In this most eloquent treatise we may detect sundry logical lapses, sometimes in the statement, sometimes in the instances, and once or twice in the conclusions. But the main and pervading error lies in the treatment of the subject 'in genere' by the forms and rules of conceptual logic; which deriving all its material from the senses, and borrowing its forms from the sense ([Greek: aisthaesis katharà]) or intuitive faculty, is necessarily inapplicable to spiritual mysteries, the very definition or contra-distinguishing character of which is that they transcend the sense, and therefore the understanding, the faculty, as Archbishop Leighton and Immanuel Kant excellently define it, which judges according to sense. In the Aids to Reflection, [12] I have shewn that the proper function of the understanding or mediate faculty is to collect individual or sensible concretes into kinds and sorts ('genera et species') by means of their common characters ('notæ communes'); and to fix and distinguish these conceptions (that is, generalized perceptions) by words. Words are the only immediate objects of the understanding. Spiritual verities, or truths of reason 'respective ad realia', and herein distinguished from the merely formal, or so called universal truths, are differenced from the conceptions of the understanding by the immediatcy of the knowledge, and from the immediate truths of sense,--that is, from both pure and mixed intuitions,--by not being sensible, that is, not representable by figure, measurement or weight; nor connected with any affection of our sensibility, such as color, taste, odors, and the like. And such knowledges we, when we speak correctly, name ideas. Now Original Sin, that is, sin that has its origin in itself, or in the will of the sinner, but yet in a state or condition of the will not peculiar to the individual agent, but common to the human race, is an idea: and one diagnostic or contra-distinguishing mark appertaining to all ideas, is, that they are not adequately expressible by words. An idea can only be expressed (more correctly suggested) by two contradictory positions; as for example; the soul is all in every part;--nature is a sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, and its circumference no where, and the like.