have any weight. Antecedently, then, it is admitted that personality is a limitation which is absolutely excluded by the ideas of the Deity, which, it is asserted, the constitution of our minds compete us to form. It cannot, therefore, be rationally assumed. To admit that such a conception is false, and then to base conclusions upon it, as though it were true, is absurd. It is child's play to satisfy our feeling and imagination by the conscious sacrifice of our reason. Moreover, Dr. Mansel admits that the conception of a Personal Deity is really derived from the revelation, which has to be rendered credible by miracles; therefore the consequence already pointed out ensues, that the assumption cannot be used to prove miracles. "It must be allowed that it is not through reasoning that men obtain the first intimation of their relation to the Deity; and that, had they been left to the guidance of their intellectual faculties alone, it is possible that no such intimation might have taken place; or at best, that it would have been but as one guess, out of many equally plausible and equally natural."(1) The vicious circle of the argument is here again apparent, and the singular reasoning by which the late Dean of St. Paul's seeks to drive us into an acceptance of Revelation is really the strongest argument against it. The impossibility of conceiving God as he is,(2) which is insisted upon, instead of being a {74} reason for assuming his personality, or for accepting Jewish conceptions of him, totally excludes such an assumption. This "great religious assumption"(1) is not suggested by any antecedent considerations, but is required to account for miracles, and is derived from the very Revelation which miracles are to attest. "In nature and from nature," to quote Words of Professor Baden Powell, "by science and by reason, we neither have nor can possibly have any evidence of a _Deity working_ miracles;--for that we must go out of nature and beyond science. If we could have any such evidence _from nature_, it could only prove extraordinary _natural_ effects, which would not be _miracles_ in the old theological sense, as isolated, unrelated, and uncaused; whereas no _physical_ fact can be conceived as unique, or without analogy and relation to others, and to the whole system of natural causes."(2) Being, therefore, limited to Reason for any feeble conception of a Divine Being of which we may be capable, and Reason being totally opposed to the idea of an order of nature so imperfect as to require or permit repeated interference, and rejecting the supposition of arbitrary {75}