If we begin with the true and pure idea of God, it is the idea of a Being infinite in power and intelligence, and though perfectly good, yet good by an unchangeable internal determination of character, and not by the constraint of an external law. Such was the starting-point, from which the human mind had to run its career of religious belief or speculation. But the maintenance subjectively of the original form of the image in its clearness depended, of course, upon the condition of the observing organ; and that organ, again, depended for its health on the healthiness of the being to whom it belonged. Hence we must look into the nature of man, in order to know what man would think respecting the nature of God. ~_Downward course of the idea of God._~ Now man, the prey of vicious passions, though he holds deeply rooted within himself the witness to an extrinsic and objective law of goodness, which he needs in order to develop what he has of capacity for good, and to bring into subjection the counteracting and rebellious elements, is nevertheless prevailingly under the influence of these last. Hence, in the absence of special and Divine provision for the remedy of his inward disease, although both conscience and also the dispensations of Providence shadow forth to him a law of goodness from without, yet the sense of any internal law of goodness in himself becomes, with the lapse of time, more and more dim and ineffectual. Thus, as he reflects back upon his own image conceptions of the Deity, the picture that he draws first fails in that, wherein he himself is weakest. Now, the perception of mere power depends upon intellect and sense: and as neither intellect nor sense have received through sin the same absolutely mortal wound which has reached his spiritual being, he can therefore still comprehend with clearness the idea and the uses of power, both mental and physical. Accordingly, the Godhead is for him preternaturally endowed with intelligence and force. But how was he to keep alive from his own resources the moral elements of the divine ideal? Coercive goodness, goodness by an external law, goodness dependent upon responsibility, was, by the nature of the case, inapplicable to Deity as such: while of goodness by an internal law, he had lost all clear conception, and he could not give what he had not got. Of course it is not meant, that this was a conscious operation. Rarely indeed, in reflective and critical periods, does it happen that man can keep a log-book of wind, weather, and progress, for the mind, or tell from what quarter of the heavens have proceeded the gales that impel it on its course.