Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE BEING AND CHARACTER OF GOD. One who has grasped the thought of necessary existence can never come to the consideration of the existence of God without a feeling of exultation that we may know so much about it. The popular impression, it is true, is that we can know nothing about it—that it is all a matter of guess, or " faith," as scientific men are contemptuously willing to allow theologians to call it. But faith is not credulity, nor intellectual levity. There is mystery here, but it is the mystery of light, not of darkness; not that we cannot see to penetrate the region in which God dwells, but that penetrating it, we find light more and brighter pouring itself in upon us, till we stop in awe at seeing that full of impenetrable brightness and depth which we had fancied to be dull and limited. We find there is knowledge of God which is joyfully plain and gloriously necessary, thecertainty of which seems bound up with that of our own existence. Although it has a tendency to degenerate into these, as Cel- sus noted in his time in criticizing the KovfoTqf Tov Xpiariavov. The subject of the being and character of God is one around which from the earliest times controversies have raged, and around which they are still raging. Into such controversies these Studies are for the most part forbidden, by the necessity of brevity, from entering. Their aim must be merely to give results. If they assume or ignore weighty points still at issue, I can but hope this will be ascribed not altogether to the serene confidence of ignorance nor to the asser- tiveness of narrow dogmatism, but to the limitations inevitable in an attempt to state great thoughts briefly. We recognize that every starting-point is disputed. And yet, as we wish to make a start from somewhere, w...