But from all this it by no means follows that the dependent spiritual person can have no knowledge of the independent spiritual Person. On the other hand, it is the high glory of the independent spiritual Person, that he can create another being "in his own image," to whom he can communicate a knowledge of himself. "Like as a father pitieth his children, so Jehovah pitieth them that fear him." Out of the fact of his Father-hood and our childhood, comes that solemn, and, to the loving soul, joyful fact, that he teaches us the highest knowledge just as really as our earthly parents teach us earthly knowledge. This he could not do if we had not the capacity to receive the knowledge; and we could not have had the capacity, except he had been able, in "the nature of things," and willing to bestow it upon us. While, then, God as "the Unconditioned cannot be classed," and so as unconditioned we do not know him "as of such or such kind," after the manner of the Understanding, yet we may, do, "see him as he is," do know that he is, and is unconditioned, through the insight of the Reason, the eye of the spiritual person, and what it is to be unconditioned. We now reach a passage which has filled us with unqualified amazement. As much as we had familiarized ourselves with the materialistic teachings of the Limitists, we confess that we were utterly unprepared to meet, even in Mr. Spencer's writings, a theory of man so ineffably degrading, and uttered with so calm and naive an unconsciousness of the degradation it involved, as the following. Although for want of room his illustrations are omitted, it is believed that the following extracts give a fair and ample presentation of his doctrine. "All vital actions, considered not separately but in their ensemble, have for their final purpose the balancing of certain outer processes by certain inner processes. "There are unceasing external forces, tending to bring the matter of which organic bodies consist, into that state of stable equilibrium displayed by inorganic bodies; there are internal forces by which this tendency is constantly antagonized; and the perpetual changes which constitute Life may be regarded as incidental to the maintenance of the antagonism.... "When we contemplate the lower kinds of life, we see that the correspondences thus maintained are direct and simple; as in a plant, the vitality of which mainly consists in osmotic and chemical actions responding to the coexistence of light, heat, water, and carbonic acid around it. But in animals, and especially in the higher orders of them, the correspondences become extremely complex. Materials for growth and repair not being, like those which plants require, everywhere present, but being widely dispersed and under special forms, have to be formed, to be secured, and to be reduced to a fit state for assimilation....