incognisable, there could be no difficulty in yielding our assent to the proposition. The unwhite, insipid, insipient, is so far inconceivable, because it has not yet presented us with any quality to conceive. It only tantalises our conceptive faculty by announcing the absence of certain conceivables, as whiteness, sapidity, sapience. It feeds even our imagination with emptiness. Such is the philosophy of the pure negative. It gives us a broad hint of the inexhaustible store of positive and conceivable qualities in reserve; but then it puts its inexorable negative on them all, and so leaves us totally in the dark as to the entities it intends. It introduces the mind to an insufferably dull masquerade, in which the masks are all so thorough, that not a characteristic of the various parties, whether true or false, is allowed to meet the eye. Such a philosophy is truly inconceivable and impossible. It is mere trifling. 3. Now if any one were to say, the unwhite, insipid, insipient is inconceivable; but the sky is unwhite, insipid, insipient, and, therefore, it is inconceivable and incognisable; the absurdity and erroneousness of the conclusion would be manifest. Yet the syllogism is in diction unassailable. Hence, as the conclusion is manifestly false, there must be falsehood in the premises. We detect the fallacy in the assertion, that the un white, insipid, insipient, is inconceivable and incognisable. The truth is this. That which is unwhite, &c., is only so far inconceivable as yet, simply because we have got as yet no quality to conceive. But we cannot tell whether it is absolutely inconceivable, until its positive qualities and real nature are laid before us. As soon, however, as we are informed that it is the sky that is thus defined, we find that it is conceivable and cognisable, not only in other respects, but even in those by which it was negatively defined. The ethereal blue, we are perfectly aware, is not white, and possesses no quality corresponding to sapidity or sapience. Hence we get the general principle, that a thing only negatively defined is unconceived and unknown as yet, though it may be, if its positive qualities were revealed, both conceivable and cognisable. In this sense, then, the Unconditioned is, so far as it is thus negatively described, as yet inconceivable. But when we are informed that by the Unconditioned is meant God, a new light springs up in our mind, by which we are enabled to understand even the application of this negative epithet to the Supreme. "God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth." Here is a goodly array of intelligible and observable qualities, by which we can form a comparatively clear and definite notion of the great Being, and even discern the very propriety and necessity of those negative epithets, Unconditioned, Infinite, Eternal, Absolute, Unchangeable, by which he is justly characterised. 4. But our philosophers mean something more than this when they place the Unconditioned, the Infinite, the Absolute, beyond conception or cognisance. They hold, we must suppose, that these special qualities, condition, limitation, relation, are of such a nature, that the very fact of their absence from any being renders it inconceivable and incognisable, though the absence of other qualities is not attended with the like result. The line of argument, therefore, by which this is sought to be established is first to be noticed. We must then examine the negatives which theese terms afford, and we shall do so with clearness and effect by considering them not promiscuously in a group, but severally in succession. 5. The whole substance of the argument supposed to demonstrate the inconceivableness of the Unconditioned is comprised in the axiom that we conceive by condition. "To think is to condition." To conceive is to regard as conditioned. Hence the Unconditioned is inconceivable, and therefore incognisable. There is no more to be said, and accordingly no more is said. Sir William Hamilton was not the man to multiply words without occasion. A similar line of argument applies to the other negatives. To conceive is to limit. Hence the unlimited or Infinite is inconceivable. To conceive is to stand in actual relation to the conceived. The unrelated or Absolute is therefore inconceivable. In short, we conceive by condition, limitation, relation, and so we cannot conceive the Unconditioned, the Infinite, the Absolute. 6. Before entering upon the examination of this argument, it is necessary to call to mind some points of essential importance relating to negative terms. (1.) Every negative is the contradictory of the corresponding positive, and the two between them include the whole of being. Thus good and not good comprise the whole of things. There is no being, actual or ideal, that does not come under the one or the other. Hence two contradictories are the complements of each other, and together make up the grand total of existing and even possible things. (2.) The negative is called the indefinite, because, while it determines the absence of a certain quality, it leaves the character of the mass of things which it embraces undetermined. This heterogeneous collection contains, in general, at least three distinguishable classes of things. 1st, Those beings. that want the quality in question, simply because it does not apply to their nature. Thus a stone is unwise, because the quality of wisdom has no relation to its nature. These are the properly indefinite. 2d, Those beings that are devoid of the quality, though it is applicable to their nature. Thus some men are said to be unwise, while others are reckoned wise. These are marked, not so much by the mere absence of the quality in question, as by the presence of its contrary. They are therefore in reality definite. Thus the unwise in this sense are the foolish. (3.) The negative is used to denote the absence of a quality in a certain respect, or in every respect. It is taken for granted in the present discussion, that we are thinking of actual things, otherwise we cannot talk of their knowableness. Now actual things have all more than one property. Hence the negative may refer to the thing so designated, either in respect of a certain quality, or in respect of all its qualities, or its whole nature. Thus a man may be said to be unwise or foolish, either in respect of the use of money, or in respect of his whole conduct. Hence there are three distinguishable classes coming under every negative. 1st, Those beings in which the quality is simply absent as inapplicable. 2d, Those in which the contrary quality is present in the whole of the thing. 3d, Those in which the contrary quality is present in some part of the thing. 7. THE UNCONDITIONED. These distinctions being before us, let us examine whether the Unconditioned be inconceivable, any farther than other negatives, from the mere circumstance of condition being the quality absent. The Unconditioned includes, 1, the unconditioned from the incompatibility of condition with the nature of the thing; 2, the unconditioned in every respect; and 3, the unconditioned in some respect. The first class, it is clear, has no existence in the present instance, as there is absolutely no being to the nature of which condition does not apply. Even to be is a condition. To have a property is to be conditioned. The second class, the totally unconditioned, is impossible, if contradictory conditions be involved, and pure nothing, even if positive conditions only be regarded. A being without any condition is a contradiction in terms, since being itself is a condition, and every quality is a condition. The third of these classes, the unconditioned in some respect, is so comprehensive as to include all beings whatsoever, as there is no being that is not free from innumerable conditions. Gold is not white, black, blue, &c.; light, transparent, &c. The absence of some condition does not of itself render any being, otherwise, of course, conditioned, inconceivable or incognisable. This universal class, then, is not excluded from the observation or imagination by the mere fact of its wanting some conditions. If it were so, all nature would be beyond the ken of reason. Thus it appears there is nothing unintelligible in the Unconditioned, except where it denotes the impossible or the non-existent. If it be said that we have confounded the division of all things into the conditioned and the unconditioned, by the introduction of the partly unconditioned, which is of course partly conditioned and inclusive of all being, we cannot help it, if reason and nature will have it so. Our philosophers use condition in the most unbounded sense. With them to think is to condition, and to be is to be conditioned. Hence the class we speak of forces itself upon us. The very Being of beings is thus conditioned, not only by being, but by every positive attribute he is confessed to possess. A stone does not possess wisdom, and a spirit does not possess hardness, and hence, in these respects, they are unconditioned. If condition is to be taken in this all-comprehensive sense, there is nothing totally unconditioned, nothing totally conditioned. And we may add, no being is unintelligible or inapprehensible from the mere circumstance of the presence or absence of a certain condition. 8. There is another meaning of this particular negative, the Unconditioned, to which, though it is rather airy and abstruse, we will venture to refer. Unconditioned may mean undefined as to condition, not having the conditions of being determined. This is perhaps the only tenable contradictory of the conditioned, the latter being understood to mean the definite as to condition. In this sense, it is quite true that the Unconditioned |