Ib. p. 61.

He that without danger will know God, and will speculate of him, let him look first into the manger, that is, let him begin below, and let him first learn to know the Son of the Virgin Mary, born at Bethlehem, that lies and sucks in his mother’s bosom; or let one look upon him hanging on the Cross. ** But take good heed in any case of high climbing cogitations, to clamber up to heaven without this ladder, namely, the Lord Christ in his humanity.

To know God as God ([Greek:  ton Zaena], the living God) we must assume his personality:  otherwise what were it but an ether, a gravitation? —­but to assume his personality, we must begin with his humanity, and this is impossible but in history; for man is an historical—­not an eternal being.  ‘Ergo’.  Christianity is of necessity historical and not philosophical only.

Ib. p. 62.

  ‘What is that to thee’? said Christ to Peter.  ’Follow thou me’—­me,
  follow me, and not thy questions, or cogitations.

Lord! keep us looking to, and humbly following, thee!

Chap.  VI. p. 103.

The philosophers and learned heathen (said Luther) have described God, that he is as a circle, the point whereof in the midst is every where; but the circumference, which on the outside goeth round about, is no where:  herewith they would shew that God is all, and yet is nothing.

What a huge difference the absence of a blank space, which is nothing, or next to nothing, may make!  The words here should have been printed, “God is all, and yet is no thing;” For what does ‘thing’ mean?  Itself, that is, the ‘ing’, or inclosure, that which is contained within an outline, or circumscribed.  So likewise to ‘think’ is to inclose, to determine, confine and define.  To think an infinite is a contradiction in terms equal to a boundless bound.  So in German ‘Ding, denken’; in Latin ‘res, reor’.

Chap.  VII. p. 113.

  Helvidius alleged the mother of Christ was not a virgin; so that
  according to his wicked allegation, Christ was born in original sin.

O, what a tangle of impure whimsies has this notion of an immaculate conception, an Ebionite tradition, as I think, brought into the Christian Church!  I have sometimes suspected that the Apostle John had a particular view to this point, in the first half of the first chapter of his Gospel.  Not that I suppose our present Matthew then in existence, or that, if John had seen the Gospel according to Luke, the ‘Christopaedia’ had been already prefixed to it.  But the rumor might have been whispered about, and as the purport was to give a psilanthropic explanation and solution of the phrases, Son of God and Son of Man,—­so Saint John met it by the true solution, namely, the eternal Filiation of the Word.

Ib. p. 120.  Of Christ’s riding into Jerusalem.

  But I hold (said Luther) that Christ himself did not mention that
  prophecy of Zechariah, but rather, that the Apostles and Evangelists
  did use it for a witness.