that we do not like, and when we have put them in our own shapes and in our own connection, we call them unmeaning or impossible.  Dogmas are but expedients, common to all great departments of human thought, and felt in all to be necessary, for representing what are believed as truths, for exhibiting their order and consequences, for expressing the meaning of terms, and the relations of thought.  If they are wrong, they are, like everything else in the world, open to be proved wrong; if they are inadequate, they are open to correction; but it is idle to sneer at them for being what they must be, if religious facts and truths are to be followed out by the thoughts and expressed by the language of man.  And what dogmas are in unfriendly and incapable hands is no proof of what they may be when they are approached as things instinct with truth and life; it is no measure of the way in which they may be inextricably interwoven with the most unquestionably living thought and feeling, as in these sermons.  Jealous, too, as the preacher is for Church doctrines as the springs of Christian life, no writer of our time perhaps has so emphatically and impressively recalled the narrow limits within which human language can represent Divine realities.  No one that we know of shows that he has before his mind with such intense force and distinctness the idea of God; and in proportion as a mind takes in and submits itself to the impression of that awful vision, the gulf widens between all possible human words and that which they attempt to express:—­

When we have deduced what we deduce by our reason from the study of visible nature, and then read what we read in His inspired word, and find the two apparently discordant, this is the feeling I think we ought to have on our minds;—­not an impatience to do what is beyond our powers, to weigh evidence, sum up, balance, decide, reconcile, to arbitrate between the two voices of God,—­but a sense of the utter nothingness of worms such as we are; of our plain and absolute incapacity to contemplate things as they really are; a perception of our emptiness before the great Vision of God; of our “comeliness being turned into corruption, and our retaining no strength”; a conviction that what is put before us, whether in nature or in grace, is but an intimation, useful for particular purposes, useful for practice, useful in its department, “until the day break and the shadows flee away”; useful in such a way that both the one and the other representation may at once be used, as two languages, as two separate approximations towards the Awful Unknown Truth, such as will not mislead us in their respective provinces.—­Vol.  II.  Serm.  XVIII.

“I cannot persuade myself,” he says, commenting on a mysterious text of Scripture, “thus to dismiss so solemn a passage” (i.e. by saying that it is “all figurative").  “It seems a presumption to say of dim notices about the unseen world, ’they only mean this