It is of minor importance how a man represents to himself his redemption by the Word Incarnate,--within what scheme of his understanding he concludes it, or by what supposed analogies (though actually no better than metaphors) he tries to conceive it, provided he has a lively faith in Christ, the Son of the living God, and his Redeemer. The faith may and must be the same in all who are thereby saved; but every man, more or less, construes it into an intelligible belief through the shaping and coloring optical glass of his own individual understanding. Mr. Asgill has given a very ingenious common-law scheme. 'Valeat quantum valere potest'! It would make a figure before the Benchers of the Middle Temple. For myself, I prefer the belief that man was made to know that a finite free agent could not stand but by the coincidence, and independent harmony, of a separate will with the will of God. For only by the will of God can he obey God's will. Man fell as a soul to rise a spirit. The first Adam was a living soul; the last a life-making spirit. In the Word was life, and that life is the light of men. And as long as the light abides within its own sphere, that is, appears as reason,--so long it is commensurate with the life, and is its adequate representative. But not so, when this light shines downward into the understanding; for there it is always, more or less, refracted, and differently in every different individual; and it must be re-converted into life to rectify itself, and regain its universality, or 'all-commonness, Allgemeinheit', as the German more expressively says. Hence in faith and charity the church is catholic: so likewise in the fundamental articles of belief, which constitute the right reason of faith. But in the minor 'dogmata', in modes of exposition, and the vehicles of faith and reason to the understandings, imaginations, and affections of men, the churches may differ, and in this difference supply one object for charity to exercise itself on by mutual forbearance. O! there is a deep philosophy in the proverbial phrase,--'his heart sets his head right!' In our commerce with heaven, we must cast our local coins and tokens into the melting pot of love, to pass by weight and bullion. And where the balance of trade is so immensely in our favour, we have little right to complain, though they should not pass for half the nominal value they go for in our own market. P. 46. And I am so far from thinking this covenant of eternal life to be an allusion to the forms of title amongst men, that I rather adore it as the precedent for them all, from which our imperfect forms are taken: believing with that great Apostle, that 'the things on earth are but the patterns of things in the heavens, where the originals are kept'.